Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"Why are we out here again?!" 

"Don't look at me with that tone of voice, this wasn't part of my plan!" 

"That's not—" James sighs, giving up on interrupting Nile and Booker's bickering in order to correct Booker's very incorrect phrase. Joe gives him a sympathetic smile and pats his arm, holding the torch out towards the ground so they won't trip. It's nearly pitch black, probably deep in the night by now, and they've been walking for a good hour since abandoning the car. 

Booker is right though; the plan had definitely not included traipsing around in the dark until they'd essentially got lost as all hell in the middle of nowhere. No; the plan had been for the four of them to take a weekend break together from work and life. They'd arranged to drive to a moderately remote cabin out in the woods so they could enjoy their shared weekend away in style, and decompress together. Unfortunately James' car breaking down before they'd reached their destination, somewhere along the road into the woods, had wormed its way into the itinerary and utterly ruined their time-frame and also their hopes for a nice, cosy Friday night. 

"Look, over there!" 

James and Joe's heads shoot up at Nile's shout, hurrying to catch up with the other two. Their torches shine out into the night, through the trees to a clearing with a cabin that looks very similar to the one they're meant to be staying in, albeit somehow a lot less welcoming than the pictures on the website. 

"Guys," Nile begins with a growing smile, "I think we should—" 

"No!" Booker hisses immediately, face looking paler than usual in the harsh light of the torch. "Absolutely not. I've seen too many horror movies to go in there!" 

Nile scoffs, turning her pleading eyes on the other two. James shrugs, and Joe sighs, having thoroughly lost the will to care by this stage. 

"Book, it's late and it's cold and it might not even be unlocked," he says, trying to be gentle about it. "Can't we just try it at least?" 

"Over my dead body," Booker says, with determined finality, folding his arms to underscore how serious he is. "There is no way I'm going in there." 

"Disgusting," Booker mutters from the back of the group as they enter the miraculously unlocked cabin. It's dusty inside, but nicely decorated and not in a bad state of repair apart from the clear lack of recent inhabitants. "I hate you all." 

"Aw, don't be such a sourpuss, Booker," Nile teases him fondly, slinging an arm around her friend's shoulders, and despite his sulk Booker looks a little comforted by the touch, sinking into it gratefully. "Look, we literally just have to get through one night and then we can sort things out tomorrow. Alright?" 

"Fine, fine. Lead the way."

They collectively decide to sleep in the main living room together, finding a few blankets and a set of covers from an upstairs bedroom that James and Nile bravely explore, while Joe and Booker stick close together downstairs. They end up squashed in across the two couches by the unlit fireplace, sticking close for warmth and reassurance. One by one they fall asleep, and the cabin goes quiet. 

For a while the night seems utterly normal, but then the quiet becomes more quiet. Nothing stirs. No sound can be heard. Not even the breathing of the four friends asleep inside disturbs the air. And when the scratching starts it can only be felt as a vibration in the air. 

Joe, the lightest sleeper, twitches. The scratching stops, only to continue again when he settles. It moves, ticking down the inside of the chimney. 

Fingernails, long and claw-like, curl out from the fireplace and two deep, pale eyes glint out at the intruders from the shadows. The scratching not-sound resumes as the creature moves, using its fingernails to crawl up the wall and across the ceiling until it can stare directly down at the sleepers, extending a too-long arm down to pluck curiously at the covers Joe is buried in with one of those long nails, disturbing his sleep yet again. 

He shifts without really waking, wriggling around to get more comfortable. His toes end up tucked under James' side, top to tail next to him, and his head slips down the armrest to pillow on his elbow. The creature watching from the ceiling drops weightlessly onto the back of the couch, balancing on the tips of its two-toed feet and the back of its knuckles, sharp fingers curled carefully up. It slinks along the back of the couch, around Joe's head and slips seamlessly down to the floor, crouching in front of Joe and staring at him. The fingernails come back out again, poking a bouncy curl with almost no pressure whatsoever, watching the way Joe's nose wrinkles in response. It touches another curl, and then a freckle on his face, feather-light and barely noticeable even if Joe had been awake to know it was happening.

And then, in the darkness, the creature lifts its chin up high and makes a soft crooning hum in what could be its throat, the vibrations trilling out despite the continued absence of actual sound. 

It flees swiftly back up the chimney when Joe jumps awake with a gasp, looking around for a sign of what could have disturbed him. He doesn't notice the silence because it isn't there to notice, gone along with the creature the moment he'd opened his eyes. He doesn't notice the creature itself, watching from the darkness as he pulls the covers tight to his chest and tries to relax again. 

The silence spreads out again as he falls back asleep, and the creature thinks to itself, hearts in its eyes, that it would be best if it kept this one for itself. Yes, that would be best. Something so pretty and precious and perfect should be protected forever, it thinks, crooning again under its breath, too soft to hear. Yes, it will keep the lovely man safe, yes. It will follow him as long as he lives, somehow or another. 

Joe sighs in his sleep, unaware that only feet away the creature that calls itself Nicky is falling madly in love with him. 

Dawn breaks over the house slowly but surely the next morning, drenching the room in weak sunlight. As the rays peek over the backs of the couches into the living room, the creature sitting by the fireplace skitters away with a soft hiss, retreating to the shadows with a mournful moan. 

Nicky doesn't know that much about the human world—it inhabits the interim, the in-between where shadows and liminal spaces rule. It doesn't much like sunlight because it makes its eyes hurt and its skin itch, but today it's going to risk it all. 

See, Nicky is in love. There's a man, a real life human man, on the couch in its home, and he's pretty and smart and sweet and kind, and sure maybe Nicky doesn't know most of those things for a fact—nor does it know exactly what they mean—but it's seen enough of those weird moving worlds in the magic box back when the house was inhabited that it has figured out they're good things to be. 

The man in question goes by the name of Joe. Nicky doesn't know that yet, but it's in love anyway, and it wants to make sure its paramour knows. It had planned on sitting patiently in front of him all night until he woke up and fell gratefully into Nicky's arms, or something else that happens in the box, but the sunlight had come and ruined that plan. The new plan is to follow Joe through the dreaded light until they reach Joe's home and Nicky can settle into the shadows forever after for its happy ending, watching over Joe for as long as he lives. It'd seen those on the magic box too. 

It listens, hidden away in his chimney, as the four get up and set everything back into place in the house before hurrying away, and then, with a quick chitter to itself for confidence, it runs after them. 

They hurry through the forest, following the overgrown path they'd ended up on the night before. The trees give Nicky plenty of cover nearby to stalk them and keep Joe in its sights, cooing in distress whenever it loses sight of its love for more than a few moments. The odd silence follows it around in a little bubble of noiselessness, birdsong dying and wind rustling silent leaves as it passes, but it keeps far away enough that the foursome don't notice anything odd. 

Because out of everything Nicky has learned, possibly the most valuable is that it's a monster. 

It has the utmost faith that Joe won't see it that way, but it can't be so sure about the other three—the magic box taught it many things, and more than one flat world with singing had very clearly imparted the message that looking different was bad unless you found the prettiest, nicest person you could and waited for them to love you. It has long lived in hope, flitting over the cabin night after night warbling in its best impression of singing, dreaming of that person, and now here he is. Nicky is very in love indeed. 

On the path the friends are fairly quiet, tired and hungry and unwilling to end up in pointless arguments while their moods are so low. Nile leads the way, with Booker just behind and Joe and James walking together in the rear. Nicky watches as Joe shivers and James puts an arm around him to warm him up, and wishes with all its might that one day it can offer that comfort to him itself. 

The car is waiting for them when they get back to the road, and Booker sighs loudly in relief that it hadn't been stolen or damaged overnight. James had already called for a mechanic and a tow, and there's a taxi to take the other three to their actual holiday home, while he goes with his car to get a replacement for the weekend. 

They tumble in gratefully, warming up in the heated interior and speeding away to their destination, utterly unaware that Nicky is tearing through the trees alongside them, desperately trying to keep up with its quickly disappearing Joe.

They don't see it fall slowly behind with a wail of misery, but keep going, determined to find their trail again and follow Joe onwards. They don't know that while they're stumbling out of the car and into their actual cabin for the weekend, relaxing with relief and setting about preparing themselves breakfast; Nicky is moving ever closer, inexorably pulled towards its happy ending. They don’t know that Nicky catches up, nor that when they leave at the end of the weekend it has learned from its last mistake, lurking in the shadows of the underside of the car. A hidden passenger happily hitching a ride as they head back home.

Chapter Text

The vacation weekend had gone very smoothly after their initial mishap, but Joe is always glad to be back home in his own apartment, able to lounge around in his cosiest clothes, with his guilty pleasure playing on Netflix and a tub of ice cream in his lap. 

So maybe it isn't the healthiest way to spend his evenings; but he loves it nonetheless. Self-care, right? Besides, he still drags himself out to the gym with Nile, and walks to and from work every day. It isn't the end of the world if he indulges a little bit, while sticking to a decent enough adult routine. 

There's just one thing up with that routine at the moment. Ever since he got back, he's noticed a few weird happenings around his apartment. His lights are sometimes weird, and for some reason he's stopped hearing his alarm in the mornings full stop, despite checking his phone is on loud and buying a second alarm clock as a backup. And, maybe related or maybe not, he's sleeping crazy well? The deepest, most peaceful sleep he's had in a while, as if the whole world was perfectly still and quiet for the entire night and not a thing could disturb him. He’s a light sleeper at the best of times, used to waking up groggy and grouchy, so this is entirely out of character. 

There's also the matter of the pasta. A few mornings after getting home he'd got up, late again and scrambling to get ready for work on time, and had tripped over an empty box of pasta that was lying on the floor by his bed. As to how it got there, he's dismayed to find he has no clue, because, critically, Joe doesn't really eat pasta. He’s a rice boy, through and through. There had, in fact, been no pasta whatsoever in his apartment before the box had spontaneously appeared—especially not a box of DiGenova’s Spaghetti all'Uovo. Somehow the box must have been planted in his room, overnight, while he was sleeping his unusually deep sleep. 

Ordinarily he'd explain it away as a prank from Booker, but seeing as Booker hasn't had time to visit—busy catching up on work after their long weekend away—it can't have been him. And it (probably) wasn't a burglar or stalker because nothing else has so much as shifted from where it's supposed to be, and the locks all remain undisturbed. And it’s pasta. 

Joe is beyond confused. 

Nile and Booker are pretty unhelpful when they meet up for lunch at the end of the week and he carefully brings the topic up, several more empty pasta boxes carefully lined up on his kitchen counter beside the first. But for some strange reason Nile's joking suggestion of being haunted sticks with him, and though he won't admit it, Joe decides that looking into what to do about a haunting can't hurt. Especially if none of his friends find out, because then he'd never hear the end of it. 

At home, a quick google search for ‘am I being haunted?’ reveals a fuckload of conflicting information that makes his head swim, and he groans, falling back on his couch with a pout for a second before sitting back up again, legs crossed with the laptop balancing on top. "Okay Yusuf, you are gonna sift through this and find your answers. We have got this," he tells himself, settling in to scroll through the seven million and something results. Changing his search question to 'what to do when you're being haunted' helps when he finally thinks to try it, narrowing down the results to something a little more manageable. It actually brings up a sponsored link for some kind of local ghost hunter site—someone calling themselves 'The Guardian' is advertising a ghost assessment and removal service in town, and they have some kind of bargain 'free first visit' on offer, splashed across the front page. 

Well, he has nothing to lose. Joe dials the number before he thinks too hard about what he's doing, blinking when a croaky, slurred voice picks up the phone. 

"Yes? Do you know what time it is?" A woman’s voice groans down the line, and he has to pull back to check it's the right number. It is, and the time on his phone shows as just past eight in the evening—maybe an awkward time to call a business but certainly not a time he’d expect many adults to be asleep by. He squints, perplexed, and the voice picks up again. "Hello? Are you just going to quietly breathe at me or did you need to make an appointment for a haunting?" 

"Sorry! I ah, wanted to do the free visit?" he replies quickly, before she drops the call. 

There's a short silence. "Shit, is that still on there? I thought I changed it." The Guardian mutters. "Sure, why not? Should've got rid of it if I didn't want people to notice it. What's your address, I'll be right round." 

"Tonight?" Joe asks, surprised.

"Yeah tonight. I work at night. Exclusively. Did you not read that part?" 

"No, yeah. I mean no, I didn’t but that does make sense, I suppose.” And perhaps answers the question about her greeting. “But that's very short notice." 

"I'm not busy. Only so many hauntings in a place like this. Do you want to deal with your ghost or not?” Joe very much does want, and says as much. He rattles off the address, and a few other contact details, and then the conversation is already abruptly wrapping up. 

His head is spinning. 

"I'll see you in like... whenever the bus shows up," she says shortly, and hangs up without another word. Joe sits back and stares into space for a second, trying to process the interaction. He realises after a minute that she is actually on her way, right now, and quickly rushes around to tidy the place up a bit, dressing in something more company appropriate than his rattiest sweatpants and t-shirt. He goes back and forth on sitting one of the boxes of pasta on the coffee table at the ready in case the ghost hunter lady needs to do any mojo on it. Will she need to? Is that a thing? Joe doesn't know. Someone should write a guide book for this shit. 

The buzzer goes only forty minutes later and releases him from his indecision, the same voice from the phone call tinny through his intercom as he buzzes her in. And then at last, in his doorway, stands The Guardian, a tall, austere looking woman complete with short, dyed black hair, dark sunglasses (at night?), brown trench coat, and an empty Starbucks to-go cup that she tosses into his bin on the way past. 

"Andromache, The Guardian. Call me anything but Andy and I walk," the ghost hunter says, taking Joe's extended hand and shaking it once firmly before striding into the apartment and looking around. "So what are you experiencing, cold spots? Moving items? Wailing? Suspicious fog? That one's usually just eye-related, have you done an eye test recently?" 

Joe struggles to keep up as Andy walks and talks. "Uh, no, nothing like that. I wear contacts, apart from at night when I have my glasses, so... No. It was the noise, actually. Or the not-noise? Oh, and the pasta!" Andy turns to look at him, a raised eyebrow appearing above the rim of her sunglasses. Joe holds up a finger, hurrying to get the item in question from the coffee table and hesitantly holding it out with a hopeful smile. 

Andy's eyebrow stays raised, but she takes the box gingerly and eyes it. "And what exactly was up with the pasta?" she asks, opening the top to peer inside, then checking the writing on the box, and finally tossing it in her hand a few times. 

"Well, it appeared. It's not actually mine at all—I didn't have any in the apartment. I found that one this morning on the floor, just sitting there, and a bunch of other ones in the same place for the last couple of days." 

"Just sitting on the floor. And what else were you saying, about the noise?" 

Joe shakes his head. "No, the not-noise. It's been weirdly quiet? I haven't heard my alarm go off unless I've already been awake. Apparently I've been sleeping through number 4C's newborn baby too. Which isn't normal—I'm a light sleeper." He stops, faltering at the fact that Andy has gone entirely still. 

"Andy? Is everything okay?" 

"Where did you find the box?" Andy asks urgently, grabbing him by the shoulders after shoving her glasses up onto her head, revealing piercing blue eyes. The empty pasta box presses into his bicep. "Quick, quick!" she insists. 

"By the bed! On my bedroom floor, but—" 

"Holy shit." 

"What? What is it?!" Joe almost wails, but Andy is off, leaping through the open living space to the bedroom door and stopping dead. Joe runs right into the back of her, trying to peer over her shoulder to see what she's so struck by. But there's nothing there. 

Andy sniffs a few times, taking careful, light steps forward towards the bed, pushed into one corner of the room under the window. She edges around the end of it to head towards the wardrobe, but turns back to face it after a quick glance around, and stops almost exactly where he'd found the pasta box. "Here, right?" she murmurs, looking intently down at the half-metre gap between her feet and the shadows under the bed. "On my signal, turn the lights off, okay?" Joe gulps and raises his hand ready. For a few more moments she just stands there, while Joe’s fingers hover anxiously over the light switch, but then she takes one more step towards the bed and nods, and as the room goes dark all hell breaks loose. 

Something explodes from under the bed frame and fills the room with shadow darker than the shadows already covering every surface. The whole world goes muffled and quiet. Joe feels the inexplicable urge to pop his ears but he can't, and besides—he's too busy silently yelling at the scene before him, where Andy is tussling with a great big, shadowy thing. 

What in the name of all that is holy has been living under his bed?! 

"So, you have a demon," Andy says in the silence after they slam the bedroom door shut and press their backs to it to keep it closed. She'd somehow managed to wrestle the thing away and tangle it in a blanket, dragging Joe out of the room and trapping the creature inside. The silence doesn’t stay for long—inside the bedroom the thing starts whining and scratching, and it soon begins to thump against the door as well. They look at each other, leaning back harder against the wood and wincing as it shudders with the force of the thing inside trying to escape. "A demon?" Joe asks, slightly numb from shock. Andy nods, and Joe notices she'd lost her sunglasses in the tussle.

"Yeah. Well, an unidentifiable creature of demonic origin, at least. Basically, that's a fucking mid-liminal creature in there, which is totally unheard of outside of very cursed places. They don't just live in cute little apartments with cream walls, is what I'm saying. So how did you end up with one here?" She looks at Joe with sharp curiosity and he squirms under her piercing gaze. He doesn't know what to say. He's more than a little distracted by the noises on the other side of the door, actually, and he doesn't have an answer that will satisfy the ghost (and also demon? hopefully?) hunter. In the end he has to settle for a shrug. 

"I don't know. The d—” He breaks off to swallow and breathe carefully. “The demon started doing its stuff when I got back from holiday last week. But I didn't do anything supernatural to summon it or anything, I don’t think?" 

A particularly hard bang on the door makes them both jump and Joe yelps, but the movement inside stops still afterwards and the creature starts making soft, oddly mournful sounds instead. Joe feels... a little bit guilty suddenly, out of the blue. It seems Andy can see his train of thought because she grabs his arm before he can open his mouth. "No. Whatever you’re about to say, don’t. We are not opening this door until I can figure out the right way to exorcise whatever the fuck is in there. Go back to that holiday you mentioned." 

Joe sighs in frustration, dropping his head back against the door again and trying to tune out the noises spilling out from under it. "Right. Well, we just spent the weekend away in the nature park a few hours from here. In a cabin. It was pretty relaxing; nothing weird happened there. We did uh," he frowns, rubbing the bridge of his nose as he thinks back. Andy shifts towards him in interest. 

"You did what?" she urges. 

"We broke down and had to stay the night in an abandoned cabin?" Joe offers. 

”That’s it!” Andy shouts. It clearly startles the demon as much as it startles Joe, because it lets out a surprised sound and goes briefly quiet before letting out a soft, wary coo and snuffling at the door. It's pretty loud actually, without the strange silencing effect, and Joe shudders to think just how closely he's been living with it, entirely unaware. "Abandoned cabin? Fucking jackpot. It must have caught your scent and followed you home to get you alone. You probably didn't notice it while you were in the other cabin because it's quiet out there anyway, and things being moved around without you wouldn't have been that noticeable. But why you? And what does it want? Could it—" 

"I think..." Joe interjects with a small frown. "I think it's friendly." 

"What? No," Andy scoffs. "That's impossible. Didn't you hear me? It's a demon. Demon. How could something like that be friendly?" 

"I don't know, but it hasn't hurt me once, and if you're right then it's been living with me for a week! All it's done is make me miss my alarm a bunch of times and steal some pasta, I don't—why would it wait this long to hurt me?" 

Andy purses her lips, but she seems to be considering his suggestion at least. After a while she sighs. "Okay look, honestly I've never actually come across a real demon before. What you're saying isn't... it doesn't not make sense. But this is the real world, Joe. You have a genuine supernatural, inhuman thing in your bedroom. Are you sure you want to risk opening the door?" 

Blue eyes meet brown. The bedroom is quiet, but Joe gets the distinct feeling that the demon is listening, waiting for the answer. 

He nods decisively. "Yes, I'm sure. Open it up." 

Chapter Text

When Joe had uttered those fateful words he'd never expected this to be the outcome. He'd expected some gruesome creature, maybe some kind of dog but warped, that would run away and escape into the night never to be seen again. He hadn't expected the demon. 

"No wait, not the blinds!" he yelps, jumping up from the couch and legging it to where the demon in question is crouching in all its bizarre and mind-bending glory, chewing on the bottom of one of the hanging panels. 

The demon blinks at him, or at least he thinks it does but it’s hard to tell. A lot of things about the physical form of the demon have been hard to adapt to, and mostly he just tries not to think about it too hard because it doesn’t make much sense. Joe reaches it and pulls the snack away, bopping it on the... well, hopefully its nose. "No. I have a security deposit to pay back when we move out of here!" The demon whines with a multi-layered, dissonant hiss, before fleeing to the bedroom to its favourite spot under the bed, knocking into the growing piles of empty pasta boxes it collects under there and giving Andy—lounging on his couch like she always does when she visits these days—a wide berth on the way past. 

"Honestly, I don't know why you let it stay," she mutters mutinously, sipping her fourth refill of coffee (probably spiked with something extra) for the night. "I keep telling you I'm sure I've got the exorcism spell down by now, it could be out of your hair just like that." She clicks her fingers to demonstrate, rolling her eyes at the deep, booming, foghorn sound of protest from the bedroom. Joe shakes his head and sits back down beside her, picking up his sketchbook again. 

"I know. But I think I actually like having it here. It's nice to have a roomie, and it’s great volume control too. No noise complaints, and I don’t hear anything from 4C at all."

Andy starts suddenly, spilling some of her coffee with a curse. Joe turns to see the demon has moved perfectly stealthily and is peering around the side of the couch arm nearest to him, an eerie but well-intentioned grin splitting its face into two lines of teeth. It had learned to smile just that morning and seems determined to keep practising. 

Andy shudders delicately, but Joe reaches out to chuck the demon's… chin? ”Hi,” he beams back, and the demon’s smile—sweet but unnervingly—widens a little bit further. He offers Andy a shrug, before going back to the scritch-scratch of his sketching pencil, which has the demon utterly enraptured as it slinks up onto the back of the couch to watch him draw. The movement is entirely too fluidly to look natural, a rolling of its mass that Joe just doesn’t look at very closely. 

"Besides, it really wants to stay. I think it likes it here, too. It gets pasta whenever it wants, and it gets sad when I leave the room. I think it was lonely before." The demon snuffles and slides down the back of the couch to perch next to Joe and watch his hands from up close, limbs folding up to take up as little room as possible, every movement more like slime dripping than anything else. Does it even have bones? 

"I’m surprised you haven’t named it already," Andy mutters, as Joe is trying to distinguish how the demon's limbs work. "Isn’t that what happens when someone adopts a pet?" 

A few minutes later—when the demon has been calmed down and sent packing back to the bedroom to sulk, and once Andy has stopped shouting about nearly being murdered for an innocent comment—Joe finally manages to think about the question. Luckily Andy's coffee had been finished before the chaos, as the demon launched itself at her in a hurt fury, because then Joe would have truly had no chance breaking up their spat. 

"It should have a name," he muses. "Maybe it wants one. Maybe it has one already. I'll have to find out. Or give it one myself—" 

He stops speaking as he glances back over the couch, because the demon is sitting in the bedroom doorway, keeping itself perfectly behind the boundary of the room with its whole body pressed flat, in a way that makes Joe's eyes hurt, whining pitifully through its invisibly squashed face. Joe only takes a second to melt, promising that he'll come and cuddle soon. 

In a weird and wonderful way, it's sweet that the demon brightens, proceeding to roll happily around on the bedroom floor and then flow up onto the bed to get comfortable, keeping an eye on Joe through the open door all the while. Joe smiles to himself, and turns back to the disgruntled ghost-slash-occasionally-maybe-also-demons hunter, who is swiftly becoming one of his good friends.

"How about DiGenova? Geno? DG? Spaghetti?" Andy rolls her eyes but Joe thinks he might be onto something. "We'll figure that out next, I think, thanks for the nudge. Anyway, I really should go get ready for bed and cuddle time, but I'll see you soon? This weekend maybe, you wanted to go into town, right?" 

Andy stands as he does and they exchange a hug to the cacophony of the demon's sulky not-quite-growls. "You bet. I'll text you, don't worry. Don't get eaten and or possessed, and or turned into anything nasty until I see you next. Bye, hellspawn!" She waves and the demon grumbles, sounding almost human for once, turning its back decisively on them. 

Joe chuckles as he closes the door behind her and turns to go get ready for bed, and for cuddles with the supernatural creature that’s curled up on top of his bedsheets. It's a weird life he's living these days, but he wouldn't change it for the world.