Chapter Text
For five days you’d been waiting sleeplessly for the moment that your mother would finally leave the house. Normally, you would never be frustrated at the idea that your mother would take a much needed break for herself, knowing just how hard she had to work to put food on the table for both you and your sister, Luz, but when she finally leaves, you wave her off perhaps a little too enthusiastically.
A few steps in front of you, down the steps of the porch, your target waves along with you at your mother, wishing her some much needed luck on her upcoming twelve hour shift, completely oblivious to the narrowed focus of your eyes as they roam her body, the way your fingers twitch in anticipation of what you plan to do to her.
It takes an unbelievable amount of willpower for you not to grab her and drag her into the house right now. Instead, when the sound of your mom’s car fades off into the distance and she turns around, you give her a casual grin that hopefully hides the burning fire within you.
“So my dear sister, now that mom’s gone,” you say, folding your hands behind your back. “You want chips and ice cream for dinner?”
“Cristian Noceda,” comes the response, though it’s given with a smile. “Are you trying to turn me into a bad girl?”
“Like you need any help with that,” you say, laughing as you open the front door and beckon her inside. “Come on, we’ll watch a movie while we eat. Terminator 2?”
“There’s a sequel?” she asks.
You roll your eyes. “Like you’d forget about your favourite movie of all time,” you say. “You know, it’s cute that you’re pretending to forget about it, so you can ‘reexperience it’ for the first time, but it’s not quite as convincing when you can literally recite the script word for word.”
“Oh, yeah,” she says, laughing awkwardly at her failed attempts. “Sorry, I guess it wasn’t that cute, huh?”
You don’t say anything, and just roll your eyes in response.
“Come on, we only have so many hours in the day,” you say, beckoning her inside once more. “We’ll have to hurry if we want to finish by the time mom gets back.”
“It’s barely 9 a.m., Cristian,” she says. “I’m sure we’ll have enough time to watch one movie.”
“Including rewatches, frame-by-frame playback, and any other miscellaneous activities you have planned?” you ask. “I know you, Luz.”
She laughs, scratching the back of her head awkwardly, but doesn’t give any other response as she walks in. Closing the door behind her, you feel the casual smile on your face falling, though you’re able to regain your composure as you lock the door behind her.
It takes about ten minutes to settle down on the couch with a large bowl of chips and ice cream on the coffee table. The living room is dark, with blackout curtains being drawn tight against the edges of the windows, plunging the living room into near pitch black. When the movie starts, the living room echoes with surround sound, imitating a genuine cinema experience almost perfectly, with the exception of the fact that the movie is playing on a relatively small screen.
To his credit, when your father had turned your living room into a home cinema, larger TVs were much more readily available now in comparison to back when he’d still been alive, and this was about as big of a TV as he could’ve gotten at the time. Your mother had never upgraded the set-up, and you weren’t sure if it was due to sentiment or a lack of money, but you actually prefer the small TV. It reminds you that you’re home.
And as the man of a house, you have a duty to the women within it.
A few minutes into the movie, you find yourself unable to hold yourself back. You have no idea what part of the movie you’re at, with how your narrowed vision is filled entirely by the woman sitting an arm's length away from you. Unlike you, her attention is glued onto the screen, as she idly scoops tiny spoonfuls of ice cream into her mouth, completely unaware of how your eyes trace the shape of her body, outlined by the flashing lights of the TV screen.
She’s so focused that you almost think she might not notice it when you slide closer to her and put an arm around her shoulder, but she does, tensing up at your touch.
“Cristian?” she asks.
You let out a content sigh in response.
“I missed this, just sitting here with you like we always do,” you say. “I can’t believe you’ve only been at your little camp for a month and a half. I missed you a lot.”
“O-oh,” she says. “I missed you too, Cristian.”
You feel her shoulders untense slightly as she leans closer into you. You see her eyes glancing at you for a split second, before darting back to the TV once she realises that you’re staring at her.
The silence sits for a few more seconds before you chuckle in response to her comment.
“I’m sure you did,” you say, right before you pull her even closer to you. She lets out a small squeak of surprise, but you ignore it to grab her chin and force her to look at you.
“C-Cristian?” she stammers. “W-what are you doing?”
“You’ve got a bit of ice cream on your lips,” you say, as you wipe a thumb against them. Her breath shudders as her eyes turn hazy for a moment, before they snap open wide.
“Cristian,” she says weakly. “I don’t think-”
“You don’t have to,” you say, interrupting her with your words and a finger to her lips. “I know how hard it’s been for you. Honestly, I was worried you might kill someone at that camp from how pent up you must have gotten. You’ve done a good job, so far, but you don’t have to pretend to be someone else anymore. You can act how you usually do around me.”
She freezes, glancing back at you nervously.
“How I usually do?” she asks.
You laugh, and cup her cheek.
“On second thought, it’s a nice change of pace for you to let me take charge for once. Maybe you can keep up the innocent girl act for a bit longer, while I remind you about what you used to be like,” you say.
From the startled, hazy look in her eyes, you don’t think she’s currently in the capacity to give you a verbal response, but even if she is, you don’t give her the chance.
Closing your eyes, you lean forward and plant your lips onto hers.
She lets out a muffled squeak of surprise, but you ignore it to run your hands over her body. You take your time inspecting every inch of her body as she squirms under your touch. With a methodical touch, you run your hands over her hips, her ass, and her breasts, lingering there for a moment when you find something hard against your touch. You pinch it between your fingers, and she lets a squeal of surprised pleasure as you pull at her nipples through the fabric of her shirt.
She shudders in your arms, but her eyes shoot open a moment later. She places her hands on your chest, and pushes you away, but you’d always towered over Luz, even as her twin.
“C-cristian,” she says, her voice heavy with reluctant arousal.
“It’s okay, Luz. You can just lay back and enjoy it,” you say, with a grin. “Unless you want to take the lead like you usually do? I don’t mind that either if that’s what you want.”
Her brow knits together as she struggles with her clear inner conflict, her eyes darting everywhere but in my direction, as if searching for something to tell her what to say, but she seems to find nothing. Eventually, she covers her face with her hands and lays back on the couch.
You smile at her, in case she’s peeking through the fingers that cover her eyes, and lean into her once more. She refuses to move her hands from her face, but you pay it no mind and move to her neck. When you kiss her gently, she moans, barely audible through her own hands over her mouth. Your mouth moves down her neck to just below her collarbone, where you sink your teeth in, no longer cautious of leaving a mark in a place that could easily be covered by a shirt. She gasps in surprise, but muffles it quickly with her hands once more.
With your patience running thin, your hands work quickly, dividing their attention between her lower and upper halves. Your left hand gropes her breasts, while your right makes its course over her hips and ass. Once you’re satisfied with what you find, you hook your fingers into her waistband and gently pull.
She’s either too surprised or unaware to cooperate by lifting her hips, but you have little trouble pulling her pants and panties to her knees. Glancing down, the dim flashing light of the TV screen reflects the dripping lines of viscous liquid that cling persistently to her underwear and drips down her thighs. When you look back up, you notice her peering down through her fingers at her own crotch in red-faced awe, until she notices your gaze and hides herself once more.
You don’t need any prompting to grab the hem of her shirt and start lifting it up. This time, she responds in time, arching her back to make it easier for you to pull it up, exposing her breasts, but she tenses when she seems to realise that she’ll have to move her hands from her face to let her shirt go any further up.
“Hey, none of that,” you say. “I want to see your face.”
You don’t know if she accepts that, but you don’t care. With one hand, you grab both of her wrists. Despite her resistance, it’s easy for you to pry them away from her face and pin them to the couch over her head. You’ve never seen someone look so red in the face before, wide-eyed in nervous shock, but you pay it no mind as you use your other hand to continue to lift her shirt over her head. You leave the shirt wrapped around her forearms, not willing to let go of her wrists.
“Wouldn’t want you to cover your pretty little face up, would we?” you ask. “It’s my favourite thing in the world to watch you cum.”
Her eyes widen in shock at my words, and her lips flap open and closed, as if she’s trying to say something but is unable to find the words. You waste no time in trying to prove your claim, and when your fingers plunge deep into her pussy, she lets out a loud moan.
Immediately, her mouth snaps closed, but without her hands to muffle her effectively, her cries ring out through her lips. You aren’t sure if it's to muffle her voice or simply to hide from you, but she turns her head in an attempt to bury her head into her shoulder.
You let it go for now, focusing your attention on forcing more pleasure onto her. With your thumb, you rub her clit in tandem with the thrusting rhythm of your fingers as they rub her inner walls. Biting your own lip, you watch and listen as her muffled cries rise into a crescendo and her pussy clenches impossibly tight around your fingers.
“Don’t be shy. Let me hear your voice,” you say. “Say my name.”
Surprisingly, though you can’t see her expression with it hidden so deeply in her arm, you feel her shudder against your fingers at your command.
She lets out another moan, still quiet, but less muffled as she turns her face away from her shoulder.
“Cristian,” she says.
Immediately, you stop, drawing your fingers away from her crotch, and placing it gently on her cheek. She finally looks up at you in confusion and betrayal, locking eyes with you as her body unwittingly writhes under your weight. You feel her hips rising and twisting, as she continues to unconsciously and desperately seek the release you’ve denied her.
“Cristian,” she says. “Please.”
You ignore her pleads as you lock eyes with her. Your fingers, still shining with her arousal, fall down her cheek and her jaw, before settling on her neck.
“C-Cristian?” she says.
“Not quite,” you say. Though you try to smile, it becomes quickly obvious to you that your patience has run out entirely. “Luz usually calls me by my nickname. My mother’s really the only person who refers to me by my birth name.”
Immediately, you feel her tense in your grip, but you keep your grip on her wrists tight, and plant your knee firmly in between her thighs, your shin pinning down her legs, using the pants still wrapped around her knees as an anchor.
“I’ll give you one chance,” you growl, all attempts at pretense fading quickly from your voice. “What's my name?”
“C-Cristian, please,” the stranger begs you, her voice straining under your grip. “I can explain.”
You aren't interested in hearing it, and you tell her in the simplest terms you have available.
She lets out a choked cough as your fingers tighten around her throat. Her arms tense and her body writhes desperately in an attempt to buck. Your hold on her wrists is too firm for her to break, but when you realise you haven’t secured her hips well enough, you drive your knee deeper into her crotch.
She lets out a croaking gasp as you strike her. She tries to buck her hips again, but with your knee firmly pressed against her, all she manages to achieve is to grind herself against you. A wordless groan escapes from behind her gritted teeth, and when her choked gasps fade and the light behind her eyes begins to fade, you let go of her neck, not wanting her to pass out just yet.
Your sister’s doppleganger doesn’t seem to be cognizant of the fact that she’s been allowed to live, her head lolling back, with a line of drool flowing from her mouth, but you know that she’s fine. You haven’t gotten nearly as rough with her as you know you’re capable of. You haven’t even choked her particularly hard, pinching her arteries with a controlled strength to cut off blood flow to her brain, rather than mercilessly trying to crush her windpipe.
“What’s my name?” you ask.
She doesn’t seem to hear the question. With your hand no longer on her throat, it’s free to roam down her body until it settles on a hard nub of flesh. The need for your gentle facade has faded. Grabbing both of her nipples, you pinch as hard as you can and pull. Consciousness seems to return to the stranger’s eyes in a sudden jolt, as she arches her back as much as she can to give herself as much slack as she can, but you simply pull harder.
She lets out a high-pitched whine of pain, and once you feel like you're nearing the physical limits of her body, you let her go. Her back remains arched, like she doesn’t realise she’s been released from your cruel torture, but her body shudders and quake.
“I asked you a fucking question, bitch,” you say. “What’s my name?”
When the stranger doesn’t answer you immediately, you grab her chin and force her to look into your eyes. They’ve gone hazy again, but quickly after you fill her entire vision, she slowly seems to remember where she is, and what sort of position she’s in.
“P-please,” she says, tears quickly welling up in her eyes, and not just from the pain that you’d inflicted on her.
“I don’t give a shit about what you want to say,” you say, gripping her jaw tight, not allowing her to move it without your permission. “You don’t want me to hurt you? Then keep your mouth shut unless it’s to answer my questions. What’s my name?”
You slacken the grip on her jaw, but she doesn’t answer immediately, but you pardon her on the assumption that she’s too stunned to react immediately. You let out a low grumble of warning, and it’s enough to make her knot her brow in anxiety making you wonder if you need to push her more before she realises that staying silent would be the wrong choice, but the tearful fear in her eyes seems to realise the truth of her situation well enough.
“I don’t know,” she says quickly, wincing in preparation for punishment. “I’m sorry, please don’t hurt me.”
Your fingers twitch, and she flinches in response, but you don’t do anything.
“Why are you pretending to be Luz?” you ask.
“I didn’t mean to,” she says. “I just wanted to run away from my old home. I was just going to disappear into the woods until Camila offered to drive me to camp. I played along because I didn’t want her to be suspicious, but she was so nice to me. It was the first time in my life I felt like I could have a real life. I didn’t plan any of this.”
From the look in her eyes and the waver in her voice, it seemed like she realised how unbelievable her claim was, relying on nothing but emotion to support her story, but you do believe her. Not only is she way too naive and too bad of a liar for her to be a career criminal, but the absolute fear in her eyes, the way she flinches every time you take a breath, tells you that right now, she wouldn’t dare tell you anything aside from what you want to hear.
Still, you’re not going to let her know that.
“I told you to answer my fucking question, not give me your sob story,” you say.
You grab her jaw tight and lean down closer to her. In the reflection of her welling tears, you see what she must see, a feral creature, more beast than man, with his teeth bared and his breath heavy. With how close you are to her, you fill her entire vision, close enough that you appear impossibly large, impossibly daunting in the curved reflection of her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
You growl, and your hand lets go of her jaw, but before a flash of relief can pass over her eyes, they widen in fear again when your fingers settle back on her nipples.
“Did I ask you a fucking question?” you ask.
You don’t give her even a second before you start to dig your fingers into her. She squeals, but the pressure is light enough that she seems to be able to maintain her wits.
“No,” she whines. “I’m sorry.”
Her apology earns her a tug on her nipples.
“Did I ask you to apologize?” you ask.
“No,” she cries again. You aren’t sure if she bites her lip to silence her cries of pain, or to stop another apology from escaping her.
You keep your grip on her tight for a few more seconds before you let go. She lets out a few heavy pants of relief, before she suddenly stops, clamping her mouth shut and staring at you, waiting nervously to see if her panting would earn her another punishment.
You decide to let it go for now.
“Do you know where Luz is?” you ask.
She nods, albeit a little hesitantly. All it takes is for you to narrow your eyes for her to start speaking.
“I saw where she was a while ago, right before I started pretending to be her,” she said. “I don’t know if she’s still there.”
“Where did you see her?” you ask.
This time, she winces.
“You won’t believe me,” she says.
You’re tempted to punish her for that, but there is no deceit or hesitation in her voice, just a sense of dejected certainty that what she says is true, that you will never believe her. You wonder if she’s ever told a lie in her life, with how she doesn’t even seem to think of lying, even in a case where it might save her.
“Tell me,” you say.
Her eyes widen in surprise, but the relief doesn’t seem to be powerful enough for you to need to remind her that you’re still willing to hurt her.
“She’s in the Demon Realm,” she answers.
She was right. You don’t believe her. After all, who in their right mind would ever believe a Demon Realm existed in the first place?
You growl in annoyance as the answer comes to you immediately. Luz would.
What had she gotten into this time?
“Don’t play games with me,” you say, driving your knee deeper into the only source of answers you have. “Where the fuck is Luz?”
“The Demon Realm,” the stranger whines, as she bucks her hips in an attempt to escape your knee. “There was a portal that led to your world. I saw her come out of it. I thought it would be a good place to run away to.”
You feel your anger rising, as she continues to spout her delusions.
“Look. I don’t give a shit about what your damage is, or what kind of trauma you have that makes you this delusional. A door to a white van isn’t a fucking portal. I need a name, a location, a plate number.”
“I’m telling the truth,” she cries out. “I’m a basilisk, a horrible monster from the Demon Realm. I’m sorry I lied. I just wanted to be someone else, for once. Someone who wasn’t me.”
She’s fully sobbing now. Your heart clenches at the sight, but you quickly shake the feeling, reminding yourself that no matter how much this stranger looks like her, or sounds like her, this isn’t Luz. You have nothing to feel guilty about.
You let go of the stranger’s wrists. You don’t plan on letting her leave, still looming over her on the couch, but she doesn’t seem like she’s in the state of mind to try and escape from you regardless. Her arms are still tangled in her shirt, and she keeps her hands above her head and grips the fabric of the couch cushions, as if she’s adamant that your hands are still pinning her down.
“You really believe that, don’t you?”
It’s more of a statement than it is a question. It’s a familiar one, flowing from your lips with practised ease.
The look-alike on the couch nods at the question, unable to speak beyond her hiccupped sobs.
You reach down to her face, gently caressing her cheek and wiping a tear from her eyes with your thumb. You’re surprised when she leans into your touch, being that you were the one who caused her tears in the first place, but you don’t turn down the opportunity.
She blinks up at you, clearly confused by your sudden change in demeanor. She’s hesitant, a look of apprehension clashing against the clear desire to accept what you’re saying, but eventually, she closes her eyes. You’re not sure if she trusts your words, or is simply desperate to believe that she does, but it suits your purposes all the same.
“I know you’re lonely,” you say. “I know you just want to belong somewhere. It’s okay.”
You don’t like using these words. They feel too familiar, too similar to the words you use to comfort the girl whose face she shares. You need information on where your sister is, and judging from how messed up this girl is in the head, that might take time. You try to tell yourself this is different, that you don’t really mean it,. You’re just lying to her, tricking her, using her.
But that too, is a familiar feeling.
When the stranger looks up at you, you struggle to keep your smile up when you see the look in her eyes. It's pure, filled with enough raw emotion to silently convey her desperate plea for you to keep telling her the exact words she’s been dying to hear for her entire life, even if it’s a lie.
It’s difficult for you to keep smiling, impossible in the face of those eyes that look so identical to your sister’s. You lean down, and hide your face in the crook of her shoulder as you catch her in an awkward embrace. You wet your lips nervously, like you always do, a nervous habit that you can't seem to fix, no matter how many times you repeat this very same lie throughout your life.
“You’re safe with me, Luz.”
When the girl tenses up beneath you, you expect her to begin to cry again, but though she breathes heavily, taking heaving breaths that sound more like choked gasps, you start to notice that something isn’t quite right.
When her hips buck against you, still pinned by your thigh with your knee pressed deep against her crotch, you raise your head, wondering if she’s having some sort of panic attack, but when you pull back, you realise that’s not quite what’s happening.
You’re stunned for a moment, your role in the scene shifting as you forget the situation you’re in. For a moment you wonder if you’re in a dream. Luz’s eyes, lidded and twitching wildly, gives away the fact that she’s not entirely cognisant of what’s going on around her either. Her eyes are locked with yours, but focus fades and wanes as pleasure washes over her in waves, in rhythm to the desperate rocking and grinding of her hips against your leg.
Luz tries to lift her head to bring it closer to you, but the arching and tensing of her body works against her, driving her head back against the couch. It might have looked comical if her motions weren’t so pure in their desperation, as her desires clashed against themselves.
You don’t lower your head to kiss her, not knowing if you should, but one desire quickly rises over the other as her hips start to move faster and faster. The movement is awkward, with how her legs are still trapped by the pants around her knees, but grace clearly doesn’t concern her at the moment.
Luz lets out a sound that’s somewhere between a gasp, a whine, and a moan, and you watch, transfixed as your twin sister’s face morphs in pleasure. She bites her lip hard, as if she’s ashamed of the sound she’s making and wants to muffle it in any way she can, with her arms still raised over her head.
Her legs shudder against your thigh, and her entire head shakes, as if the pressure of the muffled screams of pleasure have built up violently within her, and are threatening to burst out of her. Instead of releasing them into the air, she turns her head to press her face into your hand.
She screams as she cums, and though a short note of it escapes into the air, you clamp your hand quickly over her mouth in reflex, muffling her voice immediately.
It takes you a while for conscious thought to slowly return to you, but with the sight of your sister’s face obscured by your hand, you finally get your bearings and return to reality. The stranger lays, still quivering on your couch, mumbling something into your hand.
You take your hand off, but you can still only barely hear her, with how softly she speaks.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
You back away from her slowly, lifting yourself off her body and off the couch. Though she curls up into a ball in reaction, she still keeps her hands and knees pressed together by the clothes that hang around them, respecting them as if they were cuffs.
You don’t run, but you quickly walk out of the living room, and upstairs into your room. You draw in a heaving breath once you lock the door behind you, only realising that you’ve barely been breathing until you found yourself in the safety of your privacy. Looking down at your pants, you notice that nearly the entirety of the fabric is soaked through.
Some spots are darker with moisture than others, though, namely at your thigh, where it had been pressed firmly into her, and from your own crotch.
Peeling your pants away from you is an ordeal with how uncomfortably little space there is to maneuver, but still manage to rip them off quickly. You scowl down at your own member, as if you could pin the entirety of your blame onto it.
But even thinking of the reason why your cock is so painfully hard is a dangerous endeavor.
You love your sister, and not in the way that’s considered socially acceptable by most reaches of proper civilisation. You know that there are parts of the world where marriage between siblings and whatever activities may result out of that are considered to be less of a taboo, but you know that dwelling on that idea is a pointless endeavor.
You were born in a place where that isn’t considered acceptable. You don’t particularly care about that. You would burn down the entire world if it meant that you and Luz could be together, but unfortunately for you, there’s one thing you can’t forsake, and that’s Luz herself.
Your sister loves you, but only as her twin brother, and you know that there is nothing you could possibly do to change that.
For a long part of your life, you wondered if that was necessarily true. Manipulation, gaslighting, even something as fantastical as mind control had all been considered in your early quests to make Luz want to be yours, but all of these had one fatal flaw. If you made Luz into your image, she simply would not be Luz anymore.
So you gave up, seeing no way to have her. You love her too much to let your greed stifle her, so you ignore your desire to monopolize her, and dedicate yourself to the role as her protector and observer, cursing yourself to a fate of being satisfied with simply watching her live her life.
But then the stranger came into your life.
You’d been against the idea of sending Luz to camp, for obvious reasons, but you also supported it outside of her earshot. While Luz wasn’t bullied at school, somewhat thanks to your intervention, she was ostracized by the masses that didn’t understand her peculiarities, and though you had forced a few of them to attempt to befriend her before, those attempts proved to be… disastrous.
A new environment would do her good. In that aspect, you agreed with your mother.
But what your mother didn’t know was that you had another reason for you to be separated from Luz for a month and a half.
Simply put, you had no idea if you would be able to hold yourself back from doing something… awful.
You love Luz more than you are attracted to her, but that isn’t saying much when your love for her transcends the border to obsession. It hadn’t been a problem before when you were kids, but a couple of years ago, once you’d started to notice changes in your body and hers, things had started to become difficult, especially in the summer.
Gravesfield is a hot place, and with how frugal your family is, it meant that the AC was permanently off.
You weren’t sure how many times you could see your sister walk out of the shower, completely naked, complaining about the heat as she bent down to pick a popsicle out of the freezer, moaning in pleasure as she ran her tongue across its length.
So yes, you needed some distance from her.
When the stranger sauntered into your life with Luz’s face, it took your entire willpower not to strangle her to death right there. You waited five days until your mother would leave the two of you alone to interrogate her, not wanting to needlessly worry your mother about where the real Luz Noceda went.
Looking down at your throbbing cock, desperately begging for you to relieve it of the pressure built up inside of it, you’re not sure if that was the real reason anymore.
Yes, you needed to find out where your real sister was, but why did you have to take off her clothes and pin her to the couch to do it? It seemed reasonable at the time, frisk her for any communication devices she might be hiding, use her clothes as a convenient way to immobilize her.
You glare down at your cock, knowing just what part of you influenced that plan.
You open your dresser and pull out a fresh pair of boxers and open your closet for a pair of jeans, the tightest pair you can find, before you make your way to the living room.
The stranger is still where you left her, albeit newly accompanied by a bucket of soapy water by her side. You notice her twitch as you enter the room, reacting to you despite the darkness of the room and the blaring sound of the ending credits to Terminator 2 covering your footsteps. She turns her head downwards, as if focused entirely on rubbing a cleaning rag on the spot of the couch that she had just been occupying.
You watch her for a few minutes, but she doesn’t acknowledge you, even when you sigh.
So eventually, you just talk.
“You can keep pretending to be Luz, for now. At least until I can get her back.”
The stranger reacts instantly, flinching so violently that she accidentally kicks the bucket beside her. Though she squeaks out in pain, she still manages to dive for the bucket, stopping it from spilling over onto the carpet.
“Really?” she squeaks out through the pain. “You mean it?”
“I’m not letting you stay out of goodwill,” you clarify, though it doesn’t seem to dampen the relief in her eyes. “As long as you can keep tricking my mother into thinking that Luz hasn’t run off to some adventure without thinking about contacting her family for the last month and a half, I’ll let you stay. The moment you mess up, you’re gone.”
Despite the volume of the Terminator theme blaring through the surround sound system, the end credits having finished and returning the movie back to the main menu of the bluray disc, a paradoxical silence hangs over you like a thick fog.
You turn around, having given her ample time to speak up. You hear a barely audible whisper once you’re halfway out of the room.
“Thank you. I won’t let you down.”
“Just hurry up and clean up that couch,” you respond.
Instead of making your way to the upstairs bathroom for the cold shower that you desperately need, you head to the kitchens. Pulling open the fridge door, you frown when you don’t see much of anything of value there. No fresh produce, no meats. Obviously, you have a couple of chicken breasts and pork shoulders in the freezer, but nothing readily defrosted to cook for lunch.
Oh well, there’s always carrots, onions, and eggs. You guess it’s fried rice.
You pull out the carrots and onions and place them on the counter, but ignore them for now to walk over to the rice cooker. Fill the pot, wash the rice three times, dump the water, then refill to an appropriate amount. When you close the lid and start the cooker, the stranger with Luz’s face walks in with a handful of various open chip bags in one hand, and a bowl of melted ice cream in the other. She glances at you, keeping your gaze for a few seconds before looking down at her feet. You turn your attention back to the kitchen counter, pulling out a knife and a cutting board.
“I cleaned it up. It’s still damp, but it should dry soon, with how hot it is today,” she mumbles from behind you.
You don’t know what she expects you to respond with. You give her a grunt.
“Good,” you add after a short pause.
Beside you, you hear the quiet clinking of the ice cream bowl being gently lowered into the sink, and the water running for a few seconds to clean it. You keep your eyes on the carrots, focusing your attention on not cutting yourself.
“Fried rice?” the stranger asks.
You consider the question.
“Luz wouldn’t know that,” you say. “She’s never touched a raw vegetable before, except to carve it for Halloween.”
“Oh,” the stranger says. “Should I stop helping around the kitchen, then?”
“No,” you say. “It makes my mom happy. She thinks it’s because of the camp.”
Or at least it’s what she wants to believe. You know how difficult of a decision it was for her to condemn Luz to something she knew she would hate. You don’t think that her lack of suspicion towards the stranger is purely due to the exhaustion she felt after taking double shifts for the past week to get enough time off to make it up to Luz upon her return. Your mother is simply seeing what she wants, and it’s what she’s wanted ever since Luz had been born.
“I’m sorry,” the stranger says, interrupting your thoughts.
“You sure say that a lot, don’t you?” you say, scraping the diced carrots into a bowl and starting on the onions. “What are you apologizing for this time?”
“I don’t know anything about what Luz is doing right now,” the stranger says hesitantly. She waits a second for your reaction, and when you don’t give her one, she continues. “She seemed fine when I saw her in the Demon Realm, but I think she was hanging out with a criminal. I’m not sure. I wasn’t ever really sure of what went on outside of the castle. I don’t know if she’s safe or not.”
A lot of what the stranger says is strange, but you’re not unused to listening to stories about fantasy realms, so you do what you usually do and ignore everything that isn’t important.
“She’s fine,” you say, in response to the only relevant thing she’s said. “Or at the very least, she’s not hurt.”
“Luz?” she asks, as if you can be talking about anyone else. “How are you sure?”
“Magic,” you answer.
“You can use magic?” she asks.
You shrug.
“Magic, psychic powers, supernatural twin sense. Call it whatever you want, but I can always tell when Luz is in danger. If she was hurt, I would have been a lot less polite with you.”
“Really?” the stranger asks.
“They’ve never failed me before,” you say, scraping the diced onions into the same bowl as the carrots and glancing back to point your knife at her. “I don’t give a shit if you don’t believe me. It’s real.”
“I believe you,” the stranger says quickly, raising her hands in surrender, more at the words than the knife. Once again, you can’t help but be confused about just what kind of life a person could lead that would lead them to being such a terrible liar.
You glare at her, just to let her know that you know she’s lying, before you turn back around to wash the knife.
“Unfortunately, as reliable as my connection with Luz is, it only seems to register when Luz actually believes she’s in danger herself, and she's usually blind to it if she's doing anything that she might consider to be remotely 'adventurous.' She could be having fun right now, but that doesn’t mean she’s safe, just like the times with the bear caves, which is the second reason why I’m keeping you around,” you say. “I need you to quickly remember enough about this Demon Realm of yours to tell me how to get to it.”
There isn’t much else to do in the kitchen, since you need to wait for the rice to almost be finished before you continue. Still, you stand at the sink, staring down the drain, not wanting to turn around.
“You don’t believe me,” she says.
“I do,” you reply.
With how much better of a liar you are than her, there’s no wonder that she has to take a moment to decide whether you were telling the truth or not.
“You shouldn’t,” she eventually says. “Not many Demons go to the Human Realm, let alone a basilisk.”
“A basilisk,” you say. “That’s what you are, right?”
“Right,” she says, with a little bit of skepticism at your words, but eventually accepting the genuine interest you inject into your words. You’re quite good at that particular skill. “Do you want me to prove it to you?”
“Sure,” you say, turning around to look at her. “Let’s see it.”
The stranger looks up at you in surprise, quite possibly at the serious expression you have on your face, a look that you’d used multiple times to silently tell Luz that you believed in her. When the stranger nods to herself with renewed determination, it’s a painfully familiar expression on her face that automatically prepares you to use your next face. It’s one of sympathetic understanding that you would use to let her know that it wasn’t her fault that she failed, that it only failed because she hadn’t drawn the sigils quite right, or in the correct type of animal blood. Perhaps Mercury was in retrograde?
You have the proper expression readied up, but you’re not quite sure what your face ends up looking like.
You’re not a believer in the supernatural or fantastical like Luz is, but mostly because you consider yourself to be pragmatic. You generally don’t believe in things that you can’t see or prove for yourself, so when you see the stranger’s left hand transform into a green clawed version of itself in front of your very eyes, you suppose you no longer have any reason not to believe in it.
“Huh,” you say. “Why aren’t you wearing any pants?”
The stranger seems confused by the question for a moment, before her face flushes red and she turns away from you. “They were soaked through, and I haven’t had the chance to drop by my- Luz’s room to pick up new ones,” she says, before she looks up at you with what you imagine is her attempt at a glare. “Why are you focusing on that anyways? Shouldn’t you be more surprised? I’m a real shapeshifting Demon, standing right in front of you!”
You shrug, the shock having already passed enough that you can hide the remainder of it with nonchalance.
“I did say I believed you, didn’t I?” you ask, not even having to lie this time, off a technicality.
“Oh,” she says, dropping her hands to her side lamely, where they shifted back into a perfect copy of Luz’s hands. “I guess. So you’re still not worried about your sister, even if you know she’s in the Demon Realm and not the Human Realm?”
“Honestly, no,” you admit. “In fact, it makes me feel better. I thought Luz might’ve walked into some drug riddled homeless camp or insane asylum and made some friends there without realising where she was. When the only reference I have to the supposedly horrible monsters that live there is you, the Demon Realm seems PG by comparison.”
The stranger gives you a familiar look, and this time, you’re certain that it’s supposed to be a glare. You try to keep your pity from showing on your face, and meet it instead with casual nonchalance.
“Can you shapeshift everything or is it just your hand?” you ask, glancing at the still clawed hand, the only non-Luz part on the stranger that you could look at safely.
“Everything except my brain and heart,” she says. “Everything else is pretty much fair game. I can even add parts if I wanted to. Like this.”
When the stranger points to herself, you follow her finger out of an automatic reflex. When you look up at her head, you can’t help but be a little stunned when you see two cat-like ears poking up out of the top of her head.
“Meow, meow.” She hesitates and blushes as she says it, like she realised too late that it would be embarrassing, but had psyched herself up too much to not actually do it. It proves to be too much for you.
The entire house seems to rattle as you stomp towards the stranger, and immediately she flinches at the sound, turning her head to the ground as her newly formed cat ears flatten against her head.
“Sorr-”
You cut her off, grabbing her by the waist and chin, stopping her from shying away and forcing her to look up at you. Tears are already forming in her eyes, but no matter how much that makes you want to look away, you keep your glare steady.
“You aren’t Luz,” you growl.
She seems confused, but nods as best as she can in your grip.
You glare at her silently, though you’re not entirely sure what you’re looking for. She stays silent, trying her best to keep her gaze locked with yours, though she can’t stop her eyes from occasionally fluttering away in embarrassment.
The beep of the rice cooker breaks the silence between you. You let go of her to tend to it. You open it too quickly, nearly scalding yourself with the steam, but you stay silent, gritting your teeth.
You continue to make your fried rice, and eventually, you feel the stranger’s presence approaching you from behind. You ignore her and continue to cook while she wordlessly washes whatever utensils you toss into the sink and cleans the leftover eggshells and onion skins that you hadn’t cleared away before.
When you finish cooking, you grab the two plates that the stranger has already laid out for you and scoop a generous portion into both. You grab a set of spoons and make your way to the dinner table, frowning when you see spoons already placed down.
“Sorry,” the stranger says. “I should’ve mentioned I already put the utensils out.”
“Don’t apologize for something so insignificant,” you grumble, already sitting down and starting to eat.
After a moment of consideration, the stranger still grabs the extra spoons to return them to the utensil drawer, before joining you.
You take your time, not having much of an appetite, but the stranger eats quickly like she usually does, another trait that she doesn’t share with Luz.
“C-” She hesitates. “Can I still call you Cristian?”
“My mother already seems to have gotten used to it,” you say.
It’s not a complete answer, but she seems to accept it.
“Cristian, can I ask you something?”
“I won’t stop you.”
That isn’t a complete answer either, and this time she takes a bit longer to gather her courage to continue.
“Do you and Luz really do… those kinds of things?”
“No,” you say, possibly a little too quickly or too loudly. “Never. I just wanted to restrain you and make sure you weren't bugged. It was a convenient way to do both.”
The stranger doesn’t say anything for a while, until she lets out a quiet hum that doesn’t hold any meaning.
She gets up, bringing her plate with her.
“I should get dressed,” she says.
You focus on your food, determined to keep your eyes from wandering, but you’re weak. Once you hear the dishes being put away, and footsteps leading out of the kitchen, you look up at your sister’s bare ass. For a moment, you think you notice a fresh drop of liquid slowly crawling down the side of her thigh, but she leaves too quickly.
She doesn’t come back down before you finish your lunch. You head to your own room once you finish, and lay on your bed for about ten minutes before you decide that it’s pointless and get back up.
You’re not sure what you plan to do once you leave your room, but you’re surprised to see the stranger pacing outside of it, freezing once she notices you.
“Do you want to finish the movie?” she asks.
You consider the question for a moment.
“Sure.”
With how dark it is in the living room when the curtains are drawn, it’s nearly impossible to tell what time of day it is. Set up on the couch to watch Terminator 2, with a bowl of ice cream and several bags of chips open on the coffee table, it almost feels like you’ve gone backwards in time, and that the events of the day had never actually happened.
As you watch the movie, barely paying attention as you’ve already seen the movie before, you’re surprised when you feel something pressing against your shoulder.
Without looking, you raise your arm and the pressure moves, shifting from your shoulder to lay back against your chest.
It takes you a moment to realise that something’s wrong about the scenario.
“You still have cat ears,” you say.
They twitch in response to your words, or maybe just in reaction to the physical feeling of your breath on them.
“Oh,” the stranger says. “Sorry, I forgot. I’ll change back.”
You let out a quiet hum and return your attention to the movie once more, as the cat ears disappear.
You finish Terminator 2, and move onto the third movie. Once you finish the third movie, the stranger seems disappointed that you don’t have the blu rays for any more of the sequels. You’re not sure if they made blu rays for any movies after the third, and you’re not sure if they’re worth having either, with how the quality of the series went down the longer the producers milked it for cash, but with how much the stranger enjoyed the third movie, you suppose it’s possible she wouldn’t mind.
Probably not a lot of movies in the Demon Realm, if you had to assume.
“Aren’t you going to try to find Luz?” the stranger asks.
“Eventually,” you say. “Do you know how to get back to the Demon Realm?”
“Maybe? The portal that I went through led out through the abandoned house next door. I don’t know if it’s open, but I haven’t checked either. I don’t want to go back.”
“Huh. A portal to the Demon Realm only a couple feet away. Maybe Luz wasn’t just being crazy all those times she dragged me out of bed to catch all those mystical creatures she spotted around the area.”
“She did that?”
“About twice a week in the summer, and strangely more often in the winter.”
“Why’s that strange?”
“Because it’s colder in the winter? Oh right. Do you have winter in the Demon Realm?”
“I don’t really know what that word means, so probably not?”
“Sometimes, the Human Realm gets cold for long periods of time. But yeah, Luz would still drag me out even in the freezing cold. I usually sleep in a winter jacket and snowpants during the colder months, because she won’t wait long enough for me to dress myself. Thankfully, she doesn’t take the time to wear proper clothes herself, so she often gets sick enough that I can get a few full nights of rest in a row before she gets better.”
“... Do you even like Luz?”
You frown at the question.
“I love her,” you answer. “She’s my twin sister. She makes my life horribly difficult. She’s the only thing I really care about in this world, and I would let everything else burn if it meant keeping her safe. She’s got a good heart, but barely knows how to use it. If you started crying in front of her, she’d cut out her own heart without hesitation if it meant she could get you to stop, but she won’t recognize that there’s a problem in the first place unless you tell her outright. She doesn’t cook, clean, or help around the house, and every time she does something that gets our mother called into the school, she doesn’t even realise how much it hurts her. I would never ask her to change.”
When you stop, it’s clear that the stranger expects you to continue, waiting a long moment in silence until she’s confident that you’re finished.
“I was kept in a prison my entire life,” she says.
You wait for her to continue, but she doesn’t. In the background, the disk menu for Terminator 3 plays, but you make no move to get up to change to another movie.
“Do you expect me to give you sympathy?” you ask.
The stranger shrugs. From the angle that she leans into you, you can barely see the side of her face, but her expression is blank.
You don’t know how long you stay like that for, but eventually, you’re interrupted by the burst of light as your mother pushes aside the curtain that leads to the main hallway.
“Have you kids just been watching movies and eating snacks while I’ve been away?”
“Sorry, mamá,” the stranger says, quickly pushing herself off of you to stand up and turn around. “They didn’t have movies at camp. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten my Terminator fix. I guess we got a bit carried away.”
“Terminator?” your mother asks, with a laugh. “I mean, I expected something like this to happen when I went to work, but Terminator? Have you finally moved on from Lord of the Rings?”
The stranger’s eyes widen as she looks down at me, but I don’t say anything to support her.
“Don’t worry, mamá,” you say. “We didn’t just eat chips and ice cream. We made fried rice, if you haven’t eaten dinner yet.”
“We?” your mother asks, with a clear look of hope in her eyes.
“Luz helped,” you answer, giving her exactly what she wanted to hear.
Your mother blinks, and turns her head and pushes up her glasses, wiping away happy tears. You know Luz wouldn’t have noticed, but it seems the stranger does. You see a clear realisation in her eyes, as she seems to realise that your mother has been repeating this exact same motion multiple times over the past week whenever “Luz” offered to help out around the house, instead of sneaking out of the house at 3 A.M. to hunt for snakes, or trying to find bundles of poison ivy for her latest attempts at brewing a potion in the bathtub.
“Well, I did buy some takeout on the way here, but a homecooked meal sounds wonderful,” your mother says. “A homecooked meal cooked by my two beautiful children, no less. I must be the luckiest mother in the world.”
With one hand, you stack the ice cream bowl and the chip bowl, while you grab the stranger’s shoulder and guide her around the couch with the other. She seems confused, and the confusion doesn’t fade when you practically push her into your mother’s arms. Your mother accepts the offering, grabbing the stranger in a tight hug that seems to force the wind from her lungs.
“Oh, Luz,” she says. “Thank you, so much.”
You head to the kitchen to wash your bowls. Behind you, the still blaring theme for Terminator 3 makes it impossible to hear the stranger’s reaction to your mother’s affection, but you can only assume that the scene is incredibly awkward and painful to watch.
When you finish washing, you let the water run for a bit longer to take a drink from it, before letting out a long sigh.