So it’s 10pm here and all I can think about is monster-under-the-bed type nonsense. You think if I sleep with my leg hanging off the bed and unprotected by covers, I’ll meet my dream-monster?

monstersandmaw:

Can’t promise, but maybe it’s a good way to start…?

Also my hand slipped again. 

(Sfw, and no genders etc. mentioned)

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You lay there, the air warm and stuffy despite the open window, and sighed. You had always been different. As a child, your friends had feared and loathed the things under their beds, but you had always wished to meet yours. You wished and wished with all your heart, sometimes even swinging down off the bed and crouching down to peer into the darkness, but there was never anything there, only the odd shoe box and spider. 

Now you were older, and you’d almost given up hope of ever finding the ‘monster’ under the bed. 

You let out yet another sigh and kicked the sheets off. “I wish you were really there,” you murmured to the empty room. “I wish you were there, and I wish I could meet you. Why should everyone else have got a shadow under the bed and not me? What did I do wrong? Why don’t you like me?”

You’d had the longest day, and you just wanted to be held, loved, caressed. The idea of shadowy limbs wrapping you up in their embrace had always been a comfort, but tonight you ached for it with a new sense of longing until you felt your chest might burst. 

You choked back a sob and rolled over, curling up into a ball. “What did I do wrong?”

And then something happened. 

The darkness coalesced at the foot of your bed, billowing and shifting like ink in water. “Don’t cry,” a voice like broken glass said. “Please, I can’t bear it when you cry.”

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