Chapter Text
If anyone asked Pidge how the hell she managed to get back home without falling asleep at the wheel, she would never be able to give them an answer. With a loud, boisterous yawn, she climbed clumsily out of her car, her eyes drooping shut even as she moved. She grabbed her laptop bag and the bag of energy drinks she’d picked up from a convenience store on the way home and locked her car once she was sure she’d gotten what she needed.
“Morning, Katie,” Old Man Tracey crooned to Pidge softly as she locked up her car. She turned around and waved at one of the old tenants in her complex from over her shoulder. “Just getting back from work?”
The fact that the old man was up and about on his daily walk to the duck pond at the park nearby was a sheer testament to the fact that she’d definitely been up all night and morning was going to break soon. This was probably the fifth night in a row she’d barely gotten any sleep, but at this point days bled into nights bled into days and she couldn’t really tell the difference between them anymore.
“Hey, Mr. Tracey. Yeah. No one is going to see me for a couple days,” she yawned again and then gave him an apologetic look for being rude.
He chortled quietly. “My daughter sent me some fresh fruit yesterday. If you ever want a nice breakfast, please don’t hesitate to stop by. Don’t work too hard, Katie.”
“Thanks. I’ll consider it.” She gave him a friendly wave in parting and then made her way to the stairs to her place.
Twice, she almost stumbled on her own feet as she tried to hurry up the stairs, but she made it to her door in one piece and managed not to drop her keys as she struggled to get it open. She trudged inside her apartment, yawning and rubbing her sleepy eyes as she kicked off her ratty sneakers by the door and headed straight to her bedroom. Under normal circumstances, she would prefer to take a shower before going to sleep for the night (although it couldn’t really be considered the night anymore considering the sun was starting to rise). But at this point, she’d been up for almost twenty-eight hours straight, running solely on cups of coffee and red bulls (sometimes combining them both) just to finish up her deadlines for work.
Working as a video game programmer for one of the top gaming companies in the world was her absolute dream, and she was lucky to have even snagged the job right out of grad school, but she couldn’t deny that the odd, inconsistent hours put a huge strain on her body. Especially when shit like this happened. One of their storylines had to be dropped because the writer dropped out for another project and didn’t want them using it. So they’d had to scramble to fix the hole which meant that new part had to re-coded and redrawn and re-voice acted and all this other shit that took them nearly a week to do. They had to have a partially playable demo ready for the board meeting with the benefactors so they could convince them to fund the new project. And that meant nothing but perfection.
Which meant Pidge didn’t get any sleep during the duration of the work.
She was just glad that there wouldn’t be many disturbances to the long, long hours she planned to sleep that day. Her right hand neighbour was a travelling sales agent and rarely home, if ever, and the apartment on the other side hadn’t been leased yet, so was currently vacant. It was super good luck and she intended to take advantage of the quiet to sleep for days. While they worked on motion capture for the next few days, she would get time off.
With another yawn, Pidge unzipped her jeans and shoved the legs down with her feet. She dropped her pants and tshirt on her bedroom floor and stumbled in the dark over shoes and piles of other stale, stinky clothes to get to her rumpled bed. Her toe caught on a hard box, and though the pain was delayed, it momentarily stunned her awake when it burst through her foot.
“Fuck…” she growled, bending down to pick up the package she’d tossed in her room the last time she’d been home.
It was a bit heavy, but her frowned loosened when she remembered that Matt had sent it to her from his little excursion to Mongolia with his girlfriend. They were doing the whole adventuring around the world thing for a year, and though she missed him terribly, at least he was finding time to send her small souvenirs and postcards—mostly postcards and pictures. Which was why this box was surprising to her, because he didn’t tend to send packages, especially ones as big as this one.
Pidge pulled on her giant baggy MIT sweater and plopped on her bed to open it up. She was tired, but ignored her fatigue momentarily, more curious about what this could be. She ripped off the tape and got the box open and stared in it in confusion.
It was a lamp.
A brass oil lamp in the shape of a teapot with a fairly long spout. It was a bit weathered with age and some parts of the copper had turned green, but it was otherwise in pretty nice shape. It looked like the kind of thing someone might find in a museum. She had no idea why Matt sent it to her. With furrowed brows, she shuffled through the box until she found the obligatory postcard from her brother.
Heya Pidgey Pie!
I found this awesome looking ancient oil lamp at a market and thought you might think it was pretty cool. Probably bought it for more than twice the price it should be, but it is antique-y looking and I know you appreciate cool stuff like that. Hope work isn’t kicking your butt! Stay strong! Hugs and kisses! We’re off to Russia after this!
Matt
It was attached to a picture of Matt and his girlfriend posing on their horses in a grassy plain during their trek. In the background were snowy mountains that seemed to disappear into the sky. Pidge couldn’t help but crack a small smile at the goofy faces they both were making. His girlfriend especially had distorted her face so well, she kind of looked like an alien.
Pidge set the postcard on her dresser, setting a mental reminder for herself to put it in with the other cards whenever she next woke up. She settled back against her pillows and headboard, making herself comfortable as she inspected the cool artefact. It really was awesome. The cut, the design, the engravings. However old it was, it had been well taken care of all these years.
On one side was an inscription she hadn’t noticed at first. It wasn’t in English, and given the odd symbols, she was pretty certain it wasn’t in any of the languages of the world. Pidge wouldn’t call herself a language aficionado or anything, but she’d studied a lot of them and this didn’t even look remotely familiar.
There was a piece of crusty dirt covering a few of the odd symbols and Pidge scrubbed at it with her hand to clear it away. To her surprise, the fifth pass through felt decidedly hotter than before. She didn’t think the lamp was heating up necessarily, but then it happened:
The symbols suddenly glowed a brilliant azure, the light so strong it illuminated her dark room in full. Then the lamp started vibrating hard and that was the last straw. Pidge was way too tired to properly react to the damn thing glowing and shaking, but this reeked of one of Matt’s practical jokes. He was definitely trying to scare her or freak her out and she didn’t have the patience to deal with that. Pidge cocked her arm back and launched the damn thing as hard as she could at her wall. It made a very loud bang, but didn’t break and hit the ground with a thud that nearly made the room shake.
Pidge’s brows furrowed, wondering why it had suddenly sounded like a heavy body had hit the ground.
“Ow…” There was a groan from the foot of her bed, exactly where the lamp had landed and for a second, Pidge wondered if she’d fallen asleep or something because there was no way a damn lamp would be talking right now. “Jesus. Why are you being so damn rough?”
The source of the male voice rose up to its feet slowly, and Pidge found herself looking at a tall, wispy, glittery mass of blue energy. Although, it was in the form of a wiry man, it had no real face or true physical features that could help her distinguish its true appearance. But even so, she could just make out glittering, hollowed eyes staring at her on what would be the head and a large, infectious grin. The figure was just vague enough that she couldn’t fully see its features, but not so vague that she couldn’t understand that this was a slightly luminescent, humanoid wisp. It had brought with it the scent of ocean water. On both of its “wrists” were these tight gold cuff bracelets, gleaming brightly and beautifully. All in all, if she had to ascribe it to something, she would call it a celestial-looking being.
“Okay… I clearly fell asleep…” Pidge muttered.
“No, I’m very real. Keith does the whole invading dreams thing. Well, unless you want me to invade yours.” The thing winked at her and Pidge blinked slowly, wondering if she had imagined it or if it had legitimately done so. “Thank you for summoning— Damn bitch, you live like this?!”
It was looking around in horror at the mess in her room. It didn’t have a distinct expression on its face, but she could easily recognise the judge-y look as it perused the pig sty that her room had become. Pidge knew what her room looked like: empty take-out cartons littering every surface, dirty, stained clothes in piles on the floor, a full trash can she hadn’t bothered to take out in weeks with what she was sure were little gnats circling the things inside. It wasn’t her fault she spent so much time at work she didn’t particularly have time to go through her apartment and get it up to par. She had too much to do and not enough time to do it.
“Shut up. Who the hell are you? And where the hell did you come from?” Pidge growled with an embarrassed blush, annoyed with this whole situation. She should have just opened the package the next day. Now she had to deal with this headache, which she was sure was some sleep induced bullshit hallucination. The combination of lack of sleep, plus all the red bulls, plus the coffee had to have caused some sort of crazy imbalance in her brain that led to whatever was currently happening to her.
“Me? I’m Lance of the Pokémon G-Men!” he proclaimed, the weird wispy figure striking some strange heroic pose with his arms.
She stared at Lance with narrowed eyes, unimpressed. When she didn’t respond, he folded his arms across his chest and chuckled to himself. The cuffs clinked as he assumed the position, and her eyes were drawn to the odd tally mark scratches that seemed to adorn the jewellery.
“Jeez, tough crowd.” He moved away from his post to stand by the window and vaguely, she recognised that he had no feet and was floating along. What would have been his legs was a trail tapering off that was still connected to the spout of the lamp. “My name is Lance. Lance McClain. I’m a djinn, or what you might call a genie. Yes, a genie like Aladdin’s grant wishes kind. No, I’m not blue because all djinn are naturally blue. We take on the colour of something most significant to us. I can also take on any form I wish. Yes, I do have a more tangible form, but without a contract, I can’t assume it that easily because I don’t have a tether to the human world. So I’m here to make a contract with you. Did I miss anything?”
So they were really doing this, huh? Since when had her dreams become so much more corporeal than normal?
“So how does this work,” Pidge intoned dryly with a yawn, giving up and humouring him. She was sure she was hallucinating or something else crazy as shit—when had she taken that caffeine pill again—but Pidge was too exhausted, and she didn’t feel like trying to argue against him at the moment. Maybe if she just joined in on the farce, it’d get over faster and she could get some much needed rest. “I get three wishes or something?”
“You actually get five wishes. And don’t even think about wishing for an unlimited amount of wishes. The Council of Elders voted three thousand years ago and decided that they’d had enough of that loophole in the system since we were losing djinn. So that no longer works,” Lance explained, wandering over to the corkboard next to her closet and staring at all the memories and photos and notes she’d tacked up on there. Pidge stared at him with a frown. She wanted him gone. Why the hell would she want more wishes if that meant him sticking around longer? “The only other things you cannot wish for are for someone to fall in love with you, for someone to die—I can't be used like a Death Note—and I can bring someone back from the dead, but I don't want to and the way they come back may not be the way you remember them, so be cautious of that. All variations of those same wishes also cannot apply. And of course, be careful what you wish for.”
There was something about his expression that seemed a little too crafty or sneaky. There was definitely a smirk on his face. Pidge may have been tired, but she was clever enough to understand his implication. She had a feeling that if she didn’t explicitly and thoroughly describe a wish, he’d interpret it his way and the outcome might not be what she’d expected.
Pidge snorted, raising a brow in challenge. Amateur. She was so on to him. “Alright then, ya creep, wish number one. I wish you would stop talking to me for good, go back into your lamp, and leave me alone forever.”
He sucked in air through his teeth, faux sympathetic. “Ooh, nope. Can’t do that. I can’t grant wishes without a contract. And see those markings?”
Lance snapped a finger and the lamp suddenly landed on her lap, his trail of fuzzies just barely brushing against her legs and she inhaled sharply, weirded out by the chill that passed through her body. The weird symbols she’d stroked were still alight, only pulsing now, as if waiting for something.
“You summoned me with the incantation; you’re stuck with me. That’s the way it works.”
“I didn’t say any incantation!” Pidge argued, indignant. “I was scrubbing dirt off of the lamp!”
“Well…” Lance shrugged as he shifted so he was seated at the end of her bed. Somehow, it looked like he was sitting criss-cross, despite the fact that he didn’t really have legs. “Those symbols are ancient and no one can read them without proper knowledge, so they bend the rules a bit. Anything kinda goes. You rubbing it activated it.”
Pidge groaned in frustration, yanking her glasses off and setting them on her nightstand. “Then what the fuck would it take for you to disappear? I’m sick of this crazy hallucination.”
He laughed, and it sounded like there were tinkling bells in his voice. “You’re a weird one. Most people would kill for an opportunity like this.”
“…I’d kill for you to get the hell out of my face. I’m tired. I want to sleep,” she grumped, rubbing her eyes with her sleeve.
“Alright.” His smile widened and with a frilly wave of his hand, he whooshed up a scrolled up parchment paper and a quill pen with a spindle on the butt of the pen.
The arm tendril extended and he handed her both the items. Pidge stared down at it with slumped shoulders of surrender. Why was this still continuing? When the scroll unravelled, it trailed off the side of her bed, bumping on her carpet until it hit a leg of her desk and even then, still hadn’t unravelled fully. And on top of all that, it was in Latin and the lettering was so miniscule, she would need a magnifying glass just to read it. She knew how to read Latin, courtesy of high school years ago, but the time it would take to do proper translations was too much. She needed to go to bed and get this shit over with now.
“You got a more user friendly version?” she asked wearily, rolling up the scroll again and deciding it wasn’t worth the trouble. “And what is this exactly?”
“Sorry, pollita, this is the only version. Also this is my contract. You sign it with your blood, I get a tether to the human world, and once you finish up the five wishes, I’ll be out of your hair forever.”
“Just like that?” She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. “People don’t get good fortune so easily like this, Lance. Life is a bitch. If it’s easy, you’re living wrong.”
Lance’s “brow” rose as he lied down to recline sideways on her bed. “You’re cynical.”
“And you’re uninformed. So what’s the catch?”
Lance frowned semi-playfully, picking at the fingernails of one hand. “Catch?”
“To this whole I’ll grant your every wish bullshit.” She waved a hand in disinterest, gesturing to him. “There’s always a catch. There’s always terms. There’s always fine print. I just don’t want to translate and read through this long thing so give me the nuts and bolts of it.”
“Smart cookie.” An arm tendril tweaked her nose and she swatted his hand away from her face with a sharp inhale when it felt like a ghost or literal death passed through her or something. “Okay. I can only grant a wish a day, so you’re stuck with me for at least five days. Think carefully about what you want and when you make your wishes. Of course, you don’t have to make a wish five days in a row if you don’t want to, but in my experience, people have been all too excited to make their wishes fast. Oh, but we can’t start until the contract is processed, and it takes about a business day to process it. Sorry.”
“Urgh…” she groaned, rolling her eyes and Lance grinned, amused. “So I have to deal with you for at the very least, six days?”
“If the queues at the agency aren’t too long, yupp,” he said cheerfully, popping his P as he rolled onto his back and looked at his wrist cuffs. “No one will be able to see me except you unless I adopt a human form so remember that everyone will think you’re talking to yourself if I’m in this form. Also, once you sign the contract, I won’t be tied to the lamp, so you won’t have to worry about carrying it around everywhere.”
“And that’s it?”
“Nope. If you need to summon me immediately, all you have to do is say ‘Oh Lance~ You sexy hunk of a man. I need you to come satisfy my every wish~’” he said in a breathy voice, his wispy arms wrapping around his body and slowly gliding up and down in a sexual manner.
Pidge stared at him blankly while he snickered. “Not happening, dumbass.”
“Aww you’re no fun. Fine. Any words of summoning will suffice as long as you say my name after and I’ll pop up wherever you are,” Lance continued on in his same good mood. “And like I said, no killing, no falling in love, and please no necromancy. But there are workarounds, like beating someone to within an inch of their life for example. I don’t like it, but I’ve had wishes like that before. Also, abstract or subjective wishes like ‘I want to be happy’ or ‘I want to know the meaning of life’ won’t work. They have to be explicit. Oh and you have guaranteed confidentiality. I won’t reveal your name to anyone else I form a contract with, but I do like to use other people’s wishes as examples of what people can achieve through me.”
Pidge nodded impatiently. “What else? And can we hurry this up? I need to sleep.”
“Like I said, I will grant you five wishes, but it’s not for free.” Lance sat up and levelled her with a serious look, all pretence of his joking pushed aside. His tone made a shiver run down her back. The background of tinkling bells in his voice had transformed into something rough and harsh. “Ever heard of equivalent exchange?”
“Like from Fullmetal Alchemist?”
“Similar concept, sort of, but yeah. My power at your fingertips comes with a price that you'll pay at the end of the five wishes.”
“So… a depending on what I wish for, the price will be even to that, kind of thing? Let’s say I wish for a million dollars, does that mean I’d lose my job or qualifications to work or something to make up for it?”
Lance hummed, and the tinkling bells returned. “I suppose, yes. If you want to think about it that way, sure. You definitely wouldn’t have a job anymore.”
“Okay. That’s not so bad. I’ll wish for simple stuff.” As long as she didn’t go overboard or make some stupid wish that could end with her getting a worse life, she’d be fine. It’d be quick, she would get rid of Lance and then get on with her life and be none the wiser. “So is that it?”
“Yes it is! All you have to do is cut your thumb on this quill, sign it with your blood at the bottom here,” he snapped his fingers and the scroll shifted so only the bottom signature portion was showing and the rest was rolled up, “and sign your name and the date, and I’ll go bank the contract.”
What the hell, right? This was only a dream and there was no way this was real anyway, so it didn’t matter. Pidge signed her name and the date at the bottom, but when she moved her thumb to cut it on the spindle, Lance’s weird arm tendril stilled her hand. This time, she couldn’t suppress the shiver as her body recoiled from the touch. It felt like he was going through her skin.
“You sure you don’t want to read the contract?” he said earnestly. “This is irreversible. I’m totally willing to wait for as long as you need to analyse the content. And there’s no rush. As long as no one else does the incantation before you sign off with your blood, I won’t be traipsing off anywhere else.”
So there was a way to make him go away. But then again, Pidge wouldn’t want to force this crap on anyone else. She could deal with the burden.
“Well did you tell me every catch and what I get from this deal?”
“Yeah, I did. The gist of it anyway,” he said honestly, and she detected no attempts at deceit from him.
“Okay, Lance. I trust you then.” She’d always been a thorough person, but at this point, she was exhausted and desperately needed to sleep. Her body felt like it was shutting down on herself. And the sooner she got this over with, the better. She didn’t know Lance at all, but he didn’t seem to be the type to be some asshole. Maybe a little goofy, but she hadn’t gotten any threatening vibes from him. Plus, he was friendly and his concern about the contract seemed sincere enough. “Wanna let go of my hand now?”
Lance was oddly quiet for a second, a weird look on his wispy face, but then he finally released her hand to let her continue. Pidge grit her teeth and sliced her thumb across the point, inhaling sharply as it dug into her skin and drew blood. As she pressed the thumb to the designated spot beside her signature, Lance waited with baited breath, his expression intense as he watched the proceedings. Once Pidge was sure she’d gotten a good enough amount of blood on it, she lifted her head and raised a brow at Lance.
“We done here, Lance?”
“Yeah.” Lance took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and she got the distinct impression that he was a little emotional for some reason. “Alright. That’s it.”
Then with a snap of his fingers, both the parchment and the quill pen disappeared from sight. To her surprise, he conjured up a bandage too and held it out to her, somewhat sheepishly.
“Here.”
“Thanks.” She blinked, but took it and unwrapped it to wrap around her bleeding thumb. There were multi-coloured lions all over it. “So, is this really all it takes? No magic pixie dust sprinkled on me?”
Lance laughed. “No. I’m not Tinkerbell.”
“You’re a twig like her. Well, except she has an ass.”
“A twig?! No ass?!” he said, affronted. “I’ll have you know that my human form is very beautifully crafted! I am a specimen worthy of the Louvre!”
She rolled her eyes. “Just go turn that damn contract in and let me sleep. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner I can get back to the life I want.”
“Likewise…” The hollowed pools that served as his eyes took on a strange little look in them. Something about his grin had warped, but she couldn’t place it and she was too fatigued to try to figure it out anyway. “It’s been good doing business with you, Katie Holt. I’ll see you next when the contact goes through.”
And with a puff of vibrant blue smoke full of glitter and sparkles, he disappeared into the lamp, leaving behind him the strong, salty scent of the ocean and an unfortunate mess of blue glitter all over her bed and bedroom floor.
“Goddammit!” She growled, lifting her arms as the sprinkles tumbled off and landed on the bed. It would take forever to get this out.
When he came back, her first wish would be to make him clean that up. Well, provided this was even real in the first place. She was sure this whole thing was just a dream anyway and that she was so tired she’d made up the whole thing in her head. Pidge was positive when she woke up the next day, she would have forgotten all about it.
With that, Pidge tossed the lamp carelessly over the side of her bed, settled into her covers and gladly let sleep claim her.
Lance hummed quietly to himself, tapping his foot along to the beat of his little song as he watched a city go by in the horizon outside the window of the train he was on. It was dark and only the lights of the buildings illuminated the night, but he personally thought it was beautiful the way the lights reflected off of the blood red water of the lake they were traversing. The red moons, he could do without. They were creepy. But still, it was a beautiful sight despite the neverending night in this place, and he knew everything looked that much shinier because of the nice little contract he’d managed to snag himself.
His heart beat faster in excitement, just thinking about it and he found himself grinning even more widely.
“We are now approaching City Centre Station. Please gather your belongings and prepare to dismount.” An automated voice on the train announced. “We are now approaching City Centre Station. Please gather your belongings and prepare to dismount.”
As the train began to slow to a stop at the station, Lance stood with a stretch, cracking his joints and grabbing his messenger bag. There weren’t that many other creatures of the night on the train, although there was one other djinn sitting toward the back of the car who looked defeated and disappointed. Lance gave him a sympathetic smile as he walked off. It was hard making contracts as a djinn. They were confined to their objects and had to rely on someone somehow finding them or taking them and on top of all that saying the incantation.
Getting people to agree to the wishes wasn’t hard, but the part before that was the difficult one. Lance was lucky that the oil lamp he’d been tied to was majestic and fancy and something humans would find interesting, even if they weren’t collectors or something.
Lance left the station, smiling politely at other late night individuals taking the train from city centre back to the world of the living, the ghoul trudging past, a phantom who was checking a map, a female spirit who eyed him with interest. Under normal circumstances, he’d definitely stop for a chat, maybe flirt a bit and see where the night might take them (hopefully in her bed), but he had more pressing matters to attend to and no time to waste.
He walked briskly, avoiding running into anyone as he headed towards the town square, a place that was always bustling with activity no matter what time of day.
(Well, technically night since the sun never shone).
He headed straight for the huge golden building with the arrested clock tower at the middle of town square, striding through the doors with purpose. He made quick work of getting to the elevators and his smile widened further the more he approached the top floor. When he reached it, the lift stopped, but the doors didn’t open.
“State your name and business,” a bored male drawled in a voice reminiscent to an English accent.
“Hey Lotor. What’s happening?” Lance called out to the intercom.
Lotor growled at him. “Lance, you’re a few days late. You missed our appointment.”
“I know, I know. I had a little trouble because my target didn’t come home for a few days.”
Still, he considered it a blessing that he’d ended up catching the eye of Katie’s apparent brother in the first place. Lance would have been fine with snagging either of those two travellers, but it was even better that the dude had sent this to his sister. Isolated people were much easier to deal with.
Katie had been easy to deal with too, but in a way completely outside the norm for him that he didn’t understand.
It was strange to him considering most people once they heard that he could grant their every wish tended to immediately jump on board without wanting to even hear the terms. She jumped on board because she wanted him to leave her alone. She seemed a pretty clever woman, especially since she’d actually taken care to ask what the whole deal would entail. Well, up until she’d decided against reading the contract, anyway. But he didn’t blame her considering how convoluted the thing was. Either way, he really hadn’t lied to her about what it entailed.
Just worded it in very specific ways.
He thought it weird that she trusted his words like that. That she trusted him, someone who she didn’t even know. Sure, it wasn’t like he had some grotesque form and his voice was alright, but at the end of the day, he was still a demon, wish granting or not.
And she’d signed a contract with him.
He ignored the slight feeling of guilt in the back of his mind that had cropped up the moment Katie had said those words about trusting him.
The lift doors opened and Lance walked out into the swanky office of his boss’s son. He was entering some data into his laptop, looking completely fed up and very tired. Lance could never quite figure out what kind of creature Lotor was. At the very least, he was half-sorcerer, but the fact that he could enter Nevermore meant that his father had to be a creature of the night. He had vampiric qualities to him, but Lance would never ask. Rumour had it that he’d been an active field agent centuries ago until he fell in love with some princess that was his target, and ever since then, he’d been relegated to mundane desk work in the bowels of the town square. Rumour also had it that the last person who asked him a personal question about that had their head ripped clean off their neck and placed on a pike in the middle of the town as an example.
“I have the contract,” Lance waved the folded scroll up as he walked to Lotor’s desk.
“Hmm? Then this is your hundredth soul, Lance.” The man had a barely there smile on his face, and Lance knew that was the most he would be getting. Lotor opened it up to view the signature, and satisfied, took a stamp and notarised the bottom to signify his approval. “Congratulations.”
“I know,” Lance declared cheerfully and near bouncing on his toes. “And she can’t wait to get rid of me, so in five days or so, I’m going to be free.”
“This is a very strong soul. Practically untainted. Haggar will be most pleased with the addition to her collection. Good work, Lance. These five years of collecting souls have been very productive for you.”
He sobered up a bit, rubbing the back of his neck uncomfortably at the mention of who he was doing this for. “Yeah well… I have a family to get back home to. I’m not going to stay here forever.”
Lotor nodded once. “We’ll process the contract and contact you when the bond has been created. Then and only then will you receive that 100th tick.”
Lance stared down at the marked wrist cuffs on his arms. One notch remained. One more tick and he was free. “Thanks.”
Once he’d left the Soul Agency, he forewent getting something to eat at his favourite diner. The special that day was human hearts in a stew and though he had been in Nevermore long enough to grow accustomed to the unusual meals served there, certain things he refused to eat. He drew the line at any human organs or liquids.
He headed to his apartment complex and got there fast enough since he’d transformed his tail into makeshift legs so he could travel more quickly. He didn’t particularly like where he lived, since it was a djinn commune for those stuck under Haggar’s employment. It made him feel like nothing was under his control.
But the apartment itself wasn’t too bad. It was nothing more than a tiny shoebox apartment and he’d furnished it with only a simple mattress and a desk, but it was enough for him. Besides, personalising it less meant that it would be hard to form any attachments to this place, and he was definitely itching to leave, especially now that he was so close. He really didn’t like the way the species saw living humans as nothing more than food or souls to satisfy their neverending hunger.
“I heard you secured your 100th soul. Congratulations.” The cringe-y, hissing voice came from beside him and Lance turned to his next door neighbour with a strained smile. The dark mass of wispiness had a huge grin on its face that made Lance fight not to take a step back. The man made him uncomfortable with his beady eyes and serpentine-like qualities and an obvious penchant for malice that rolled off of his body in waves.
“Thanks.” News travelled fast, huh?
“You’ve really been busting your ass to get out, huh? I’m in no rush. I would prefer to savour how delicious the souls are.”
“Right…” Lance chuckled half-heartedly, turning away to end the conversation. “Well, enjoy your night.”
He got in his apartment and made sure to lock the door after, leaning against the doorway with a slow exhale.
Lance wanted to be out before he became like this guy. Blood thirsty and ugly hearted and becoming just as grotesque as a creature of the night would look. He knew some men and women who had been stuck for several hundreds of years from debts they could not pay quickly who were absolute abominations he would not wish on even his worst enemies. And he’d also seen people in five years of getting confined to this place at the same time as him turn into the very monsters they’d once feared.
Lance could feel the change in himself too.
Once upon a time, he couldn’t fathom exchanging someone’s soul for giving them five wishes. But he’d seen the greed and gluttony and disgusting envy in their hearts and by his thirtieth, he’d readily begun to trick them, making the deal seem sweet without properly disclosing the payment for the brief bout of unlimited power. The dark thoughts and easy way he could justify sending people to their untimely prison in a literal hell was something that kind of scared him. When had he become so quick to believe his brand of justice was totally justified? So the sooner he left, the better, because he was quickly on his way to becoming someone completely unrecognisable from the Lance he’d once been.
He felt kind of bad about Katie. Her soul would end up imprisoned for eternity after this whole ordeal was done. She seemed like a nice enough woman, if not snarky—and definitely very cute, which was a definite plus if he’d have to spend time with her—but she’d still signed the contract. He wasn’t completely sure if she truly wanted her wishes granted or not and her attitude had been hard to decipher, but even other reluctant people who’d signed in the past eventually became power hungry once they realised exactly what he could do.
So to a certain extent, Katie was probably just as greedy as the ninety-nine other ugly people he’d had to serve in his time under Haggar’s authority, right? Sacrificing Katie was a means to an end. An end in which he finally got to go home.
And that was a price he was willing to pay.