A Demon's Bargain

In one moment, I experienced twenty-five years of life.

Diapers, nursing, crawling, playing; learning to speak, walk, then read…

Running, homeschooling, ice-skating, growing, crying, eating…

I loved my mother. My human mother. I loved my father, the very man across from me, centuries later.

I screamed in abject horror, as loudly as I could, and fell off my seat onto the floor in a convulsion. As I lay there, petrified, one new memory in particular surfaced.

I had been given the choice. I had to be placed as either a human or a demon. With my mother or my father. Only the latter would guarantee my immortality. If I were a human, athanasia was a gift that even my father, the Devil, would be unable to give.

I had been only twenty-five. Young, full of both ambition and libido. I didn’t want to face the possibility of death, of aging. Living as a desire demon would grant me timelessness; I would learn abilities that gave me power beyond what I had heretofore possessed. Knowing I would have to disinherit my youth to fit in, I had become a demon.

I sat up. Chris was watching me carefully from his seat on the divan. I blinked. “Dad?”

Chris smiled and nodded, and I lunged upwards to embrace him. It had been so long! So, so long! We were quiet for a long time, both of us tearing up, as we took joy in the reunion.

When I pulled away, I felt the full weight of love’s meaning. I had won the hearts of many thousands of women, perhaps millions, and then broken them without a second thought. I had doomed them to a life without fulfillment. I sat back down on the armchair, so overcome by centuries’ worth of guilt that I could not speak. Empathy was a curse!

Memories of my time with Lola haunted me the most. I knew without asking that, if I truly loved (Y/N), and my heart told me I did, I had loved her ancestor as well. I still did. And I had left Lola, left the woman I loved, knowing she would be unsatisfied forever after, out of cowardice and confusion. And yet here I was, reveling in the affections of her progeny.

“Andy, how are you feeling? Are you ok?” I glanced at Chris as he leaned forward, concerned.

My previous tears of joy were drying on my face, leaving salted despair in their wake. My heavy regrets pulled me back to my seat in the armchair. Every bargain I had ever made was a weight upon my heart, pulling me towards despondency. “I am a loathsome, deplorable thing. I cannot carry on.”

Chris shook his head. “No you’re not, Andy. You were just doing what you were supposed to, what you were trained to do-“

I grimaced. “-This is a disaster! I cannot bear this remorse!”

Notes

Stay tuned for the bomb to drop...