We can be monsters together. Pt. 1
pairing: creature x fem reader
themes: established relationship, gentle creature, soft love, slow burn, definitely SFW :)
summary: you met the creature a while ago and with your help he starts slowly adapting to the modern world
word count: 2.2k
part 1/?
[find Part 2 here]
The grocery store
“Must I?” he breathes, looking down at you.
“Yeah,” you nod.
“But…,” he turns around to sit down on his chair next to the window. He softly touches the window’s glass with his fingertips, looking at the raindrops running down at the other side of it.
Outside on the street are few to no people. It’s not only because you live in a quieter part of an English town, it’s also because it’s 6.30 am.
“I know,” you kneel down next to him and grab his other hand, that rests on his leg.
He now looks at you with his dark eyes, his left eye slightly sparkling, as it does often, when he’s getting emotional.
“You will be fine, trust me, okay?” you smile at him and he slightly smiles back, before he nods.
“Pray tell, how exactly does it work?” You have been sitting in your car for the past five minutes watching the big glass door opening and closing in front of and behind customers walking in and out of the store.
“I can only tell you, it has a sensor on top of the door and it works with little electric motors,” you answer him now wondering yourself how automatic doors actually work.
“I’ll look it up when we get back, okay?” Your eyes search for his and when his gaze falls upon you he says “Okay” and you finally leave the car.
On the short way to the magic glass door, you watch him pulling the hood of his sweater further down to hide his face. You grab his hand again because you know how nervous he must feel. He told you that when he had encountered people in the past it almost always went completely wrong. And by “completely wrong” he meant that people are scared of him, they look at him like he is a monster straight out of their nightmares.
It had crushed his soul to the point where he hid from everyone and everything.
Until you ran into him one day.
You were mesmerized by him, his looks, the way he moves his hands and fingers so delicately. You gasped in awe when you saw him. And he felt it too. Something about you was different from the start.
But he was not in the position to grant anyone even an ounce of trust, so he fled anyway.
You waited ten minutes, hoping he would return, but he didn’t. He watched you from a safe place though. You reminded him a lot of the woman he had loved once, which made his heart ache a little, but there were enough unique features about you. Your hair was dark and long, but not as long as hers. And of course you were wearing very different clothes. The clothes have changed so much since his last time being in love with someone. And man, some periods in the past two- or three-hundred years had been wild, to say the least.
But he liked your clothes right away. They were all the right shades of teal.
He didn’t dare hope to ever see you again. He prepared himself for the reality that he would never see the woman again who was the only one after all this time to not run away screaming at his sight.
Still he found himself the next morning sitting in his hiding place staring at the little pathway between the houses where he had met you the day before.
And there you were.
This time you carried a little teal coloured backpack. You carefully stepped into the pathway gazing around looking for him. Silently he moved back a little in the small shed he had been successfully hiding in for so long.
He watched you opening the backpack and pulling out some teal plastic -it probably was plastic, he guessed, since no one seemed to use metal anymore- thing and a cloth?
You carefully positioned the patterned cloth on a stool that someone must have forgotten and then laid the plastic thing on it.
Before you turned to leave, you decided to open up the plastic thing to reveal its content: a peanutbutter-jelly sandwich, another one with turkey and salad, some boiled eggs and your personal favorite: potato salad after your grandma's very own recipe.
Thinking back at the first time you two saw each other, even if it was just a tiny moment, brings a smile to your face.
You stop him a few meters away from the magic door and both of you take a deep breath. You don’t really need the courage, you do feel safe and secure when you’re with him, but you know how much the breathwork you taught him, helps him in situations like this one.
The fresh, cool morning air fills your lungs and you finally step through the door.
Behind it, the fruit and vegetable section awaits its customers.
He looks at the seemingly endless amount of apples stacked in a five meter long shelf. Next to it is more fruit. “Apples, lemons, grapes, peaches and…,” he grabs a fruit and inspects it, moving it carefully in his hand to look at it from all sides.
You point at the sign next to the stack of fruits where he took it from.
“Grapefruit,” he reads. You nod.
“But it is not of grapes,” he wonders.
“One might argue that it looks like little grapes on the inside,” you answer.
“May we take it with us?” he asks.
“Of course,” you smile at him and he smiles back at you, placing the grapefruit in the little red basket that you had grabbed at the entrance.
“What else is it that we require?” he then asks, looking at the handwritten shopping list you’re holding.
“Potatoes,” you reply, as you grab a pack of the vegetables. “Some olive oil, too,” you say.
“May I go and look for the oil, please?” he asks you, after looking around the store and noticing that you seem to be the only ones present.
“Absolutely!”
He smiles again, before he turns around and walks towards the back of the store. He still feels very self conscious, but he also notices that he almost wants to put himself out there. After all those years he still has some hope left that it is possible for him to be accepted into mankind. Into society. Or at least into this town. Neighborhood. As a matter of fact, the floor in her apartment building would very much suffice.
But for now he would need to navigate this grocery shopping scenario.
He reads the words on the signs positioned over the shelves, silently mouthing them to himself, until one of them says “Oils”.
So he looks into the aisle to see if it is empty and therefore safe for him to step into.
It is not.
In fact, it is occupied.
There is a shopping cart standing in the middle of it. A baby is sitting in the seat of the cart. It has grabbed one of his little feet and tries to shove it into his mouth but the bar prevents his small hands from doing so.
He stands there, watching the baby’s dark eyes focussing on the task at hand, and it warms his heart. He feels his eyes starting to tear up and his vision starts to get a little blurry when the baby suddenly lets go of his foot and looks up.
Their eyes meet and he freezes. He is ready to jump behind the shelf to save himself and the baby from the shock. The baby’s eyes now look around his face, the dark, straight hair moves from side to side as its head moves too.
Then all of a sudden a hiccup sound, followed by a laugh, leaves the baby’s mouth. It puts his arms up, reaching for him, now smiling the biggest smile the little face is even capable of producing.
He finally catches his breath and slowly starts smiling back. He takes one step forward, then another one. The baby now starts bouncing up and down in his seat, moving his little fingers like he is trying to grab onto him even though he is still a few meters away.
It makes his heart jump, he feels adrenaline but also a very happy feeling rushing through his body. Finally someone reacts positively to him. Finally. Except you, of course, which was already a huge win in his life.
When he is almost close enough to reach for the baby’s tiny little hand, they’re both still smiling their biggest smiles, the baby’s mother suddenly appears out of nowhere.
He stops and holds his breath, praying to the heavens that the woman will not look up from her phone. She grabs the shopping cart from the side across where her baby is sitting and with some shushing sounds she rolls the cart in front of her to move on to the next section of the store. The baby is complaining with sounds and his arms waving around, reaching more intensely for him now, but the mother, thankfully in this case, does not pay a lot of attention to it. Whatever she looks at on her phone’s screen must be very much more interesting to her.
“Have you found it?” You step into the aisle to see him carefully holding a bottle of oil up to his face and reading the very short ingredients list.
“I am quite overwhelmed with the amount of different oils to be found in this place,” he says, lowering the bottle and looking at you.
You gaze at the shelf and it is indeed an incredible amount of bottles.
“Yeah,” You say, now looking back at him, smiling.
“Is it this one you asked for?” he delicately hands you the bottle and you quickly look at it before nodding and saying: “It is, thank you”
He smiles. “Do we need more?”
You shake your head “No, that is all. We can go now”
“Delightful,” he says, turning around about to walk back to the magic glass door, where you two had entered not long ago.
“We need to pay for the things,” you follow him, softly grabbing and squeezing his hand to make him stop.
He turns back around to look at you. “Pay?” he asks.
“Yes, let me show you,” you nod and start leading him to the cash register. He follows you silently, firmly holding on to your hand, as if he is suddenly scared to lose you in this basically deserted grocery store.
“Hey Eliza!” you wave at the lady sitting behind the counter as you put your final item on the conveyor belt. He has been trying to hide behind you this whole time, which is, as a matter of fact, impossible. He is about one foot taller than you and also his broad shoulders prevent him from succeeding with that.
“That is so nice seeing you here, child!” Eliza exclaims from behind her counter. “How are things?”
“It’s going really good, thank you. How about you?” you ask the lady with the gray hair and the round glasses, that keep sliding down her nose and that she keeps pushing back up.
“Oh, you know. The regular life,” she shrugs, then she looks up at him.
“Who do we have here?” she asks, pushing up her glasses to get a better look at him.
Now he is trying to melt into the floor, he feels his forehead starting to produce sweat. This old lady will look at him and die from a heart attack right here, right now, he knows it will happen, it happened before.
The lady stands up from the little gray stool that she had been sitting on, and quicker than he expected her to be, she reaches out for his hand.
He can’t move. He peripherally notices the smile on your face as you watch the scene take place. Why are you not stopping this lady? His eyes start to burn, but he doesn’t want to start crying so he holds his breath.
“Who are you, my pretty boy?” the lady squeezes his hand, now reaching up with her other hand. Her hand is now scarily close to his face. A tear escapes his eye when the lady pulls the hood of his sweater off of his head.
“He’s my…,” you start talking but stop yourself when the lady turns her head towards you for a second, only to look back at him right away.
She’s in awe.
“You are of such beauty, my boy,” she gasps, putting her hand on his cheek to wipe away that single tear he had cried from pure terror of what he had feared would happen next.
“It’s like you’re made from marble, darling,” the lady says.
She lets go of him slowly without taking her eyes off of his face.
“Thank you,” he whispers, when he finally finds his voice.
“You better keep him. He’s a good one, you know?” the lady looks at you with a look on her face that allows no other opinion than her own, but you nod and say “I know.”
“Good,” she says.
