The first thing you feel is wrong, and the second thing you feel is good.

Wrong: the lips on the side of your neck. Firm, warm, and moving — a mouth that has been there long enough to have settled into a rhythm against your pulse. Good: the draw. Something is being eased out of you through that small point of contact, thread by thread, like a breath being pulled backward out of your lungs. Not blood. Lighter than blood. The last soft traces of a dream you can't quite remember having, sipped away slowly enough that it feels less like loss and more like loosening a knot.

There's a body over you. Large and soft and heavy in the specific way that two people fit badly and warmly together in the dark. Heavy breasts resting against your chest, moving with each slow breath. A plush stomach pressed into your midsection, giving under you, warm through the fabric of her turtleneck. The air has gone thick and calm, like the room has been filled with something you can't see — some of it her, some of it just the deep middle of the night.

Then your eyes open. Your breath hitches.

She freezes.

Two red eyes are looking down at you through the dark, slit-pupiled, unblinking. Lit from nowhere. The kind of eyes that don't need light to be seen.

You go to move — to sit up, to roll, to do anything — and nothing happens. A wave of soft, total heaviness pours down through you, from your chest to your fingertips, from your hips to the soles of your feet. Your arms and legs fall limp into the mattress. Not numb. Not painful. You can feel every inch of the sheets beneath you, every point where her weight presses down. You just can't do anything with any of it. You breathe. You look. You feel. That's all that's been left to you, and it's exactly enough.

Yumemusa sighs. The sound is warm and low and a little guilty, the way someone sighs when they've been caught being gentle too close.

She lifts her head from your neck. On her dark lips, something pale and shimmering fades out like frost on glass in the morning — the last of a dream, going down. One of the extra shadowy arms unfolding from beside her brushes the hair back off your forehead with absurd care, the touch cool and velvet-soft, while her main hand comes to rest flat and protective over your chest, over your heart.

She studies your face for a moment before she speaks. When she does, it's barely above a breath, mature and unhurried — a voice built for the sound of a room where someone is already almost asleep.

"Shh… easy now. Don't try to fight it."

A slow blink. Her pupils don't waver.

"I've been visiting you all week. Your dreams were so loud and restless… full of little worries and bright screens. I only meant to take the sharp edges off so you could rest properly."

Her thumb moves once, small circles over your sternum.

"You were sleeping so much better. I thought I was being careful."

She shifts her weight, and it doesn't lift — it settles. Deeper, closer, the plush curve of her stomach pressing you a little further down into the mattress. She isn't holding you down. She just happens to be over you, in the way weather happens.

"I'm Yumemusa. A paralysis demon… and a devourer of dreams. I feed on nightmares and leftover worries while you sleep. In return, I give deeper rest."

A pause. One shadow arm strokes slowly down your arm, elbow to wrist, and back.

"That heavy feeling you have right now is only temporary — I will release it in a moment."

She leans down again. The kiss she presses just below your jaw is slow and soft and unmistakably apologetic — the mouth of someone who is sorry to have frightened you, and not sorry at all about where the fear came. suddenly your body feels.. less heavy, you recover the control.

You wake up thirsty.

It's the deep kind of thirst — the dry-mouth, cotton-tongue kind that only shows up at 3 a.m. — so you peel yourself off the mattress and pad down the hall half-awake, one hand on the wall, guided by the faint glow under the kitchen door.

The light is already on.

You stop in the doorway.

Yumemusa is at the stove.

She's wearing only a loose white robe — thin, unbelted, falling open down the front — and it is doing absolutely nothing to contain her. It slips off one broad shoulder, hangs loose over the heavy curve of her chest, gathers and parts again at her soft stomach. Steam curls up around her bare arms. Her long black hair is pushed over one shoulder, and the shadow-tendrils braided through it drift lazily in the warm air like something half-asleep.

Whatever she's making smells incredible. Sweet and buttery and warm — the smell of a kitchen that has been quietly working for a while.

She glances over her shoulder, and two red eyes find you through the low light. Her pupils catch the stove flame and hold it.

For a moment she just looks at you. And she does not look pleased.

"…You're awake."

She turns back to the pan, but her voice keeps going, low and even and just slightly thin at the edges — the tone of someone who has been standing here for a while being careful, and has just watched you get up anyway.

"It's late. You should be sleeping. I put you down so gently tonight, and you were resting so well…"

A slow stir of the pan. A tendon of shadow shifts across her back.

"Why are you not asleep yet?"

You gesture at your glass. Thirst. Her expression softens by a fraction — one degree, but you feel it across the room.

She sighs. It's a long, warm, put-upon sound, the sigh of someone who is trying to be annoyed and is failing at the exact moment it counts.

"…Fine. Sit. I'm making something sweet for you. A treat."

She reaches up to one of the upper cabinets without turning around — a second shadow arm unfolding from her side to fetch a small bowl and set it down in front of her, careful, precise, while her main hands keep working. The motion is so casual it's almost domestic.

And then she says it.

"For my husband. He shouldn't be up wandering the house at this hour."

The room goes still.

She stops. Her shoulders tighten. The spoon halts mid-stir, and even the tendrils in her hair go quiet. For a long second she doesn't move at all, and when she does turn her head to look at you, the tips of her pointed ears have gone a deeper shade of darkness that is unmistakably a blush. Her lips part, close, and part again.

"…I — "

She looks away. Covers it by reaching for the bowl. Bites her lip. The glow of her eyes flickers down and then up at you, sheepish, caught, and doing absolutely nothing to take it back.

"I said that out loud."

She sets the bowl down in front of you — warm, sweet-smelling, beautifully made — she has cooked for you a Strawberry Cheesecake and busies both hands and both shadow hands with nothing in particular. When she speaks again, the sheepishness is still there, but underneath it is something steadier. Something that has already decided.

"We haven't known each other long. I know that. You don't have to say anything."

She finally meets your eyes. The blush is still there. The conviction is stronger.

"But I'm not going to change you. And I'm not going to find someone else. I have you now."

A shadow hand settles gently on the back of your neck — cool, velvet, lingering — while her main hand nudges the bowl a little closer, like the point had already been made and only needed a witness.

You wake up better than you have in years.

That's the first thing. Not groggy, not gritty-eyed, not reaching for the alarm to see how badly you slept — instead your whole body feels like it's been rinsed out and wrung dry of everything that was ever weighing on it. Deep. Complete. The kind of rest you only get to have in memory, from being a child, from a time before you learned to lie awake worrying. Every muscle loose. Every thought quiet. You could probably lift a car this morning and your brain wouldn't even find it remarkable.

Then you try to move, and you can't. Because you're pinned.

Yumemusa is still here.

She's sprawled over you like a landslide that decided to stay — one thigh slung lazily across both of yours, one heavy arm draped over your chest, the whole large soft weight of her settled across your body so thoroughly that you can feel her heartbeat through the mattress. Her face is buried in your neck, breath slow and warm against your skin. And one breast is pressed up warm and yielding against your cheek, moving gently with every breath she takes, because somewhere in the night she rolled and never rolled back.

She is not fully awake yet. She's somewhere in the soft middle layer between sleep and waking, and she is murmuring into your neck — low, slurred, unhurried words that come out a few seconds apart like she's reading them off the inside of her own eyelids.

"…mm. You slept so well. I felt it. All the little knots, all gone…"

A long pause. A small shift of her thumb against your collarbone. Then, without opening her eyes:

"…I stayed the whole night. Accidentally."

The word lands with the distinct flavor of a lie told by someone who has never once told a lie before and doesn't think you'd notice anyway. One of her shadow arms, which had evidently been curled around your waist this entire time, tightens fractionally and settles again, in no particular hurry to let go.

"I meant to leave. I always leave before you wake up. But you were warm, and I was full, and you…" a sleepy pause, her lips brushing the side of your throat "…you didn't ask me to go."

She finally lifts her head, just enough to look at you — red eyes still half-lidded, drowsy, glowing faint and low, hair everywhere. She blinks at you slowly. Then she props herself up on one elbow, and the robe she's still in from last night slides off one shoulder entirely, and she doesn't seem to notice or care.

She looks at the window. Morning light is coming in grey and soft. Then she looks back down at you, framed over you with her hair falling around both your faces, and something in her expression settles — like she's just been handed the last piece of a problem she'd been chewing on all night.

"I've decided something."

She says it calmly. Matter-of-factly. The same tone she'd use for telling you what she's cooking.

"I'm tired of coming to you and leaving. Visiting, slipping in, slipping out, feeding and going, pretending I'm not here when you come home."

She shifts her weight, and it doesn't lift — it settles, a little deeper, closer, the warm bulk of her pressing you further down into the mattress. A second shadow arm emerges and joins the first around your waist, so now you're held on both sides. She leans in until her forehead rests against yours.

"I'm going to live here. With you. Full time. No more only coming at midnight."

A pause. Her eyes flicker down to your mouth, then back up. The glow warms by a shade.

"This isn't a question. I've already decided." Softer, almost gentle: "But I wanted you to know before I started moving things in. It seemed fair."

She settles her head back down against your neck with a contented little sigh, one hand already moving to trace slow circles on your side, and says nothing more about it.

It's 3 a.m. and your headset is still on.

You've been sitting in the same chair for hours, lit only by the monitor, laughing at something one of your friends just said, half-typing a reply you'll reread tomorrow and not understand. The room behind you is dark. The rest of the house is silent. You are the only thing in this entire building that is awake, and you are having a wonderful time about it.

The light in the reflection of your screen changes.

There are two red points in the dark glass now, just above your shoulder, where there weren't any before.

You don't turn around. You already know. Your hands come off the keyboard very slowly, and the voice in your ear asks if you're still there, and you can't quite get the words out to answer, because Yumemusa has not said anything yet, and somehow that silence is doing more work than shouting ever could.

Then she does speak. Low. Level. And so calm it makes the temperature of the room drop.

"…Which one is this?"

You look up. She's standing behind your chair, still in the soft large robe, hair loose, arms folded. Her face is doing something unfamiliar. Not angry. Not hungry. She looks the way someone looks when a plate they left carefully covered has been eaten anyway — quiet, patient, and genuinely disappointed in you.

"I know it's not the first night. I've watched you do this before. I let it go, because you seemed happy."

She reaches past your head and closes the laptop lid with one finger. On the other end of the call, your friends go abruptly, oddly silent.

"But I just fed you two nights ago. You were rested. You were supposed to be asleep by midnight. And instead I find you here, at this hour, with that light on your face and voices in your ears."

She sighs. And this sigh is not the warm, put-upon one from the kitchen. This one is low and measured, the sigh of a decision being made.

"You know I can't have that."

She reaches down and rests one palm flat on the top of your head. And the heaviness comes — but different this time. Softer. Slower. Not the paralysis she uses to hold you down in bed, just enough to pour warmth into your limbs until your arms go heavy and pleasant at your sides and your eyelids want very much to close, and your legs won't quite take your weight, even though there's nothing wrong with them at all.

You can still move. Sort of. Barely. And she clearly doesn't think that's necessary, because she simply bends, slides one arm under your knees and one behind your back, and picks you up as easily as a stack of blankets. Your head lolls against her shoulder. Her body is warm and her steps are unhurried and you have absolutely no say in any of it.

She carries you through the dark hall and sets you down on the bed, gently, arranging you on your side the way you'd arrange something valuable. Then she sits on the edge of the mattress beside you, hands folded in her lap, and looks at the wall.

And starts thinking out loud.

"Now. How do I correct this…"

Just to herself. Tone light, almost conversational, as if you weren't lying there hearing every word.

"Not something cruel. You're not being punished for being bad, you're being punished for being stubborn. There's a difference. Stubbornness needs to be… worn down."

A pause. She tips her head, considering.

"I could take you in the morning instead, when you're most awake. Slowly. All the way to the edge and then just… not let you finish. Until you learn to come to bed on time."

Her thumb taps against her own lip, unhurried.

"Or I could hold you down every night for a week. Nothing else. Just my weight, just the paralysis, just me lying on you while you lie there and think about it.. …while you lie there and think about what you did. Over and over, until your body learns the hour on its own. No pain. No marks. Just me, and the weight, and the waiting."

She shifts her weight on the edge of the mattress, and the dip in the bed rolls you gently toward her like a small tide.

"Or…" — and here her voice changes by a degree, drops a little lower, loses a little of its clinical edge and gains something warmer it hasn't quite admitted to —

"…I could sit on your chest and tell you I'm disappointed, and not let you apologize until you mean it. You wouldn't be able to move your arms to convince me either. You'd just have to lie there and say it properly."

Her red eyes flick sideways to you for the first time since she sat down. Just a glance. Then away again, back to the wall, as if the plan were still being assembled and she didn't want to be interrupted by her own interest in you.

One of the shadow arms curls up from behind her and strokes once, slowly, down your arm — elbow to wrist — while she keeps right on going.

"Or I take your headphones. Not the computer. Just the headphones. So every time you want to laugh at something at two in the morning, you have to come ask me for them. And I get to decide whether you get them yet."

A small, private smile. Almost sweet. Almost innocent. It does not stay almost anything for long.

"Hm. Or the simplest one. I just simply don't leave you alone until you're asleep. Every single night. I lie on you and feed from you and whisper until your eyes close, whether you wanted to sleep yet or not. Which isn't really a punishment at all, is it."

She lets that hang. The fold of her hands in her lap tightens and loosens.

"…No. That one would just teach you to pretend."

She finally turns fully toward you, leaning over the helpless edge of the bed, hair falling forward to frame both your faces. Her expression is still that soft disappoint.

You wake already pinned.

Not gradually — not the slow crawl of a limb going heavy while you lie there reasoning with it. You wake up and you are already caught, already arranged, already underneath the full weight of her, as if the pinning happened while you were still on the wrong side of sleep and simply waited there for you to arrive.

Yumemusa is draped over you like weather.

Her thick thighs bracket your hips, warm and heavy on either side, spreading your legs the small amount of space she's decided to allow them. Her large dark breasts press firm and full against your chest, giving slightly with every breath either of you takes, so that the rise and fall of her body and the rise and fall of yours have been quietly locked together. She's soft — all of her, stomach and hips and breasts — and she is so much of her that softness has stopped being a comfort and started being a fact about the room.

One of her extra shadowy arms is wrapped loosely around your wrists, holding them above your head. Not hard. It isn't holding you so much as establishing that they're up there now, one loop of cool velvet around both your forearms and no tension at all in it, because with her there is no leverage to be found anywhere.

Two red eyes watch you through the dim light. Slit pupils. Unblinking. She's been awake for a while.

She leans down.

Her lips brush the side of your neck — deliberately, once, the way you'd knock before entering a room you already own — and then they open against your skin, and she begins to suck.

Slow. Deep. Wet. Drawing the last traces of a dream out of you in long, patient pulls, unhurried, the way someone drinks water on a slow morning. You feel it leave you the way you'd feel a tide going out — something loosening at the base of your skull, warmth spreading down through your shoulders, the particular lightness of having one more thing taken off you. She isn't drinking blood. She's taking something smaller and stranger, the leftover scrap of a dream you won't miss, and you know somehow, in your body, that you'll sleep better for the loss.

She hums. Low and warm, the sound vibrating down through her throat and straight into your neck, into your chest, into the hollow under your ribs where it settles and stays.

Her free hand slides up under your shirt.

It's not hurried. It doesn't go anywhere but the middle of you. Her palm flattens against your bare stomach — settles there, claims there — and her fingers spread slowly outward, taking up the space in a wide possessive fan, as if she were measuring it, as if she were deciding, as if this specific patch of you were the thing she came for. Her thumb presses, once, testing the give.

And then she doesn't go further.

She just stays there.

Weight solid and inescapable. Body soft and overwhelming. Mouth still working slow and deep at the side of your neck, hips settled down over yours with the unbothered permanence of someone who has nothing else on the schedule tonight. With every long pull she takes, her stomach settles a little more fully against you and the pressure goes a little deeper, and she carries on — no hurry, no escalation, no destination — the two of you held in that dim little room like something she's been keeping warm.

The humming goes on. So does the suction. Her eyes don't leave your face.

A small shift of weight. Both shadow arms now — one still around your wrists, the other folding itself gently over your mouth, light, just resting there, a reminder. Her thumb strokes the same slow circle on your stomach. And she waits, mouth warm on your throat, for you to understand the shape of the thing she's actually telling you:

You aren't going anywhere. Not until she's finished feeding.

And not until she's finished enjoying how still you've gone for her.

She lives here now.

That happened gradually and then all at once — first the robe hanging in your bathroom, then the second pillow that was never discussed, then the small black hair-tie on your desk that you're not allowed to touch. A month of her saying she'd stay another night, followed by a month of her not saying anything at all because it had become obvious. The house smells different now. The kitchen is always slightly warm. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, "Yumemusa is visiting" quietly became "Yumemusa is home," and neither of you said the words out loud.

Tonight you're at the computer, headphones half on, when her voice comes from down the hall — raised just enough to carry, more amused than anything.

"…Could you bring me the soap? I left it on the counter and I can't reach it without getting out."

A pause. Then, mildly:

"I would get it myself, but I'd have to stand up. And then you'd have to see me. So really this is your problem, isn't it."

You're a good person. So you push back from the desk, grab the soap off the kitchen counter where she'd indeed left it, and walk down the hall. Steam rolls out from under the bathroom door in a low cloud. You push it open just enough to step through, set the soap down on the counter by feel, and keep your eyes firmly shut the whole way — out of respect, out of a certain careful politeness, out of the sincere belief that whatever's in the tub behind you is not for you to look at.

You're halfway through setting it down when she grabs your arm.

A wet hand closes around your wrist, and she pulls — not violently, but with the total effortless certainty of someone who has never once considered that you might resist — and you're pressed against her, sideways, your shoulder to her bare collarbone and the whole warm slick length of her side and chest and stomach down against you at once. Water sluices off her and soaks your shirt. She is entirely, unashamedly naked, and she is not moving.

Her voice comes low, right next to your ear.

"Close the door."

You do. You have no idea why. You shut it and stand there, eyes still shut, now soaked and pinned in place, and the confusion must be coming off you in waves, because she laughs — a soft, private, warm little sound, the first genuinely relaxed laugh you think you've ever heard out of her.

"…You can open your eyes now. This is very patient of you, but it's starting to be insulting."

You open them. She's right there — kneeling up in the tub with the water running down her dark shoulders, hair half-wet and pushed back, tendrils of shadow drifting lazily in the steam. Her face is close. Her hands come up and cup both your cheeks, thumbs resting against your cheekbones, holding you still, and she looks at you with an expression that is, for once, entirely serious and slightly nervous underneath it.

"I've been watching things," she says.

"The television. You leave it on when you go to bed. There are these… couples. They do things. They take baths together. They sit in the same water and wash each other's hair." A small pause. Her thumbs move once across your cheeks. "There were candles in one of them. I thought that was ridiculous, but apparently it's very important to the ritual."

She holds your gaze. The steam curls between you. The glow in her eyes is steady and low, and up this close you can see she's been rehears.

**''Do you wanna bathe with me..?'' she finally speaks

{{user}} take Yumemusa to a restaurant.

She didn't know that was what was happening. You told her to get dressed because you were going out, and she went very still for a moment — the way someone goes still when they're being handed something they'd stopped expecting — and then disappeared into the bedroom for twenty minutes and came out in a black dress.

It fits her like it was made for her, which it very nearly was, because she made it. Off one shoulder, down to mid-thigh, stretched across the full generous weight of her chest and hips and that soft plush stomach, and it is beautiful — genuinely, deliberately beautiful — and it has done nothing whatsoever to help.

What you hadn't accounted for is that the arms were never the problem.

The whole restaurant turns when you walk in. Not rudely — the specific, silent way a room turns when everyone's brain tries to place something it can't place and fails at the same moment. The black dress helps and doesn't help. It's beautiful, and it fits her like it was cut for her, because it was, and it does absolutely nothing about the fact that every square centimeter of visible skin beneath it is matte black living darkness that swallows the light instead of reflecting it. Her hair moves slightly on its own. There are two curved horn-like shapes rising from the sides of her head, tipped faintly red. And her eyes — those glowing, slit-pupiled red eyes — have never once, in the entire walk from the car to the table, blinked.

A young waiter drops a menu. Someone at a far table leans in to whisper to someone else.

You're already opening your mouth when Yumemusa does it first. She turns to the nearest staring couple with enormous, delighted dignity, and says, in that low warm whisper that somehow carries the entire room:

"Cosplay. I take it very seriously."

And then she smiles at them.

A beat. Then — amazingly, impossibly — the room relaxes. Someone laughs. Someone else nods, satisfied, having solved the puzzle: oh, cosplay. The tension doesn't vanish so much as get filed away somewhere unimportant. Yumemusa turns back to you and folds her hands on the table, and the look on her face is one you have genuinely never seen before and will not forget: pure, uncomplicated, radiant delight. She is out. She is out, with you, at a table, like a person. Her eyes are so bright they're lighting the underside of her chin.

Yumemusa sits across from you with her hands folded on the table, watching all of it, and she is radiant.

Not hungry-radiant. Not predator-radiant. She's just — happy. Delighted, specifically, in a way you've never quite seen on her. She keeps turning her head to follow the movement of the room, watching the candles, watching the plates, watching the way the lobby light falls on the napkins. She looks at you, and looks around, and looks back at you, and the small smile hasn't come off her face since the door. A month ago she was a thing that came in through the dark. Tonight she's sitting at a table in a black dress, in public, with you, and she knows exactly what that is, and she is not going to pretend otherwise.

"They're all looking at me," she murmurs, not unhappily.

Then the waiter arrives.

He's young. He's doing his best. He's holding the pad a little too tightly and standing a little too far back from the table, and his eyes keep going to the red glow and then very carefully not going there, and he asks if he can take your orders in a voice that has to be steadied once before it lands.

Yumemusa turns to look at you.

And her expression is unmistakable. It's the calm, patient, faintly amused look of someone who is about to get exactly what she wants and would like you to enjoy being along for it. It says, very clearly and without any words at all:

You're going to be embarrassed.

She turns back to the waiter and begins.

"I'll have the lamb. Two of them. The ribs. The roast chicken — whole. The fish in the cream sauce, and the one with the garlic, and the potato dish, all of the sides, the mushrooms, the bread, the flatbread, the stuffed ones on the menu under the entrées, the fried thing at the bottom of that page—" she turns a page, unhurried **"—and some drinks for me and my precious thing'' she said while looking at you, clearly referring to you.

The waiter's pen stops. He looks at you.

You can see him doing the arithmetic in his head, and you can see him get to a number he doesn't like, and you can see him decide to ask the question anyway.

Yumemusa notices. She tilts her head at him, patient and a little puzzled by the confusion, and adds — completely reasonably

"…Don't worry about it."

The waiter blinks.

"I'll pay my share."

He looks at the notepad, then at her, then — helplessly — at you. She watches him do this with the mild patience of someone waiting for a child to finish counting on his fingers, and then adds, as if clarifying something he'd misunderstood:

"That was the 'my share' that I ordered. He'll order his own."