Janice watched Danny’s back getting further and further away, until he left the cafeteria with a smug look.

“Hahahahaha, Jane is going to lose her shit when I tell her about Danny opening up today. She definitely would have ditched her other things to come have lunch with us if she knew this was gonna happen”. Janice chuckled while thinking ways to tease her friend about the connection she and her friend’s crush just had.

“OH FUCK! I forgot why I came looking for him in the first place!”. She had agreed to inform Danny about the gathering a week from now to discuss the details of their group research project. She totally was caught in the moment and forgot about it.

Janice scrambled out of the cafeteria running and luckily found Danny still in the corridors of the university. She quickly told him about their plans, and grabbed his phone number to make talking with each other easier. They had forgot to exchange contact information all this time, since it was so easy to find everybody in the classes every day.

They waved their goodbyes a second time and finally went their own ways. She still didn’t know, but it was very lucky she found him too, since Danny would not be showing in the campus for the next days.

“Ooof, with that done, let’s go back to class, and plan my ultimate teasing plan. Muahahaha”. Janice let out an evil laughter while getting lost in her own musings.

Danny didn’t stay for the afternoon lessons. He had more important things to deal with right now.

“Since I decided to take the chance and accept the deal, I have to figure out the best way to approach the creature in order to get the most out of this arrangement. But I should also protect myself, in case everything it said was a lie”. Just because Danny had decided to go through with this deal, it did not mean he would jump in blindly. Although Danny felt that the chance of this new development being just a trick was small, there was still a chance.

As a matter of fact, there was not much Danny could do to prepare. Their positions were way too different after all, be it strength or knowledge, pretty much all the cards were in the creature’s hands, which lessened the chances of this being a trap, of course. When you are in a strong position, there is no reason to scheme after all. In fact, Danny didn’t even know where it came from or if it had a name.

He and his mother spent most of their time after his father left researching myths, theology and even conspiracy theories to find hints about it. But as expected, even the most promising aspects of their findings did not provide anything concrete, it was all speculation.

His tattoos also came from the conjectures he made after years of research. At the time he hoped that by marking his flesh he would maybe attain some form of repelling power against the creature.

However, everything he did was mostly a shot in the dark and answers could only be obtained by trial and error. To this day, Danny still did not know what truly worked and what did not. His most successful findings were still music and light.

While light might seem a pretty obvious guess, seeing the nature of the monster and its shadow-like aspect, one must remember Danny and his mother thought, at the time, that they were gambling with their lives at every attempt of resistance. Music on the other hand came as an inspiration from a myth from his mother’s land, the place he was first attacked.

As the legend goes, there is a creature known as Tutu, a monster of unidentified shape that chases after unruly children that refuse to sleep. This tale, as it is with many similar stories, had many variations and branches that appeared through time. While only a few versions spoke about the creature’s aversion to music, most of them contained lullabies that mentioned the dangers of staying awake and urged the kids to sleep through threats of what would happen if they otherwise stayed awake.

Those stories often related Tutu as a sibling of the boogeyman or even the boogeyman himself. No matter where the truth really lies, or even if those stories were based on actual happenings, the core of the issue is that neither him or his mother ever managed to shake it off. They tried everything, from travelling far away, to seeking asylum in religious ground, nothing worked, but they survived at least.

“Looking back at it now, it makes sense why the monster never killed my mother. If I assume it was telling the truth yesterday, there was not much to gain by killing her since she could not threaten it. On the other hand, by letting her live, I got an emotional support that kept me going through the dark times, allowing it to take advantage of me longer”. Danny sighed as he recalled their mostly futile attempts to not submit.

It didn’t matter if his mother was so insignificant to the creature that it felt beneath it to kill her, or if keeping her alive, and by Danny’s side, was more in line with its interests. In the end, she survived a darkness monster but succumbed to cancer. Fate was really a fickle thing.

Danny got down from the bus, and went into his rented home. His next steps would be decided depending on what the monster had to say. The way it phrased the events that were about to unfold painted a grim future. Danny’s thoughts kept churning from one possibility to another.

“Is it something that is going to affect only me again? Is there some new problem that’s coming about because of this rotten body of mine? Or is it something else? Maybe I am looking at it from the wrong angle, maybe it has to do with the creature. Did it face some kind of setback and I am no longer as valuable alive as before so it wants to make new arrangements?”

Danny kept going from one scenario to the next, getting more and more anxious. While lost in thoughts he kept going through the motions he was so used to. He only stopped when he caught himself with a full plate of dinner ready at 2:00pm.

Danny stared at the food he prepared way too early before he released a burst of uncontrollable laughter. After 5 minutes of laughing his head off, Danny stood up feeling refreshed, as all the pent-up stress and anxiety left his body. As if every chuckle released a little bit of tension.

“What’s the point of obsessing about things I can’t control? What is bound to happen will happen. I should take this time to relax my mind a bit to get in the best possible state when facing the creature”.

After storing the uneaten food in the fridge, Danny got down the stairs to his strange room. He saw on his desk his inseparable agenda where his mother’s music player should have been. In his muddled state this morning he had unknowingly swapped them both.

He let out a few more giggles while thinking about how strongly he grasped that weak sense of control over his life. It felt so pointless right now. No matter what happened tonight, everything was fated to change, and Danny was determined to take charge of his life for the first time ever. Danny held the cover tightly before slowly letting go of it into the trashcan in the corner of the room.

Danny suddenly felt very free when he laid back in his bed and let all the tiredness wash away in a peaceful slumber.

Danny woke up again at sundown, feeling very much alive. No trace of the earlier worry could be found in him, only tranquility and resoluteness.

“What will be, will be”. Danny slowly repeated in his mind while preparing himself to tonight’s meeting. He went up, ate the dinner he had prepared earlier, before getting down again.

This time he didn’t prepare the room like usual, instead of turning the room into a battlefield, a statement of uncompromising resistance, Danny kept all the music devices and lights turned off. The single exception being the candle by the bedside and his mother’s memento in his hand. Compromise was all good and dandy, but it did not mean that Danny would put himself at the complete mercy of the monster, that would be certainly foolish.

Danny knew how unbalanced their positions were, and how hopeless his own bargaining power might seem in front of it. However, being in a weak position did not mean he had no advantages whatsoever. If one was to believe the creature’s previous words, Danny’s own flesh and blood were his bargaining chips.

While some might feel that treating himself as an object, as a product to be sold was humiliating and even dehumanizing, Danny did not care. What he craved was hope. Hope to be able to live a life where his choices truly mattered. Hope to fulfill his mother’s dying wish and truly find satisfaction in life, making her proud. If blood and pain were the price to create a path forward, it was a price he was willing to pay.

“Coming to think about it, I am selling out my own body to get something in return. That’s actually quite close to prostituting myself, isn’t it?”. Danny grinned at the thought of being a gigolo for a monster.