Complex Presents: Fan Fiction for Monsters Who Need Young Adult Love Stories

The Twilight franchise has proven that young monsters want love. Despite needing things like, say, warm blood to live, teen monsters want heavy petting and necking in cars, just like the rest of us.

Warm Bodies, in theaters today, continues the trend, telling the hot-and-heavy story of a young zombie who falls for a human. In the spirit of equality, Complex looked for monsters who have been left out of the conversation. They need fictional love stories. So, we wrote some.

Welcome to Complex Presents: Fan Fiction for Monsters Who Need Young Adult Love Stories.

Try not to get too horny.

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By Justin Monroe

The Egyptian cotton bandage snaking from the entrance of Tut’s apartment made KD’s heart race. She closed the door he’d left unlocked and thought, He’s waiting for me. And I’m ready this time. At 17 (11 months, 27 days, 16 hours, 45 minutes, and counting), KD’s virginity felt like a yoke that must be shed so she could join her peers in adulthood, or at least conversation. Melissa, Heather, and even cross-eyed Christine had lost theirs over the summer. It was true that they had “become women” somewhat embarrassingly in back seats and bushes at summer camp, and there was nothing romantic about their experiences, yet when they gossiped about their painful, hardly ecstatic fumblings KD was acutely aware of her envy, that anything she had to say came from YA novels and MTV’s slate of sexed-up teen reality shows. She wanted her first time to mean something, but she also didn’t want to be 35 when the planets finally aligned.

For weeks, she and Tut had talked about doing more than making out and petting. She had talked, rather. He mostly groaned, moaned, and snarled, as was his way, but KD thought she understood some profound wisdom in his throaty sounds. He seemed to say: It’s OK to take your time so it’s special. Life is longer than you know. I’ll wait until it feels right for you. I love you. What did you do with your hair today? It looks great. Tut was only 18 when he’d died, but he’d matured significantly since 1323 B.C. He was way more sensitive and attentive than the boys trying to grind and grope at high school parties. It was clear that, whatever organs had been removed from his once young body, Tut’s heart remained intact.

KD took off her running shoes by the welcome mat (Tut, who lived by himself above the oil and incense shop where he worked, liked to keep his floors clean so his bandaged feet wouldn’t pick up dirt like Swiffers) and began to follow the cloth trail he’d left for her. It bounced off of one wall to the other, then into the kitchen, to the table, and back out and down the darkened hall towards his bedroom, slipping under the door. KD had never seen Tut without his wraps, was not sure what to expect of his mummified body, but found that she was eager, if equally nervous about being naked in front of him for the first time. KD stopped at the bedroom door to gather herself and appreciate the moment before her life would change. She listened to her thumping heart, the blood pumping to her ears and everywhere, making her feel feverish, and clucked her tongue in rhythm so she would remember this wild beating drum forever.

She snapped out of it when she caught Tut’s moan beyond the door. It was unlike any she’d heard before, more base, animalistic, instinctual, almost lewd. There were no words KD could put to it. It was simply uuunnnggghhh. Confused, KD took the knob, turned, and pushed the door in.

She gasped. “Oh my God, Tut! Seriously?! Are you fucking serious?!”

Cross-eyed Christine quickly backed away and covered herself with the sheet. She shot a pleading look at Tut as if he could somehow whisk her out of this uncomfortable situation. Then she turned to KD. “I’m soooo sorry!” Christine said, her crossed eyes showing mortification more than remorse. “I was looking for you and it just kinda happened and—“

“You shut up, skank.” The rage KD felt looking at Christine was overcome by a sick hurt pressure in her chest that forced tears to well up in her eyes when she looked Tut in his boney, leathery brown face. “Why, Tut? Why? I was ready to give myself to you.”

“Mmmmmm-nnnnnnn-ungh-aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrr,” replied Tut. For the first time, looking into his blank milky eyes, KD registered that whatever wisdom Tut may have once had had been pulled out of his nostrils with a hook. She left while he was still trying to explain that, yes, his brain was in a jar somewhere, and that his heart remained but had shriveled with age and only filled and beat again like the living when he was with her.

By Tara Aquino

“You never take into consideration what I want!” Taylor said, huffing her blonde hair out of her face.

“God! Don’t be so dramatical. Everyone thought it was hilarious,” Eric retorted, as he twirled his plastic crown around his index finger.

The pair stood atop the Whimsy Bridge, Taylor’s favorite place in the world. She'd unofficially named it when she was only 7. To any passerby, the bridge was a decrepit eyesore that the town’s citizens considered a disgrace to the beautiful park surrounding it. But to Taylor, the bridge was her castle, her fortress of solitude. This was the spot where she'd spent countless hours reading fairy tales and playing princess, where she had her first kiss and, now, where she and Eric would celebrate their ascension to prom king and queen.

“The first dance between a king and a queen is not supposed to be hilarious, Eric!” Taylor cried back. “You were so busy screaming at the DJ to play ‘Teach Me How to Dougie’!”

She delivered a searing look, only to discover Eric had checked out of the conversation and was now balancing his crown on his hard-on.

“What are you doing?!”

“Bow to your king!” Eric exclaimed before keeling over with laughter.

“That’s it! Go to the party without me!” Taylor crossed her arms. “We’re over.”

“Whatever," Eric said, quickly zipping up his fly. “Why would I even want to be with someone who doesn’t know how to Dougie?” And with that, he turned around and left her.

Taylor buried her head in her hands and started to sob. She began to walk away, until her feet got caught in a crack on the bridge. Despite trying to regain her footing, Taylor teetered uncontrollably. She reached for the rail when her heel snapped. Missing it by inches, she flew over the edge, her crown slipping from her head.

As she fell, she screamed. In her head, she looked back on her life. Well I shouldn’t have spent all that time studying for the SATs if I’m just gonna die.

Just as she had accepted her fate, strong arms embraced her, breaking her fall. For the first time, she became aware of the minuscule 10-foot drop. I would’ve only sprained an ankle, she thought.

Realizing she was still being cradled, she looked into the eyes of her savior. “Oh, holy shit!”

Piercing blue orbs, hidden beneath a tangled wad of dirty eyebrow hair, stared back at her. Startled, the creature dropped her and ran back into the darkness under the bridge.

“Wait!” she cried. “Who are you?”

From the shadows, she noticed her crown slowly rolling back toward her. Taylor picked it up, dusted it off, and perched it atop her golden locks.

A song began to echo from the tunnel. Upon hearing the first note of Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” Taylor perked up. It was her favorite.

Out of the darkness, a four-foot-nothing troll with green warty skin covered in dirt and foliage emerged. Over his ripped shorts and stump-like legs, the creature wore what looked like a First Communion blazer pulled from the dumpster behind Goodwill.

Despite his disheveled, unnatural appearance, Taylor couldn’t help but smile. She was fixated on the most enchanting set of eyes she had ever seen, just like the kind the princes had in her books.

With Dion crooning in the background, the troll held out his hand to her, grunting for her to take it.

Taylor accepted. She didn't care what he was. She didn't care that he only came up to her breasts. They were from two different worlds, but she felt something for him she couldn’t explain. As they began to dance beneath the starlit sky, her foot crushed a goat bone.

Her hero opened his mouth and began to sing, “When me touch you like dis...”

Taylor matched his voice, “When I hold you like that...”

The prom queen finally got the dance she deserved. "If I kiss you," she blushed, "Will you turn into a handsome prince?"

"No."

"Oh. Um, I think it's past my curfew?"

By Matt Barone

Under any other circumstances, Stacy would be scared to death. Actually, she'd be dead. Literally.

Resting upwards of 500 feet in the air, she's in perfect striking distance for every missile and bullet that's presently traveling in her direction, but she's not the least bit uneasy. Jafara will keep her safe. That's what he does best.

Seated comfortably on top of his long, stretch-limousine-sized snout, Stacy has both hands firmly locked into two of Jafara's facial breathing holes. She holds on tightly, treating her newfound love's scaly, slimy nose as her very own magic carpet.

Ever since her father, General Stanley Porter, took her to see Disney's Aladdin when she a wide-eyed, curious 9-year-old, Stacy's always dreamed about riding high in the sky on the same kind of fantastic transportation that the hero and the beautiful Princess Jasmine flew on.

Sharing his delicious popcorn with her in the crowded movie theater, Stanley said, "Don't worry, sweetie. One day, you'll get your own magic carpet. It might not look like that, but you'll find your Aladdin. Because you're a princess, aren't you? Of course you are."

Daddy was right about one thing, thought Stacy: Jafara, as she affectionately named him, doesn't look anything like Aladdin. But he's just as heroic. She learned that firsthand when the green, over-sized lizard came to her rescue nearly an hour earlier. The memory of it replays in Stacy's mind: Like everyone else in Manhattan, she was watching the beast tear through Midtown, knocking down buildings and roaring with loud, intimidating fury. As the monster barreled down 37th Street and inched closer and closer to the Porter's high-rise apartment, Stacy couldn't help but press her hands and face against the all-glass wall, in unbridled astonishment. She never expected the beast's deafening, powerful roar to shatter the glass and send her falling to a splattery death. Nor did she anticipate that the gargantuan everyone in the city feared would catch her with its bare, bumpy, reptilian hand.

The more the soldiers' barrage of firepower whizzed past Jafara's head, the more Stacy couldn't help but feel comforted. If she were to lose her grip and slip off her speech-deprived but nonetheless emotive protector's snout, Jafara would catch her. She could tell by the way he looked at her with those dark, trampoline-dimensioned eyes.

Even if Daddy won't accept it. There he is, in a chopper that that's trailing Jafara. Through an extremely powerful megaphone, Daddy shouts: "Stacy, honey, please get it to stop! It's not your friend! It's a monster! You're going to die like this!"

Typical Daddy. He never likes any of the boys. But Jafara is different. He's like Aladdin.

At the top of her lungs, Stacy shouts for Jafara to hear, even though she's pretty sure he won't understand a word: "You've saved my life! That's more than any other man has ever done for me! Especially that bastard Todd. He would have just let me fall, but not you!"

Suddenly, Stacy feels Jafara's snout, along with the rest of his body, vibrate. The movements nearly shake her hands free from their grips. An ear-puncturing noise that sounds like massive helicopter propellers gearing up for liftoff fills the air. Looking past Jafara's enormous right eye, she notices what appears to be a wing ripping through a skyscraper. Seconds later, she and her special magic carpet are ascending into the air, high above the buildings and well beyond Daddy's chopper.

The view is breathtaking. Stacy can see all of New York City in the distance, and the Empire State Building up close as Jafara slows down for the approach. Like a dog sniffing a wall, Jafara sticks his snout against the roof, coaxing Stacy to crawl off and onto the building. She steps down, turns around, and makes eye contact with her hero. Squinting his snout, Jafara smiles, winks at her, and says, in a growling, hardly audible voice, "Stay here. Safe. Be back shortly. With present."

As Jafara flies away, back toward the military's nonstop blitzkrieg, Stacy yells, "And you can talk! This is too good to be true! I'll be here, Jafara!"

"Jafara? What kind of stupid name is that?"

Stacy turns around and sees an attractive, similarly young woman sitting near the other side of the rooftop. "And did he just wink at you, too? That bastard! Even the ones that aren't human are no good!"

Flabbergasted, Stacy shouts back, "Who the hell are you?"

"Don't worry about who I am! I'm pretty sure I know who you are: You must be my 'present.' That jerk has a lot of explaining to do when he gets back!"

By Ross Scarano

The guidance counselors didn’t have the necessary information.

They’d advised Todd not to drop out of high school, saying that he wouldn’t find a job, but the paint factory shut the sweater-vests up. His friends didn’t know what to say when he stopped hanging with them in half-empty parking lots, choosing the bar instead. The Oak Leaf had started serving him, not because his babyface suddenly squared off and needed shaving twice a day, but because he was part of the paint factory. Older women asked him home. His stepfather was dying and yelled at the television through an electrolarynx. Outside of the paint factory, no one spoke to him. No one knew how.

What would the guidance counselors say now, if they had the new information?

---

At the kitchen table, with the lights off and the clock reading past midnight, Todd shakes from a chill that runs from neck to feet. She’s screaming again. He’s sitting in his next-door neighbor’s kitchen, and she’s screaming.

He imagines sitting down before the plaid body-shaped thing that gives out career advice and telling it: “I am dating my next-door neighbor. She’s 28 years older than me. She screams a lot, was screaming the night before my stepdad died. She doesn’t scream when we have sex, but she talks to me when we’re done, saying things like you could be my baby and it makes me feel split open. She’s screaming and I know someone is going to die tomorrow, just like the last few times. Because my next-door neighbor with the pale hair is a banshee.”

“Please,” Todd says in a voice inaudible. In a tank top and black underwear he watched her buy at a drug store, Rosemary paces the peeling linoleum with her mouth open and terrible sound coming from it. Her voice won’t give out. It comes to a point, like a kettle boiling, and holds for what feels like minutes. Then it drops in volume before it rises to peak again.

“Hey,” Todd says in a voice she can’t hear, though she’s watching his lips move. She learned how to read lips. She told him that once, when she was still dropping hints about her true self. He stands, goes to the fridge for one of the beers she buys him. He cracks opens the can, drinks, wipes his mouth, stares into the fridge. He stares like the light in the fridge will give him the answer. He feels a stirring in the back of his brain, a twinge of a thought that might tell him what to do, if there’s anything he can do to make her stop screaming.

Two doors down, his neighbor Mr. Jenkins throws a ragged hand to the varnished bookcase he staggers toward. Fingers digging into spines, he pulls five hardbacks down to the ground before crumpling with them, his heart flat-lining, dead.

Back in the kitchen, Rosemary’s lips finally meet after hours of wailing. Todd shivers again. Finally, he thinks. He moves toward her with designs, extends a hand to touch her face.

The tear begins at the outside corner of her left eye and moves in an arc toward the bridge of her nose before rolling down her cheek. She’s crying soft. She says something he doesn’t catch before launching into honking sobs.

“Will you please be quiet, please,” he says and then belches and then goes back to the Formica table to massage his temples thoughtfully and think about how sad he is to have a girlfriend who cries when she isn’t screaming because she knows when people are going to die. He should’ve just dated the cross-eyed girl who read horse books.

By Matt Barone

After a good ten minutes of preparation, Emily was ready. Rose petals adorned her bedroom's sky-blue carpet, forming a long path that led from the door to her mattress, which was covered in an all-black bedspread. Just how Greg liked it.

Three long weeks of waiting had brought her to this moment. With past boyfriends, she'd held off on sex for upwards of two months, but things with Greg were different. Since the moment she first met him while visiting her mother's grave plot at the Fair Lawn Cemetery, their connection was entirely foreign to her, and endlessly exciting. Perhaps it was how Greg, who went by the name Grim at the time, sweet-talked her with the revelation that he'd initially appeared inside Fair Lawn's gates to follow her into her Toyota Camry, quietly cause the vehicle to malfunction, and send her crashing into a guardrail, but then followed that startling story up with how much more beautiful she is in person than from the photo of her that's front-and-center in the Reaper's Guide to Mankind.

Normally, Emily would have reacted like any other sane woman and fled in horror, but Grim quickly calmed her nerves when he'd said, softly, "Please, Ms. Duncan, call me Greg. I've always hated the name Grim." That completely set her at ease.

She hoped to exude an equally soothing demeanor once she invited Greg into her bedroom. She wore a flowing silk negligee. Hopefully she'd finally discover what was beneath that dark cloak.

"Come on in, baby," she said. "I'm ready."

The area directly in front of the door clouded up in smoke. Greg, his face once again hidden by darkness and his body draped in the long black garment, slowly formed in the mist. Emily loved how he did that. Any man can walk through a door, but using smoke? That's something special.

"Ms. Duncan," Greg said, "I would like to join you in bed, but, for the last time, I'm simply unable to consummate this union."

Emily rolled her eyes. "You keep saying that, but I don't get it. We've spent every night together for the last two weeks, talking but never any touching. There's no reason to be self-conscious with me. I know you're Death personified, right? And I know that going around and killing people hasn't given you much time to, well, date. Or have sex. But I'd like to be your first. Because, well, there's something I haven't told you yet."

Greg put the scythe on the ground and floated closer to the bed, without actually making contact. "That you're a virgin, Ms. Duncan? I already know this. I'm Death, remember? I know everything about you."

"Damn. I keep forgetting that. Then you should know how badly I want you to be my first, right? Maybe this will help." Slowly pulling the comforter down with his left hand, Emily used her right one to move the lace strap on her right shoulder toward her elbow. "Like what you see?"

"More than you'll ever know, Ms. Duncan." The sides of Greg's cloak lifted in the air, as if underneath each of his hands were clenched. "That is it. I must show you what I mean. Please call your pet feline into this room."

Emily, hoping her obedience would breed positive results, yelled for Boomer. As always, Boomer strolled in. A bony, skeletal hand reached out from the cloak's left appendage. The longest finger, the middle finger, gently touched Boomer's head, causing the cat to keel over, its tongue sticking out of its mouth. "You see, Ms. Duncan, anything I touch dies."

Emily's face froze, her jaw stuck gaping. The look of horror wasn't lost on Greg. "But, Ms. Duncan, I assure you that I do find you to be the most beautiful female I have ever seen."

As Greg spoke, Emily noticed the bulging region near the lower section of his cloak. Wiping away tears shed for poor Boomer, she said, "Well, look at that."

To which Greg replied, "What? I'm Death, not dead."