(Warning, there will be slightly morbid talk. You have been warned. This is not an x reader story because there is no love involved. Just Nightmare being Nightmare.)

Haha, y'all thought I was gonna come back with a cute story to make you smile. This is more action and greed related. No relationship, lo siento

Words, the one thing that drives humanity to be the maddening monstrosity that it has become. Words can cut deeper than a knife and yet can also build those same people up to impossible levels of pride. Words, what deadly things they are.

Her whole life has been filled with words of praise for her looks and abilities, but no one used them to help her. No one dared to ask her how she was. No one dared to ask her what she needed. They just assumed she was ok because she was pretty and perfect.

She was far from it.

(Y/n), being the Phoenix she is, has seen the rise and fall of many people around her. Many have also seen the rise and fall of herself, but none of them understood the pain and sadness she went through with it.

She has seen the people she cares the most about, perish. When she was younger, she even awaited her best friend's resurrection, believing all beings could comeback to life after death.

Oh how wrong she was.

Everyone believed her heritage was a blessing; something to be jealous of. Eternal life and death is like drowning someone over and over again, but they always comeback up with just enough air in their lungs to be tortured again. She was drowning in an endless cycle of life and death while the world moved on.

She wished she could disappear sometimes, but then the oddest thing happened. A skeleton, covered in a black substance, took her away from the world she once knew. Not like a prince in shining armor in the fairytales her mother told her. He originally kidnapped her to take her immortality for himself, but when she begged him to take it from her he froze.

Never had anyone begged him for anything but mercy or a change in his actions. Why was this girl begging for her immortality to be taken away? Didn't she want to stay alive forever?

"It's a curse. You watch everything you care about perish before your very eyes while you have to live and die again and again. If that's what you want, then hurry up and take it from me. I have no care for it anymore." The girl says, crying as she kneeled in front of him, her eyes bloodshot.

Nightmare only rolled his eye light as he snaked one of his tentacles around her stomach. "Happily, you ungrateful brat. Of course you wouldn't know the true power behind immortality because it was handed to you at birth." He states, going to stab his pitch black appendage through her torso only to be stopped by unforgiving flames. The heat and raw power radiating off of the girl was immense, vaporizing some of the sludge on Nightmare before he quickly retracted his tentacle.

"I thought you wanted your immortality gone! Why won't you just give it to me?!" He shouts, single eye light shining a brighter blue than before. "I do, but that does not mean my body does. I thought you would have known this since you seemed so prepared." She commented in a snarky tone, irked that he believed she would lie to him. "Seems little miss perfect has a way to protect herself and her immortality after all. Guess that means I'll have to take it from you while your resurrecting!"

This causes the girl's eyes to widen as the flames on her back grow stronger, unfurling into ginormous crimson wings. "I may wish for my immortality to disappear, but that does not mean I wish for my life to be over as well!" She hollers, protecting herself from Nightmare's onslaught of relentless strikes from his tentacles. The heat of her wings melting them slightly with each block.

Nightmare quickly noticed this and propelled himself away from the girl as the heat grew stronger. His mind racing for strategies as the phoenix inside the young girl grew stronger, taking over more and more. "What a pain." (Yare Yare Daze)

Wings completely unfurled, (Y/n) finds herself sprinting, with a boost from her wings, towards him. Her body slowly becoming engulfed in her flames as she does so.

Surprised by the girl's speed and newfound confidence, Nightmare flinches and barely dodges the flames. Oh how he envied those beautiful flames, so powerful and yet delicate. He needs their immortality. He needs their power. He needs their destruction.

He needs them.

Everyone knows that determination comes from a human soul, but so does a phoenix's flames. Their soul, their heart, their being, is all fed by their flames. Without them, the Phoenix is no more than a normal bird. To take their flames he must take their soul. But this hybrid, she is a dangerous combination. Both determination and the flames of a Phoenix flow through her. She was not going down without a fight.

Tendrils shot from Nightmare's back as (Y/n)'s wings go to strike him. The flames licking at his black and gooey appendages. He pulls them away quickly as he feels the heat begin to burn through the ink covering his body.

As she went to strike him again, wings fanned out to hit more of him than before, he finds himself maneuvering around her. His single blue eye lighting up as he strikes several of his tendrils at her, all of which are aimed at different points. They too begin to heat up, but he pushes through in hopes of striking her. She notices this and whips her flame covered wings towards them, causing Nightmare to shout in pain as the burned him.

He needed to find a way through those flames, but the had completely engulfed the girl by now.

As he was devising his new plan and slowly paying less attention to the ongoing battle, or what little bit he was fighting to begin with, (Y/n)'s scorching hot fist collided with his jaw. This knocks Nightmare unconscious for a moment, enough time for the phoenix controlled girl to stand on his chest. Her feet leave his clothing burnt and the ink covering his body to melt, including the tendrils on his back.

His glowing blue eye looked startled at her. He never knew the full extent of a phoenix's strength and this wasn't even a fraction of it.

That one moment of distraction cost him the chance to obtain his prize. The last thing he sees before it all went black was her crimson engulfed foot stomping on his neck.

(Lemme know if you want more or to make an actual x reader out of this. Peace ✌️)