Missy's eyes snapped open, staring up into the inky blackness with sudden, inexplicable alertness. She felt her brain surface from sleep with a determination that was as absolute as it was perplexing--she didn't remember waking from a weird dream, she didn't feel an urge to go to the bathroom, she just... didn't feel tired anymore. And even before she reached for her phone to find out what time it was, the darkness that surrounded her bed told Missy that she wasn't lucky enough to have just woken up a little bit before her alarm. This was the deep dark, the quality of true night only experienced by insomniacs and the truly nocturnal. Missy wished she didn't know it this well.
Sure enough, the display on her smart phone lit up brightly with a lock screen reading '2:45'. The absolute worst time of the night to wake up. Not nearly late enough to get a good night's sleep--Missy had tossed and turned for what felt like a solid hour, and that was after finally forcing herself to lie down at nearly eleven o'clock--but far, far too late to get back to bed easily before the alarm went off and she had to drag herself to work. She was going to spend the whole damn day bleary-eyed and groggy again, pushing every fucking thought through a goddamn sea of sludgy exhaustion and hating every second of her existence until she made it home and the insomnia kicked in and the whole cycle repeated itself.
Unless.
Missy knew exactly what supplied that treacherous little 'unless', exactly which voice slipped it into the pause in her head between frustration and indecision. Oh, it sounded like the voice of her own thoughts, and on some nights Missy's brain remained just drowsy enough to fool herself into thinking that she came up with this particular idea all on her own. But her subconscious had done just a little bit too good of a job at waking her up, and Missy understood with crystal clarity that the impulse that suddenly popped into her mind wasn't hers. It belonged to Peace. Master Peace, if Missy wanted to follow that particular rabbit hole all the way down into her unconscious and come back out just a little more susceptible to his control.
She'd sworn off of his material months ago. Ever since that one weird day when she blanked out listening to one of his files in the evening and had gone to work the next day without panties, slipping off to the restroom no less than five times to edge her soaking cunt and earning herself a snotty note from her work director about good time management, Missy had decided that maybe 'Master Peace Theater' needed to drop off her list of PornVid channels to subscribe to. Maybe he didn't mean any harm by it, maybe the problem was with Missy and the way her subconscious just responded to his instructions a bit too well for her own good, but she could tell when she was getting in over her head. She decided it was time to quit cold turkey.
Only she quit a little bit too late, didn't she? By the time Missy decided she needed to take a break and clear her head from the constant pink fog of brainwashing and masturbation that turned her nights into a heady blur of sex and submission, her subconscious was already a little bit too used to getting the reward fix from Peace's nightly conditioning. Even when she put on the deprogramming file he listed all the way down at the bottom of the screen and described with some reluctance as 'For those who no longer want to Be Mine', it didn't do any good--something deep inside her needed to be mindfucked every evening, and it wouldn't let that craving go away. Missy listened to the deprogrammer six times before she realized she'd just tricked herself into getting her hypnosis fix another way.
But Missy had been around the hypnokink community for a few years. She'd picked up a few things. She understood that if she only fought the cravings long enough, eventually they'd subside as her brain picked up new habits and slowly unlearned all the things it had learned under Peace's dubious tutelage. She just needed to suffer through some rough nights, stay mindful of all the justifications and rationalizations her deep self might use to trick her into thinking just one more file couldn't hurt, and sooner or later she'd shake off his programming and feel like her old self again. And most nights, she did exactly that.
But it was nearly three AM. Missy's resistance was at its lowest ebb. Exhaustion was slowly beginning to seep back into her brain like water infiltrating an old basement, not nearly enough to make her really tired again but plenty when it came to finding the wherewithal to argue with herself about the quickest way to get back to sleep. Her thoughts kept going back to the last file she listened to every night for almost a solid year, the comfortable and familiar voice that helped her rub herself into a deep, hypnotized slumber. 'Peace and Pleasure'.
Missy fumbled for her tablet. She'd taken out the bookmark, but her fingers knew the URL for his channel by heart.
She had a laughably brief moment where she tried to convince herself that she was really just going to the website to decide whether she wanted to break her promise for the fifth time in a month, but Missy didn't even have time to lie to herself properly before her finger stabbed at the link and the sound of Peace's smooth, seductive voice wrapped around her thoughts and cocooned her drowsy mind into vacant bliss. "You've returned because you need peace and pleasure, haven't you?" he asked. Missy didn't even notice herself nodding in agreement.
