The sanctity of the circle was broken.
Again.
He woke faster this time, more like he was supposed to. He stood, arms straightening, wings flaring. And the intruder fell to the ground right in front of him, exactly where he'd been watching.
Small and pale and raven-haired. The same girl? Or did he only think so because the memory was so fresh, still fixed in his mind, the way she'd watched him as she fled?
More intruders. These ones were breaking things. Were they with her? If it was even her. It didn't matter, anyway. He was supposed to be killing all of them. No time to bother with sorting things out. Kill those ones first, then check if this was her, decide what to do with her if it was. Or if it wasn't.
This imprecise assessment of the situation took only a half-second before he roared, turning to jump down to the first floor. He drew his wings in close as he hit the ground, pushing off immediately to pounce. He wasn't aware of guns, or what they could do, but he was faster than their aim regardless.
Bullets were generally much less effective than baked goods.
His claws sank into flesh with ease, and it felt strange when all his most recent memories were of trying very hard not to do that. Maybe he would have acted differently if these intruders had been smaller, looked softer. He gripped the esophagus, yanking and tearing through it and pulling them to the ground in the process so they could die out of his way. Just as quickly, he pounced again, the claws of his feet sinking into this other one's stomach as he wrapped both hands around their head and twisted. They fell to ground, him on top of them, their head entirely backward.
It took two leaps to get to the last one, kicking claws into their back to hook on their spine. There was a lot of unpleasant screaming as they collapsed, which he resolved by slamming their face into the floor, again and again until it had cracked all to pieces. He roared again, which accomplished little, but felt satisfying.
The church was silent around him except for his breathing.
Surrounded by corpses and covered in blood, he found that he didn't really know what to do with himself. Usually this was the part where he turned back to stone, to be found in the morning by whoever it was that took the bodies away. They usually cleaned the blood off of him, while they were at it. He stood up, pulling his claws out of the man's back with a wet sound. He licked at the blood on his hand.
Bleh.
He flared out his wings, and this time when they beat it was with purpose, pushing against the ground so that he could fly up to the second floor again. He landed, and his footprints were bloody as he drew his wings back in to approach the little intruder again.
Different clothes, but this was the one he hadn't killed before, the one so eager to get away from him. Why would she come back here? Had she brought backup this time for whatever she'd meant to do before, or did she bring them along for revenge? There was blood on her leg, but he couldn't tell whose. There was blood on his leg, too.
He crouched to try to get on her level, and gave her a quiet growl of warning.
She heard the roar and decided her best bet was to stay on the ground and play dead. Running had worked, just, super poorly for her last time. She was confident he'd be distracted within--yep.
She propped herself up, crawling over to the edge of the balcony to stick her head through the railings and watch.
A good person would probably have been horrified and nauseated, but she watched with a wide-eyed fascination. She couldn't she what happened to the first two; they were underneath the the balcony, too far for her to see. She saw her would-be savior get sprayed with blood, at one point, heard sick, disgusting sounds of flesh rending and bone breaking.
The third one ran, and the creature pounced, in the middle of the church and perfectly within her view.
It was something she would never be able to unsee.
She stared, dazed. She'd never seen a human spine, not outside of a model skeleton. She'd heard screaming like that before, but it felt more well-deserved this time. She felt kind of like a sissy for screaming when he'd just menaced her lightly. And it did, suddenly, feel like extremely light menacing.
The head was paste by the time he finished with it.
Her breath caught as he glanced back up at her, drenched with blood, claws covered in viscera. She had felt this the obvious choice when running from those men, but now she was wondering if she hadn't made a terrible decision yet again.
He leapt into the air, and she didn't have time to think about how beautiful it was, in a terrifying, bloody sort of way, because her heart had stopped dead in her chest. She stared at him in frozen terror, unmoving, as he approached, mind still playing and replaying the spine ripping out of the man's body, the head, smashed into the ground, the sounds of deaths unseen.
She stared blankly at him with wide, terrified eyes, as he approached her, crouched down, and growled.
Oh god.
Was she seriously just incapable of making any good decisions in her life?
She stared for another few moments, not even breathing, before she remembered her blind insistence on spending some of her valuable money on something for the next time she was menaced by angry bat-demons.
Slowly, trying to make her movements as deliberate and obvious as possible, she reached into her bag, and pulled out the tub of hot pink strawberry icing, and held it out to him, hand shaking.
He'd never felt blood slowly drying on him before. It... was weird. He scratched at some of it on his wrist as he watched her slowly reach into her bag. He perked up visibly.
Last time she'd retrieved something, there'd been sweets.
He stared at the little can. Slowly, he took it from her, smearing it with blood from his fingers. He turned it over. It was... hard. There were pink spots, but he didn't think they were edible. He licked the pink lid to confirm.
Not good.
Maybe she was under the impression that he just liked the color. He'd been licking a lot of pink things, before. Not all of them had tasted as good as the first one.
Did that mean this was supposed to be an offering? Tribute? He didn't know how many nights it had been — he didn't think many, in the same way that he had a vague sense that he'd been dormant a long time the first time she woke him. Like cobwebs gathered in his skull the more time he spent still.
The concept of tribute was within his base knowledge, those things he understood without thinking to question how. Something given, something gained. He didn't think that tribute was supposed to be for him. He wasn't going to ensure a good harvest, or protect anyone from harm. He thought. Unless he had.
This might be a misguided attempt to keep him from killing her, or a misguided attempt to thank him for not killing her before, or even a thanks for having killed those other intruders.
He set it down at his feet, deciding to investigate this situation further before he made any decisions. Until now, his only problem had been intruders, and his solution had been killing them. He'd never seen someone more than once, because he'd killed them. Chased off, on rare occasions, but mostly killed. Those few he'd scared away instead had never returned, and if they had, he would have killed them for it.
He'd definitely never given anyone an impromptu and clumsy semen bath. And she… she hadn't been good, necessarily. There'd been all that yowling and screeching and flailing and trying to trick him and running away. It had all been very dramatic and ungrateful. But maybe that was why she'd come back, to rectify how rude she'd been.
He tucked in one foot, and then the other, so that he was sitting cross-legged on the floor. The position required him to lean forward more than most people, so his tail could trail out comfortably behind him without bending unnaturally against the floor. Leaning forward was what he wanted, so that he could inspect her pants. There was a rip in the garment, and it seemed perfectly logical to him to tear it open wider so that he could better see what was happening beneath it.
Not that he knew anything about fixing a broken human. That was not his half of the equation. Cut humans bled, but whether they stopped bleeding or how was a mystery.
He... licked the lid.
He didn't understand how tins worked.
Absurdly, Ren snorted, amused, then giggled briefly. She quickly covered her mouth, looking worried. She hadn't really been in the laughing mood before, so she had no idea how he would react to being laughed at.
He just set it down, clearly unimpressed. Man, she was about to blow his fuckin' mind. She was hesitant to reach for it, though. What if he thought she was stealing it? He'd been pretty good about letting her randomly grab at things in the past, but, gosh, it was almost like him sitting there soaked in blood from head to toe was making her extra cautious, or something.
She did reach for it, eventually, slowly, broadcasting her movements. At the same time, he reached towards her. She froze, hand halfway to the tin, as he hooked a claw into her pants.
This upset her for several reasons.
One was that tearing off her clothing was a very obvious prelude to something she was not willing to do with him completely covered in blood. Not that she'd been willing to do it before but... no. Please, god, no. But even more importantly... he was going to get a lot of blood and fleshy bits in her open wound that way. She didn't have so much as an elementary school's formal education, but she'd lived with some questionably intelligent people, on and off, and learned some questionably intelligent things. Being careful with blood and other dead-human bits was explicitly one of them.
She started to shriek in alarm, but quickly killed the sound in her throat, remembering the screaming of the men downstairs. What came out was more of a squeak. She lunged towards his hand, catching his wrist not so much with her own hand as with her entire forearm and shoving it quickly away from her injured leg, scooting her legs back a bit as she did.
He cocked his head to the side. That… was a new sound. He thought it was good. He didn't know what to make of it yet. Her reaction suggested that it was a bad sound, but he didn't know why.
She shoved at him so suddenly and with such force that his wings flared, and he hissed in displeased surprise, baring his teeth in the process. He was trying to help. He wasn't just going to poke his finger into the wound. His wings folded again, but he was still obviously irritated, tail lashing behind him. He told himself that she was just more sensitive than he'd thought, and it hurt more than it looked like it should.
Serve her right if she bled to death because she wouldn't let him look at it.
Not that he would know what to do with it once he'd seen it.
He'd let her touch his broken horn, if she wanted. Fair was fair. He rubbed at the blood on his forearms, tried licking his hand again. He immediately scraped his tongue against his teeth, and didn't do it again. His wings flexed, and he huffed.
She froze like a deer in headlights when he hissed, then ducked her head, as if to push herself further against the ground. Make herself smaller. She'd never heard him hiss before; it was a new sound, alarming and scary. Less bone-shaking than his enraged roaring, but covered in blood and baring teeth... the message was clear.
Now would be a very good time to distract him.
Slowly, apologetically, she crawled forward, using her forearms and elbows to drag herself without raising herself off the ground at all. Just close enough that she could reach out, slowly, and grip the tin. When he didn't immediately snap at her for doing so, she pulled it towards her a bit and then, as if doing a demonstration, popped off the plastic lid. There was a bit of foil sealed over the top, as well, so she peeled that off. She hesitated, glancing down at the thing. What exactly did she expect him to do, stick his whole face in there? He'd just licked his claws and seemed to hurt his tongue on them.
She should have brought like... a spoon or something.
With a little sigh, she dug two fingers into the frosting and held them up for him. He'd figure it out, she was sure, and want the frosting out of there faster than she could spoon it. Then he could make a mess or whatever he wanted.
Crawling back to him was not what he'd expected, but she had his attention. He watched her take the can back, pulling and peeling it apart.
Something inside?
He perked up again, uncrossing his legs to kneel and lean forward, trying to get a better look. She dipped her fingers into the can, retrieving a familiar color and texture.
He hopped up onto his feet to crouch instead of kneeling, because that position made it easier to move quickly, grabbing her wrist before she could try to pull it away. He brought her hand closer to his mouth, dragging the rest of her with it, and immediately started licking at the mass of sugar. His tail was moving quickly, but without the violence it had to it when he was angry, holding her forearm with both hands so it couldn't move.
He didn't lick it away as quickly as he could have, wanting to savor it this time. Long strokes of his thick tongue over her fingers, and eventually between them as he sought out anything that could possibly be left of it. He was being very thorough. He gave her palm a lick for good measure, then let her go, looking to her expectantly. He looked to the can, then back at her. If she didn't seem to get the hint fast enough, he'd nudge her hand back toward it, then watch her again.
He practically pounced on her hand. She would have held it very steady even if he had not gripped it so firmly. She was feeling very cautious of his teeth at the moment. He dragged her by her arm, her whole body sliding across the floor. She winced a bit as her leg was jarred, but otherwise allowed it to happen without complaint.
He did not seem to understand the amount of frosting she had given him. He took his time to an almost ludicrous extent, stroking his tongue along her hand, wrapping around each finger in turn. Even the fingers that had exactly no frosting on them. She bit her bottom lip and endured the sensation, hoping that he would eventually tire of licking her and turn to the actual source.
Not... uh... not quite.
He looked down at the can, then back to her, pointedly. She moved her hand back, and gestured at the frosting. He gripped her hand and put it on top of the frosting tin.
Goddamnit.
She sighed, then scooted forward again, wincing as she pulled herself into a sitting position, legs folded to the side. She took advantage of the pause to look at her leg. The gunshot wound was still bleeding... It had completely soaked that entire pants leg and just her leg in general. But it was a glancing blow. There was a ragged tear in her flesh, yes, and it hurt like a motherfucker, but it was much better than it could have been.
She turned her attention back to the frosting, worried he'd run out of patience and start using her hand like a dipping stick. She picked up the tin of frosting and scooped up more with a single finger, holding it up to him. Maybe if she did it very slowly, he'd lose patience and do it himself.
He followed her gaze to her leg, looking while she wasn't looking at him, almost out of spite. He wanted to see what was so interesting that she didn't want him to look at. That seemed like a lot of blood. How much blood was inside a person? He could check the bodies downstairs and see. She didn't act like she was dying, though. Considering how she'd reacted to something as harmless as his dick, he was sure he'd know if she was dying.
As soon as she looked away from her leg, he turned his head in the other direction, as if he hadn't been looking at all.
She held up more frosting, and he didn't grab her arm this time, trusting her to keep holding it up for him. Again he took his time, and again he licked parts of her hand that he should have known had no frosting whatsoever. He was very paranoid about missing some of it, somehow. He even experimented with sucking on her finger, though it was no more useful than licking it had been. He purred against her skin, then let her hand go to wait for more.
His tail had been moving consistently all the while, brushing a semi-circle in the dust.
She hadn't quite realized he was capable of sucking. It just hadn't occurred to her... her contact had been mostly with his tongue, not his lips. That had some... interesting implications that did not bear thinking about at all whatsoever.
Flushing and a bit irritated, she decided to up the grading curve for this apparent idiot. She took one of his hands in both of hers, and used the sleeve of her hoodie to wipe the blood off one of his claws. It still wasn't very hygienic, but whatever. She wasn't going to live long enough for illness to be that big of a concern. The fact that she'd made it somewhere into her twenties was nothing short of a miracle as far as she was concerned.
Once it was clean to her satisfaction, she guided his claw into the frosting, scooping up. She did this slowly, as if to emphasize how easy it was and how to do it. She pulled his claw up and licked the very tip of the frosting, as an example, then pushed it towards him.
She was turning red again, which pleased him. He allowed her to take his hand, and appreciated her attempt at cleaning, though he wished it had gone a bit further. Being covered in blood didn't feel very nice. It was all sticky, made his skin feel tight, cracked when he moved. In comparison to the other bodily fluids he was now aware existed, blood was subpar.
He also allowed her to guide his finger into the jar, unclear what she was trying to accomplish.
Whatever it was, watching her lick frosting from his finger was nice. And it gave him an idea.
Despite her forceful indication that he should take his hand back, he reached back out, and smeared a little on her lips. Then he leaned forward and licked it off before she could object — or worse, lick it off herself.
He looked very smug about his own cleverness.
She spluttered a bit when he rubbed the frosting on her face, indignant... and then more indignant still when he leaned forward and licked it off. She flushed dark red. He looked so fucking SMUG, too! This asshole thought he was soooooooo smart, and he couldn't even fucking figure out frosting!
She reached her hand back into the jar and grabbed a dollop of frosting, then lunged forward enough to smear it on his nose. Ha! Two could play his ridiculous frosting game!
He recoiled a little, taken aback by her sudden frosting assault. He blinked, and waited. Was she going to lick it off of him, now? His nose seemed like a weird place for her to lick, but she'd licked a lot of things that wouldn't have occurred to him, so what did he know.
When she made no move to do any such thing, he leaned forward enough to put a hand on top of her head to hold her still. There was still frosting on his finger, and so he smeared it across her lips again, and then across her cheek. Then he nuzzled at her other cheek, effectively transferring the frosting she'd put on him.
Still holding her still, he started to lick… her whole face. Essentially. He licked one cheek, and then the other, taking his time because he was enjoying himself. Then he licked her mouth, again, and finally let her go. He rocked back to his comfortable crouch, and looked at the can of frosting to see if there was any more to be had.
She sat there, smug as could be, amused by the sight of pink frosting smeared on his nose. She'd been expecting him to lick it off, or perhaps sulk. Instead, after a moment, he reached over and grabbed her head. She went to move automatically, but he was holding her firm. She opened her mouth to protest, and he effectively silenced her by smearing frosting on her lips again, then onto her face and cheek.
"Pffff!" she protested, licking her own lips automatically. It was so friggin sweet. How could he just keep eating it?
And then he was moving more, leaning over her to nuzzle against her face, and then immediately began to lick it up. God damnit. She made a face but allowed him to do it, knowing there was no point in trying to stop him. Forget being stupid; he was just an asshole.
When he released her, she crossed her arms irritably. Realizing quickly he'd probably just make a mess of her again, she snatched up the frosting tin and put the lid back on. She shook it at him sourly, as if to say, here, now no one gets any frosting. She was well aware that he could just tear it open if he really wanted to, but maybe he wouldn't realize that. Maybe he would think she had magical frosting powers.
Either way, she couldn't sit here and wait for him to eat an entire tub of frosting off her body. She needed to figure out her game plan here. He was probably going to try and fuck her again, and he was covered in blood and also she was bleeding and also there was a corpse within plain view. A horrible, horrible corpse. But she certainly couldn't climb back out, and also had no desire to. She might get shot again. No matter her feelings on demon babies, she did not want to be shot again.
She paused in her chiding long enough to glance back over at her leg. It had maybe stopped bleeding? Or was probably just oozing? It was hard to tell; her leg was as much of a mess as his... entire body.
He watched her close the frosting with narrowed eyes. If she expected him to keep getting frosting himself, when he could make her feed it to him instead, she was going to have another thing coming. As blood dried on him he started rubbing his hands over it and scratching at it with his claws, getting it to flake off as best he could. It wasn't hugely effective, but it was better than nothing.
He wanted to look at her leg again. She kept looking at it, after all, and every time she moved she winced. Clearly, it was bothering her. Maybe her leg was falling off. Could she put it back on if it was? He knew that losing heads, and throats, and spines, and organs were all fatal to humans, but he'd never tried pulling off a leg. Maybe they could take her shirt, and use it to tie her leg to her other leg to keep it secure. He was becoming determined to solve this problem, in some ill-defined way. He'd just… have to be careful. As long as he didn't touch it, or touch too close to it, or move her around too much, it would be fine. He assumed.
It was just a matter of making her behave.
He grabbed her by the neck, and gave his best attempt at a gentle growl of warning. What he wanted was to coax her to lie down, whether on her back or on her side. Something to keep her still, so her leg would stay safely attached to the rest of her.
He was very convinced that his leg-related logic was a sound explanation for the circumstances at hand.
He did not know how to make noises that would make a person less scared, rather than more.
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