who would prepare for peace take up the sword

“Can. Can you get off of me?” you say.

“No,” he says, and then he lays his head back down.

You aren’t sure what you’d expected, to be honest. Are ghouls usually biddable? If so, this one is not.

You lay your head back down and try to take stock of the situation, looking up at the coffered ceiling of your small cell. Your vows are fresh from your tongue, sworn before the Devil only a week ago. You’d been a congregant for much longer, though, ever since you’d left your old life behind, the life you try not to remember but that gnaws at you sometimes in your sleep.

You’ve seen ghouls, in your time here, but rarely interacted with them. You definitely haven’t spoken to this one.

You’d at least gotten up to pee an hour or so ago, so that isn’t desperate. He hadn’t been there at five this morning. But sometime between five and whatever time it is now, he’d made himself at home in your bed. No, not in your bed. On you.

The ghoul keeps purring. His tail swishes impatiently; it’s a strange tail, not that you know anything about ghoul tails. It almost looks like it has fins on the end, except they’re jagged and shredded and blackened, like they’d been ripped or burned.

“Ghoul?” you say again.

He looks up again, and he blinks unevenly, first one eye, then the other.

“Uh. Why are you here?”

He shrugs, or tries to, although his position lying on top of you doesn’t really allow that either. “Why not?” he says.

You aren’t sure how to answer that.

“What’s your name?” you ask the ghoul, deciding to try another tactic.

“Dewdrop,” he says, and his tail swishes again.

“So you’re a water ghoul?” you ask.

Another swish, but this one reminds you, again, of a cat—annoyance, a warning maybe. “Not anymore,” he says.

“Sorry,” you say. “I’m new here.”

“I know,” he says. “That’s why I’m here.”

“What, you’re the welcoming committee?” you ask.

He laughs then, a rough sound, and reaches up to push back some of his hair. You wonder why you’d thought his skin looked sickly. Despite the blue color, you can see a warmth in it.

“No,” he says, and reaches up to pat your cheek. “I came before anyone else could stake a claim.”

“A claim?” you repeat.

He sighs and rolls his eyes, impatient with your ignorance. “A claim,” he says again, slowly. “You’re new meat.”

You stare at him for a moment. You’ve heard stories about ghouls being dangerous, but you hadn’t believed them. What if…

“Are you going to eat me?” you ask in a small voice.

He flashes another smile—literally, because for a moment there’s a flare of brightness with it, like someone flicking a lighter on. “Only if you ask nice,” he says.

Your cheeks flush. “That’s not what I—”

“I know what you meant,” he says. Now he sits up, though he doesn’t get off of you, but moves to straddle you. Only once he gets up do you realize he’s naked, and your cheeks are burning hot now as you try to look away, up at the ceiling again.

Even so, your memory is still full of him—thin body, scrappy more than scrawny, and a thick thatch of yellow curls where his legs meet, legs that are currently on either side of you where you’re wrapped in your blankets. Beneath the curls is a glimpse of something small but thick, hard and decidedly not human in nature.

It had been a brief look, but it’s burned into you like an afterimage on a screen.

“Listen,” he says then. “I haven’t done this for a long time. My last human and I parted ways a while ago and I didn’t want a new one.”

“Your human?” you repeat, and despite your embarrassment, you look at him again.

His hands smooth down your blankets. “My human,” he repeats. “I loved him, my old human. I loved him a lot. But when I became a fire ghoul, we didn’t…fit, anymore.” He looks down, his short spiked lashes casting a shadow over his sharp cheekbones. “After I set him free, I didn’t want a new one. Not until I saw you take your vows last week.”

You stare at him. “What?”

He looks up at you, studying you for a long moment. “I saw you,” he says again. “You came here hurting, didn’t you? But you were so sincere in what you wanted. To serve our master, to serve the others, to be more than whatever you’d been before. I could see it in you. A flame,” he says, and snaps his fingers. Fire flares from his fingertips, stretching towards the ceiling, and then it fades.

No one has ever said anything like that to you.

“And I wanted it. So here I am.”

“Dewdrop,” you say, using his name as if to add gravity to what you’re saying. “What do you want from me, exactly?”

“I just said.” Any softness is gone from his tone. “You. Your sincerity. The flame in your heart.” He brings his fingers down now, touching your chest just above the edge of the blanket.

You let out a yelp, because his fingers are burning hot, little flickers of flame through your pajama shirt.

He pulls his hand away, and you yank your shirt collar down to look at the skin, but there’s no mark, no burn. Even the shirt is unmarred, you realize.

And now when you look up at him, for a moment, his skin is incandescent, the color at the heart of a fire, and you’re left blinking away pain and spots in your vision.

“Look,” he says then. “I could spend my time reassuring you, coaxing you. That’s probably what Aether would do, even though he has quintessence. But in the end? You’re mine. I claimed you. You might as well understand that without going to all the trouble.”

And then he bends, and you brace yourself for pain again.

But when his lips meet yours, they’re hot but not punishing. The kiss is hard, but not bruising. You feel his fangs nip your lip as he pulls away, but it leaves only the faintest sting that fades as quickly as it had happened.

“Dewdrop?” you repeat.

Such a cute name. Such a small ghoul. But he’s crouched over you still, fully in control. His tail thrashes, and you can see teeth and claws and him, his skinny little body one coiled muscle ready to strike if he needs to, wants to.

But he does not strike. He considers for a moment, his lids half-lowered. Your lips taste like cinnamon and wood smoke, and you run your tongue over them for a moment.

The kiss had been good.

The kiss had been very good.

And despite yourself, despite the fear in your chest and the threat of him looming over you, you find yourself thinking of what he’d said.

That he’d loved his old human, that he hadn’t wanted a new human. Not until you.

“I’m nothing special,” you find yourself saying. And now you aren’t trying to get him to leave, not as you were before. You’re trying to let him down, to explain to him that whatever he’d seen isn’t there. Or maybe some warped and wounded part of you wants to hear him disagree.

But if you’d expected a gentle reassurance, you were mistaken. Instead, he bares his teeth, and his hand comes to your chest again, and this time the flame you feel jolts through your nipple, making you cry out. As before, though, you know the skin is unharmed; there is no smell of burning, no sign of it except the memory of pain.

“You’re mine,” he tells you, sharply, firmly. “And so you’re never going to say that again.”

And now he starts to pull down the blankets, moving aside.

“I picked you out, I claimed you, I wanted you,” he says. “I don’t know what happened to you before you came here, but I saw what you are, I know what you are.”

And now he shoves up your sleep shirt, finding you bare, and he cups you, his hand not burning hot but warm, so warm, and it’s firm, pressure against you, demanding your arousal but not giving you relief.

“And what am I?” you say, a challenge as much as a question. But your face is hot, lips still tasting of him, and your nipple is still tingling, and you can feel him there.

“You know what you are,” he says, and now he starts to touch you. His hand is precise, and he finds wetness and grins. “You know what this is, too,” he says, and he brings his hand up to his mouth to lick your arousal from his fingers. “You want me to take care of you?”

“I—” You don’t know what to say, except there’s a heat between your legs that has nothing to do with fire ghoul powers and everything to do with his forked tongue slowly licking over his fingers.

“I told you that if you asked nicely, I’d eat you,” he says, but his voice is lightly mocking. “Say please.”

“Dewdrop—”

His fingers find you again, stroking sensitive skin. You can feel pleasure start to build, and you moan and let your head fall back.

Then he flicks his claw against you, you cry out from the brief snap of pain, brief but brilliant. “That’s not what I told you to say,” he tells you. “Say please.”

You let out a rough breath. The pain fades, but the arousal it leaves behind aches like a bruise, pounding in time with your racing heartbeat. “Please,” you say, and try to buck against his hands. “Please, please, please.”

That gets another grin—and more than that, him crouching again, low, his mouth on you, as hot and needy as you are. The forked tongue traces over you, making you choke, and then delves into you, and you arch so hard you almost levitate off the bed. And then he extracts his tongue from you to take your hardness into his mouth, sucking, flicking at you with that wicked, wicked tongue, and the heat he builds in you is entirely from your own body, your own desperately human body.

You scream when you come, and you think you hear him laugh.

But then when you’re done, he crawls up again, and this time when he lays on you it’s skin-to-skin. You can sort of feel his own arousal, but when you shift to reach for it he grabs your wrist firmly, pulling it away—and then kissing your palm, leaving a tickle of heat behind.

“Do you know what you are now?” he asks then, looking up at you as he had done when you’d first woken up.

You bite you lip. You think you might, but you’re afraid to say it.

“I don’t know who hurt you before you came here,” he says. “But I know no one else will ever hurt you again. Not even you, saying you aren’t special. Of course you are. Because of what you are. Say it.”

You swallow hard, but you open your mouth.

“Yours,” you say, your voice small. “I’m yours.”

He smiles. “That’s right,” he says. “And that’s why I’m here.” And when he kisses you again, he tastes like you and he tastes like fire and he tastes like a promise that you’ve never even hoped for.

This morning you woke up with Dewdrop in your bed. And as you get up, as he dresses you both and then leads you out of your cell, you know that’s the last time that’ll happen.

Because tomorrow, and every day after that, you’ll wake up with Dewdrop in his bed.