キラリ★キラリ

It probably should bother you, but it never really does. He's always so sweet to you, kissing your hand when he greets you, brings you food to share at mealtimes, books he enjoys— he especially loves bringing you flowers, it seems. He seems to hold preference for giving you coreopsis, camapnula, celandine. One night when he dropped in for supper he told you, glancing out the window with a frown.

"Y'know, they say a monster lives in the forest, here."

You laughed. "Don't they just tell kids that?"

"Eh, I don't believe it. But everyone else does. I've never seen anything freaky in the woods."

"… Freakier than you, you mean."

He laughed, nodding as he covered his mouth to finish swallowing the mouthful of food. "Y-yeah. Exactly."

He didn't tell you any more, though, but was still insistent on keeping close to keep you safe when you went out. Again, you don't much mind. He's handsome and affectionate and again, for all his morbid statements and unhinged thoughts, he's just… sweet, in his own way, and he seems to truly like you. Even if there is something… off in his eyes. Sometimes in the dark if you look in the direction of his house, you'll see two red pinpricks watching you.

He doesn't spend every waking moment with you, though— that wouldn't be happening for a while. Perhaps the inciting incident that put it into his head is the argument you suffer in the town square. A merchant that sells various textiles— fabrics and thread and notions for making your own clothing. You're not even sure what started it, and you incorrectly hope that as someone who'd been an outsider to the village till you showed up that he might show you some understanding. But no— your hands shake as he starts shouting at you, calling you a thief and all kinds of other awful names, right in front of everyone else. You apologize, trying to get your shaking hands and teary eyes to work to count out the coins to settle the difference. You really, really, don't mean to cause any trouble. No one comes to your rescue.

Except for Lohen.

He shows up out of nowhere, telling the merchant to back off. When he doesn't, Lohen punches him so hard he's out cold before he hits the ground. You don't even process it before his hands are cupping your cheeks, looking you over. "He didn't hurt you, right?" His eyes are wild, and for the first time you see them have a hint of light in them.

"N-no, no, I'm okay… just… It was just a lot."

He hugs you tight, so tight you feel your ribs protest, but it brings you back to the moment. The merchant slowly picks himself up, spitting a broken tooth and a bit of blood on the ground. You miss how Lohen's eyes widen and his tongue roves over his own lips at the sight. Especially since his eyes narrow when he watches the merchant stand up again, his hand pressing to the growing bruise on his cheek. "Don't mess with her ever again, you hear me? You won't get away with it just because she's new."

He walks you home after that, arm around you as he glares around just in case someone dares to try anything. But no— everything is quiet. He's insistent on staying for a while until you calm back down, and when he finally does leave you pull him in for a soft kiss.

He pulls back abruptly, eyes going wide and his face going red as he stammers, one hand covering his mouth. Even so, you can just barely see his lips curling into a smile behind his fingers. Lohen slowly lets his hand drop— he insists that he'd not done all of that to earn your affection, but… he'd hardly turn it away. He does really like you, after all. He kisses you that time, and you're shocked to find his lips tasted of iron.

Things are peaceful for a few days. The merchant even apologizes to you, telling you that he'd forgive the difference and would keep a better eye on the price tags and change given from here on. Lohen seems to be in even higher spirits, walking around with your hand clasped in his, or his arm around your shoulders or waist, his lips never far from your cheek or your forehead or your ear. He seems so insistent on taking things slow despite being at your home even more than before— you were surprised when he told you he'd never been in love before.

"Nobody ever really caught my interest," he said with a bit of a mischievous smile, twirling his knife around his fingers. As scary as the blade looked with curved spikes and brutal edges, you only ever see him use it to cut flowers that he then weaves into your hair (now dame's violet or eyebright, most often) or to carve little animals out of pieces of wood. You've amassed a tiny army of them on the windowsill in your kitchen. You once commented on how cute a particular one was, and you noticed he's since made more of that same critter than any other.

Well, that animal other than bunnies. He likes carving rabbits quite a bit. Or maybe hares? He doesn't seem to mind what you call them, but he's happy you like them so much. Each rabbit is wildly different from the last, not like iterations of other animals. When he carves two cats, for example, it's clearly the same feline in a different pose— perhaps based off the one that loves to nap on the roof of your porch and soak up sunbeams. But each rabbit is plainly different, with different shapes in their ears, positionings of their tails, fur lengths, eyes and noses…. When you pointed the differences out, he'd been delighted, telling you he had, indeed, been making different bunnies each time. And now, your army has an entire squadron of little wooden bunnies.

"They help me keep an eye on you," he says with a warm smile, kissing your forehead.

You let yourself fall into step with the peaceful times, not fearing confrontation in the town square nor the monster in the woods. Lohen told you not to fret on both fronts. You trust him to keep you safe.

… And then, they find the body.

You awake to the sound of screams from outside. You'd hurried out, still in your nightdress, racing down the road only to find a corpse lying in the town square. It hadn't been thrown into the fountain but it's definitely close, with splatters of blood going between it and the body as if it had tried desperately to reach the water before falling cold and still. It's wrapped in bloody fabric and tufts of fluffy fur, like shed hair. A small chorus of gasps washes through the gathered people, which turn to screams as someone finally flips the bloodied body over to reveal that their face is completely unrecognizable, as if it had been eaten up by a hundred little wild beasts with sharp teeth. The bites are too big to be a rat or a mouse, but too small to even have been a cat. The teeth don't seem match dogs or cats, either. The village head does a headcount, and you felt your stomach drop when they find the victim to be the merchant that you'd fought with the other day. The others all take steps away from you… except Lohen, who sidles through the crowd to stand closer and put his arm protectively around you.

"Eh, good riddance," Lohen says once you're back home.

"Don't say that! S-someone's dead, Lohen!"

"Yeah, but he made you cry." He shrugs, like that's all he needed to say. You hate to admit that you feel an odd happiness alongside the sinking feeling at his words. Really, you should have known he'd say something to such an effect, but… "If he's that quick to fly off the handle over a mistake, who knows what else he'd do?"

He fixes you cocoa, and gently strokes your hair as you drink it. Even as morbid as he could be, you can't help but feel a bit amazed how pleased he seems with the turn of events. And not long after that, the village head shows up, his face grave as Lohen opens the door.

It's then that you discover just what had happened.

The merchant had grown frustrated once more with how you'd, apparently, embarrassed him, and had gone after you. The easier target, you aren't afraid to admit that. You hadn't been the one to knock him out cold with a glancing blow, after all. And so the man had snuck to your house in the dead of night and… well, his now-widow refused to say just what he planned to do, but from the look on the village head's face you could only make a handful of guesses that it would not have been pretty.

Lohen pulls you closer, wrapping both arms around you protectively as you start to shake.

Oddly— or perhaps not oddly at all, people are kind to you again after that. They blame the murder on the monster, and though you still endure the occasional comment about the incident, even the merchant's former friends are kind. Lohen, though, is still insistent that he keep an eye on you. One night you ask if he'd rather just stay with you, and he seems so relieved you asked.

You never slept better in your life. You heard him speaking gently to you as he strokes your hair, and your eyelids and limbs feel so heavy… but when you wake up so refreshed, does it really matter?

Things become calm again, and you adjust to this new normal. Lohen is even clingier and more doting than before, but sometimes he goes on long walks alone. And while you never once wake up alone in the middle of the night, you have an odd feeling that he doesn't stay in your bed together the whole time. He never admits to it, so you stopped pressing. He must have his reasons, right?

And then another body turns up. The same way, like they'd been mauled by a thousand vicious pairs of sharp teeth, their face gone in a mess of ragged flesh and blood. Again, the village head does a count and finds it was one of the farmers this time. It almost seems random, and so Lohen's nonchalance doesn't put you on edge quite the same way as it had before. "It's for the best," he says with a shrug, cuddling you into his chest. "He was always looking at you kinda creepy. But… don't worry. No one will ever hurt you as long as I'm here."

Perhaps you should have figured it out by now. Perhaps it's conscious choice that you don't suspect him— you don't want to, after all. He's shown his sweet side to you, and it's precious. He's strong, and a little bloodthirsty, and has morbid thoughts, but… There is simply no way Lohen could be connected. Lohen, who holds your hand and kisses each knuckle with reverence like he's counting a rosary, who kisses your lips with so much love and so much want all at once that it makes you feel like the most beautiful creature on the planet, that once showed you a secret path into a clearing in the forest to pick flowers from, who sneezed when you blew dandelions into his face and then laughed even as he sneezed again and again, who signs up for patrols with aplomb to protect you (even if he only ever showed up with other peoples' blood on him, never his own), who sits and watches you sleep with your head in his lap, gently stroking your hair like a beloved little pet. Lohen, who dotes on you, who tends to your needs and whims gladly, who greets you with a warm smile every morning, who still brings you flowers picked from the fields and the clearing and anywhere else (now often primrose and rhodendron, and once an edelweiss he gave you with pride), who still whittles you cute little figurines with his knife, who always holds you so close you feel almost like he wanted to crawl into you and live in your chest instead…

But one morning, you wake up and he's gone. That never happened before, at least not without ample warning. But normally you'd still wake up only after he returned and had curled back up next to you, humming contentedly and pressing kisses to the side of your head. Worry catches on your heart like brambles on your clothes and you throw back the covers, wrapping yourself in your coat and hopping around to fasten your boots on your feet properly. You look around outside and find a puddle of blood on the back doorstep.

It's dry, only still barely damp in the middle, congealed into a disgusting gelatinous clot there that makes you feel sick just looking at it. The rust-colored splashes trail down into the forest. The thought that the monster might have gotten him rushes through your head, but you still race headlong into the woods, following the trail.

Fear rages in your heart, pounding faster than a rabbit's feet as it flees the jaws of a wolf. You race past the clearing, and when you gaze into the still-dark woods in the morning mists, in the shadows where the rays of sunlight don't illuminate, countless red circles point back at you.

You near a break in the trees— a creek that Lohen sometimes wandered over to when he wanted time to think alone, the rare times he thought that being truly idle was acceptable. He'd taken you there once, a long while ago, and the two of you had floated down the stream a ways, laughing as you bumped gently into the rocks only a few dozen yards down.

You aren't laughing anymore. You finally see him, wading in the water, facing away from you, and splattered with blood.

You aren't sure how you knew, but like every time before, you know it isn't his.

You feel those thousands of pinpricks of crimson light pointing on you still, even if they never show on your skin.

Lohen turns slowly, a smile on his lips that reaches his eyes, his pale skin a shock as you see the water dyed scarlet around his legs, bared from the pants leg being rolled up to his thigh. His shirt is somehow still a pristine white, like the blood flowed off of him like rain off a duck's back. All over the ground between you are scraps of cloth in colors he decidedly is not wearing, all with sickening deep red splotches. You step on something soft and wet and a splash of red shows on the grass beneath your boot. You decide not to lift your foot to inspect it. Similar globs, so wine-red they look black, lie scattered around the ground, like two wild beasts fought tooth and nail for whatever produced them.

Lohen holds his knife loosely, not a drop of blood on it, yet you can only assume from his hands still stained that it must have been dyed red not long ago.

A bouquet of flowers— begonia, hawksbeard, coltsfoot, mallow, nightshade— is tucked into the waistband of his pants, held firmly in place around his lithe frame by a belt you bought him not long ago— water beads on its carefully-waxed surface.

"Oh, good morning, love. I hope I didn't wake you."

You get close enough— you didn't realize you were moving still, but you were close enough to notice unfamiliar freckles on his cheeks. No, not freckles. Blood that had long ago dried.

"I just thought I'd handle taking out the trash for you, that's all."

It probably should bother you, but it never really does. He's always so sweet to you, kissing your hand when he greets you, brings you food to share at mealtimes, books he enjoys— he especially loves bringing you flowers, it seems. He seems to hold preference for giving you coreopsis, camapnula, celandine. One night when he dropped in for supper he told you, glancing out the window with a frown.

"Y'know, they say a monster lives in the forest, here."

You laughed. "Don't they just tell kids that?"

"Eh, I don't believe it. But everyone else does. I've never seen anything freaky in the woods."

"… Freakier than you, you mean."

He laughed, nodding as he covered his mouth to finish swallowing the mouthful of food. "Y-yeah. Exactly."

He didn't tell you any more, though, but was still insistent on keeping close to keep you safe when you went out. Again, you don't much mind. He's handsome and affectionate and again, for all his morbid statements and unhinged thoughts, he's just… sweet, in his own way, and he seems to truly like you. Even if there is something… off in his eyes. Sometimes in the dark if you look in the direction of his house, you'll see two red pinpricks watching you.

He doesn't spend every waking moment with you, though— that wouldn't be happening for a while. Perhaps the inciting incident that put it into his head is the argument you suffer in the town square. A merchant that sells various textiles— fabrics and thread and notions for making your own clothing. You're not even sure what started it, and you incorrectly hope that as someone who'd been an outsider to the village till you showed up that he might show you some understanding. But no— your hands shake as he starts shouting at you, calling you a thief and all kinds of other awful names, right in front of everyone else. You apologize, trying to get your shaking hands and teary eyes to work to count out the coins to settle the difference. You really, really, don't mean to cause any trouble. No one comes to your rescue.

Except for Lohen.

He shows up out of nowhere, telling the merchant to back off. When he doesn't, Lohen punches him so hard he's out cold before he hits the ground. You don't even process it before his hands are cupping your cheeks, looking you over. "He didn't hurt you, right?" His eyes are wild, and for the first time you see them have a hint of light in them.

"N-no, no, I'm okay… just… It was just a lot."

He hugs you tight, so tight you feel your ribs protest, but it brings you back to the moment. The merchant slowly picks himself up, spitting a broken tooth and a bit of blood on the ground. You miss how Lohen's eyes widen and his tongue roves over his own lips at the sight. Especially since his eyes narrow when he watches the merchant stand up again, his hand pressing to the growing bruise on his cheek. "Don't mess with her ever again, you hear me? You won't get away with it just because she's new."

He walks you home after that, arm around you as he glares around just in case someone dares to try anything. But no— everything is quiet. He's insistent on staying for a while until you calm back down, and when he finally does leave you pull him in for a soft kiss.

He pulls back abruptly, eyes going wide and his face going red as he stammers, one hand covering his mouth. Even so, you can just barely see his lips curling into a smile behind his fingers. Lohen slowly lets his hand drop— he insists that he'd not done all of that to earn your affection, but… he'd hardly turn it away. He does really like you, after all. He kisses you that time, and you're shocked to find his lips tasted of iron.

Things are peaceful for a few days. The merchant even apologizes to you, telling you that he'd forgive the difference and would keep a better eye on the price tags and change given from here on. Lohen seems to be in even higher spirits, walking around with your hand clasped in his, or his arm around your shoulders or waist, his lips never far from your cheek or your forehead or your ear. He seems so insistent on taking things slow despite being at your home even more than before— you were surprised when he told you he'd never been in love before.

"Nobody ever really caught my interest," he said with a bit of a mischievous smile, twirling his knife around his fingers. As scary as the blade looked with curved spikes and brutal edges, you only ever see him use it to cut flowers that he then weaves into your hair (now dame's violet or eyebright, most often) or to carve little animals out of pieces of wood. You've amassed a tiny army of them on the windowsill in your kitchen. You once commented on how cute a particular one was, and you noticed he's since made more of that same critter than any other.

Well, that animal other than bunnies. He likes carving rabbits quite a bit. Or maybe hares? He doesn't seem to mind what you call them, but he's happy you like them so much. Each rabbit is wildly different from the last, not like iterations of other animals. When he carves two cats, for example, it's clearly the same feline in a different pose— perhaps based off the one that loves to nap on the roof of your porch and soak up sunbeams. But each rabbit is plainly different, with different shapes in their ears, positionings of their tails, fur lengths, eyes and noses…. When you pointed the differences out, he'd been delighted, telling you he had, indeed, been making different bunnies each time. And now, your army has an entire squadron of little wooden bunnies.

"They help me keep an eye on you," he says with a warm smile, kissing your forehead.

You let yourself fall into step with the peaceful times, not fearing confrontation in the town square nor the monster in the woods. Lohen told you not to fret on both fronts. You trust him to keep you safe.

… And then, they find the body.

You awake to the sound of screams from outside. You'd hurried out, still in your nightdress, racing down the road only to find a corpse lying in the town square. It hadn't been thrown into the fountain but it's definitely close, with splatters of blood going between it and the body as if it had tried desperately to reach the water before falling cold and still. It's wrapped in bloody fabric and tufts of fluffy fur, like shed hair. A small chorus of gasps washes through the gathered people, which turn to screams as someone finally flips the bloodied body over to reveal that their face is completely unrecognizable, as if it had been eaten up by a hundred little wild beasts with sharp teeth. The bites are too big to be a rat or a mouse, but too small to even have been a cat. The teeth don't seem match dogs or cats, either. The village head does a headcount, and you felt your stomach drop when they find the victim to be the merchant that you'd fought with the other day. The others all take steps away from you… except Lohen, who sidles through the crowd to stand closer and put his arm protectively around you.

"Eh, good riddance," Lohen says once you're back home.

"Don't say that! S-someone's dead, Lohen!"

"Yeah, but he made you cry." He shrugs, like that's all he needed to say. You hate to admit that you feel an odd happiness alongside the sinking feeling at his words. Really, you should have known he'd say something to such an effect, but… "If he's that quick to fly off the handle over a mistake, who knows what else he'd do?"

He fixes you cocoa, and gently strokes your hair as you drink it. Even as morbid as he could be, you can't help but feel a bit amazed how pleased he seems with the turn of events. And not long after that, the village head shows up, his face grave as Lohen opens the door.

It's then that you discover just what had happened.

The merchant had grown frustrated once more with how you'd, apparently, embarrassed him, and had gone after you. The easier target, you aren't afraid to admit that. You hadn't been the one to knock him out cold with a glancing blow, after all. And so the man had snuck to your house in the dead of night and… well, his now-widow refused to say just what he planned to do, but from the look on the village head's face you could only make a handful of guesses that it would not have been pretty.

Lohen pulls you closer, wrapping both arms around you protectively as you start to shake.

Oddly— or perhaps not oddly at all, people are kind to you again after that. They blame the murder on the monster, and though you still endure the occasional comment about the incident, even the merchant's former friends are kind. Lohen, though, is still insistent that he keep an eye on you. One night you ask if he'd rather just stay with you, and he seems so relieved you asked.

You never slept better in your life. You heard him speaking gently to you as he strokes your hair, and your eyelids and limbs feel so heavy… but when you wake up so refreshed, does it really matter?

Things become calm again, and you adjust to this new normal. Lohen is even clingier and more doting than before, but sometimes he goes on long walks alone. And while you never once wake up alone in the middle of the night, you have an odd feeling that he doesn't stay in your bed together the whole time. He never admits to it, so you stopped pressing. He must have his reasons, right?

And then another body turns up. The same way, like they'd been mauled by a thousand vicious pairs of sharp teeth, their face gone in a mess of ragged flesh and blood. Again, the village head does a count and finds it was one of the farmers this time. It almost seems random, and so Lohen's nonchalance doesn't put you on edge quite the same way as it had before. "It's for the best," he says with a shrug, cuddling you into his chest. "He was always looking at you kinda creepy. But… don't worry. No one will ever hurt you as long as I'm here."

Perhaps you should have figured it out by now. Perhaps it's conscious choice that you don't suspect him— you don't want to, after all. He's shown his sweet side to you, and it's precious. He's strong, and a little bloodthirsty, and has morbid thoughts, but… There is simply no way Lohen could be connected. Lohen, who holds your hand and kisses each knuckle with reverence like he's counting a rosary, who kisses your lips with so much love and so much want all at once that it makes you feel like the most beautiful creature on the planet, that once showed you a secret path into a clearing in the forest to pick flowers from, who sneezed when you blew dandelions into his face and then laughed even as he sneezed again and again, who signs up for patrols with aplomb to protect you (even if he only ever showed up with other peoples' blood on him, never his own), who sits and watches you sleep with your head in his lap, gently stroking your hair like a beloved little pet. Lohen, who dotes on you, who tends to your needs and whims gladly, who greets you with a warm smile every morning, who still brings you flowers picked from the fields and the clearing and anywhere else (now often primrose and rhodendron, and once an edelweiss he gave you with pride), who still whittles you cute little figurines with his knife, who always holds you so close you feel almost like he wanted to crawl into you and live in your chest instead…

But one morning, you wake up and he's gone. That never happened before, at least not without ample warning. But normally you'd still wake up only after he returned and had curled back up next to you, humming contentedly and pressing kisses to the side of your head. Worry catches on your heart like brambles on your clothes and you throw back the covers, wrapping yourself in your coat and hopping around to fasten your boots on your feet properly. You look around outside and find a puddle of blood on the back doorstep.

It's dry, only still barely damp in the middle, congealed into a disgusting gelatinous clot there that makes you feel sick just looking at it. The rust-colored splashes trail down into the forest. The thought that the monster might have gotten him rushes through your head, but you still race headlong into the woods, following the trail.

Fear rages in your heart, pounding faster than a rabbit's feet as it flees the jaws of a wolf. You race past the clearing, and when you gaze into the still-dark woods in the morning mists, in the shadows where the rays of sunlight don't illuminate, countless red circles point back at you.

You near a break in the trees— a creek that Lohen sometimes wandered over to when he wanted time to think alone, the rare times he thought that being truly idle was acceptable. He'd taken you there once, a long while ago, and the two of you had floated down the stream a ways, laughing as you bumped gently into the rocks only a few dozen yards down.

You aren't laughing anymore. You finally see him, wading in the water, facing away from you, and splattered with blood.

You aren't sure how you knew, but like every time before, you know it isn't his.

You feel those thousands of pinpricks of crimson light pointing on you still, even if they never show on your skin.

Lohen turns slowly, a smile on his lips that reaches his eyes, his pale skin a shock as you see the water dyed scarlet around his legs, bared from the pants leg being rolled up to his thigh. His shirt is somehow still a pristine white, like the blood flowed off of him like rain off a duck's back. All over the ground between you are scraps of cloth in colors he decidedly is not wearing, all with sickening deep red splotches. You step on something soft and wet and a splash of red shows on the grass beneath your boot. You decide not to lift your foot to inspect it. Similar globs, so wine-red they look black, lie scattered around the ground, like two wild beasts fought tooth and nail for whatever produced them.

Lohen holds his knife loosely, not a drop of blood on it, yet you can only assume from his hands still stained that it must have been dyed red not long ago.

A bouquet of flowers— begonia, hawksbeard, coltsfoot, mallow, nightshade— is tucked into the waistband of his pants, held firmly in place around his lithe frame by a belt you bought him not long ago— water beads on its carefully-waxed surface.

"Oh, good morning, love. I hope I didn't wake you."

You get close enough— you didn't realize you were moving still, but you were close enough to notice unfamiliar freckles on his cheeks. No, not freckles. Blood that had long ago dried.

"I just thought I'd handle taking out the trash for you, that's all."