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#3: Little Lion

It has been nine days since Brother Côme was eaten in the Mid-Winter Feast. He was either killed, or Transubstantiated, his soul continuing on in the body of Abbot Barnabé. Little Bruce Archambeau, the mouse novice-initiate, and apparent new favourite of the Abbot, remains burdened by doubt as to the Brother’s ultimate fate, as well as his own.

It has become apparent, undeniable, that the predator monks of the Leonsjardine Abbey want to devour him. Sooner or later, it will happen. He had always known this of his predatory neighbours and peers. It is the cornerstone of the Faith, the exaltation of the prey that they become Sacrament for the predator who chooses, one day, to consume them. This is the way of the world. And yet, it had always been strangely abstract, a matter to mull over later, or that would only ever be relevant to others. He sits at his desk and watches the snow fall outside of his window. A storm in the distance, approaching swiftly. Brother Nicodemus suspects a blizzard is on the way and others more fit have been preparing the Abbey for the winds, while he has been left to his own devices, considered too small to be of much use in the toil. Instead, he is to draw. That is his work, painting and transcription, the creation of a brilliant Illuminated Manuscript containing another man’s words, meditations on the Old Scripture and what it has to say to prey like himself. Words written by a predator.

That is, he wonders now, important?

His teeth ache. He presses his thumb into his mouth, tastes the charcoal staining his hands and murmurs about his own stupidity. He feels over where canine fangs would be if he were not born a mouse and imagines himself as a lion, like the Son of God, like Abbot Barnabé, like the brilliant bodies portrayed in the abbey’s many tapestries, statues and stained glass windows. Not to be, he supposes. A mouse. Small, meager, designed by God to be fearful food.

The work has been difficult over the last week. Thoughts don’t align properly. Where once he would write with simple acceptance of the Old Scripture, accepting its poetry and symbolism like a warm blanket, like reassurance that all was right in the world, now everything seems to carry a sinister edge.

In the Beginning God said Let There Be Life!

and so there was

and it was Perfect.

The Carnivore fed on the meat of the Prey,

and the Prey did not resent him.

This is Divinity.

How does the one who is swallowed write their own word? What prevents the predator from simply burning his work once the hunting is done? What, little Bruce wonders, realizing for the first time that his room has become incredibly cold, prevents the Abbot or whomever from simply destroying his work once he has been swallowed away?

---

A familiar knock at his door disrupts the mouse’s brooding. He recognizes his guest as Brother Mathéo the stoat before he even rises to open the door. Brother Mathéo had been the first to invite Bruce out of his little room to join the congregation at mealtimes, and thus the first to become Bruce’s friend. The mouse is of a quiet, introspective and anxious disposition and so has had few other conversations. He knows only a handful of names to match to his fellow monks, and has spoken more in the past few weeks than he had since his arrival (in fact, some of the other monks presumed he was either mute or had taken a vow of silence).

The mouse opens his door to find the stoat waiting for him, fangs bared in a warm smile that promptly vanishes. Mathéo looks over Bruce’s head, surveys the mouse’s room, clutches his arms across his chest and feigns a shiver. “God. You must be freezing, little friend. The draft in your room is unbearable.”

“I didn’t notice,” Bruce answers honestly.

The stoat regards him with concern. Then he squats down, so that they are near to eye-level, though Bruce’s head still only reaches Mathéo’s chin. “You must look after yourself,” he says, settling his hands upon Bruce’s narrow shoulders.

“Yes. I apologize. I’ve been…”

“You’ve been worried and depressed since the Feast,” Mathéo insists. Bruce only nods, seeing little reason in denying the fact. It is a difficult thing to reconcile oneself as a meal in waiting. Mathéo is sympathetic, of course, but a predator by nature. Bruce doubts he could understand, and so they haven’t discussed it.

“Right. Come on.” Mathéo curls an arm behind Bruce’s thighs and suddenly lifts him clean from the floor, as if he weighed nothing. Bruce, who had fantasized about being handled by the stoat since Mathéo began showing an interest in him, sinks into the embrace easily. He wraps his arms around Mathéo’s neck and sinks his face into the stoat’s chest. Mathéo holds an arm around Bruce’s back. A comfortable, easy embrace. “You’ve overcome some of your nerves,” Mathéo observes.

“I know most Brothers here will like me even if I’m awkward,” Bruce murmurs back. “Abbot Barnabé believes I’m tasty.”

“They’ll be fond of you for more than that, if you let them know you,” the stoat sighs. He closes the door to Bruce’s chamber with a shove of his hip, then turns and carries the mouse through the abbey’s corridors.

Bruce realizes that they aren’t headed toward their usual destination, the dining hall. He asks Mathéo why.

The stoat explains, “surrounding yourself with hungry men isn’t the best thing for you. Not at the moment.”

“What about your dinner? Or is that me?”

Mathéo shakes his head and holds the mouse tighter against his chest.

Inwardly, Bruce realizes that he’s being difficult. Before the Feast, before Brother Côme and his conversations with Abbot Barnabé, he would dream about being carried by Mathéo. When he was alone, before he befriended the stoat, he would imagine what it would be like to be noticed and accepted, without fear of being perceived. Although he would never admit it aloud, the little mouse dreamed of having conversations without feeling he should run and hide, in a world where people bent down to speak to him. That he went with the Abbot to his chambers after the Feast has made him a subject of idle gossip. Brothers acknowledge him now, and some speculate within earshot that he may well by the next Feast’s Sacrament, something they believe ought to be a compliment.

“Oh, is he hurt?” An unfamiliar voice. Bruce leans back to look over his shoulder. One of the abbey’s two fox Brothers, on his way to the dining hall. Bruce feels his face flush with heat. It’s embarrassing to be carried, or to be seen in another’s arms at all. Then he dimly recalls that he had seen this fox either mounted by, or mounting, his fellow fox at the Mid-Summer Feast, and wonders why he’s so ashamed to be seen with Mathéo.

“No, no. He’s just been up all night working away at his book,” Mathéo lies on his behalf. The stoat pats his back with a chuckle that Bruce feels roll through his little chest.

“Well…” The fox sets a hand down atop his head, mussing his fur as if he were a boy. “Don’t work too hard now. You’ve all the time in the world. God is in the doing of the deed, not the deed once done.”

Bruce lifts his head again. He twists about and Mathéo moves with him, so that he can look up to the fox, who stands a head-and-a-half above him. “What do you mean by that, Brother…”

“Reynarde,” Mathéo whispers to him.

Bruce gives Mathéo a look. Mathéo only frowns in response.

Bruce clears his throat and repeats, “what do you mean by that, Brother Reynarde?”

The fox folds his hands into the sleeves of his robe. His head dips to the side, one black ear pointed straight up. He answers, his voice a touch softer, as if to reassure Bruce that there is no shame in the asking, “when novices and the like come to the abbey, they often have it in their minds that we’re here to have done, to have painted, to have written, but this is not so. We find ourselves in the work, the labour. The dreaming of the next brushstroke is as important as the brushstroke itself, but the painting…” The fox only shrugs. “I am not a talented artist. I have painted and painted and never seem to improve. Maybe this is simply a way of making myself feel better about that fact, but I find, when I let my mind wander from the painting itself to what I feel as I paint… There is an honesty. I come nearer to Divinity. It is the same for you, isn’t it?”

“I find my mind wanders far from whatever I feel I must paint,” little Bruce confesses.

Reynarde considers this for a time, then asks, “so why not paint what’s on your mind for a while, instead?”

“My manuscript,” Bruce starts, but the fox only tuts and shakes his head.

“All the time in the world!” he interjects with a musical little laugh. “Oh, but I’m starved. They had us coating the roofs in that wretched-smelling tar most of the day. Please excuse me, Brothers.”

“Thank you,” Bruce says.

Mathéo and Reynarde wish each other well, and then Mathéo is on his way again.

---

They meet another Brother on their way, and another, each of them pausing to ask after Bruce’s wellbeing. These are the same men who had fallen into a frenzied orgy as they watched his fellow mouse be swallowed alive not a fortnight earlier. Some sort of facade, Bruce wonders? Had the Faith allowed them to overcome their inner bestial nature, as the Abbot proposes?

“Here we are,” Mathéo says. He shifts Bruce into one arm so that he can open the door of his own chambers, somewhere Bruce has imagined yet never seen.

Before Mathéo can push the door aside, the two are interrupted again.

“Is he well?” another new voice.

Bruce twists about again. By now, Mathéo seems to know to move the mouse accordingly, so that he may be a part of their conversation. Bruce is confronted first by a wall of round fabric, another of the abbey’s enormous denizens. He leans back, tipping his head, and feels a cold shot of animal fear run through him as his eyes meet the round yellow eyes of the owl, Brother Gauvain. The one who Bruce had seen swallow another small prey monk at the Feast, outside of the ordinary bounds of the ritual. The owl regards him with his vast eyes half-lidded. A soft, round face, which would put Bruce at ease were he not now distinctly aware of the vicious beak protruding through Brother Gauvain’s feathers. Is he only curious? Or is it something else? Bruce finds the owl’s expressions difficult to read, his features too strange. Mammals who spend no time among avians often have such difficulties, and this is the first time that a bird of any kind has struck up a conversation with him.

“I see.” Brother Gauvain doesn’t look toward Mathéo for even a moment. His empty, black pupils remain fixed on Bruce. His face ripples, the feathers rising and falling in a wave. A distinctive brow line emerges amid his feathers, like a scowl, and two fearsome black horns rise atop his head. The owl’s orange eyes widen until they are all that Bruce can see. He reaches down the vast measure of distance between himself and Brother Mathéo to extend a talon toward Bruce, as if to shake hands.

“We’ve not yet met. I tend the library. Your manuscript will be added to my shelves, once you have completed it. Or perhaps we will feature it in an open display. Wouldn’t that be exciting?”

Bruce finds he cannot answer. His voice catches in his throat. Tension rises through his body. He feels he wants to escape. Run, crawl under something, disappear. Underneath the instinctual fear to flee is something else, something stranger, something that Brother Edmé the bear and Abbot Barnabé had been able to draw out of him in their moments together, somehow made more intense. He wants to see Brother Gauvain’s throat, to be seized in talons, pierced with the owl’s beak, ripped apart and eaten. No, he doesn’t. That thought came to him unbidden, a frightened mind attempting to make something pleasant of doom.

The owl clears his throat and shiver runs through Bruce.

“It would be embarrassing if you didn’t shake my hand, little one,” the owl mentions. The mouse’s eyes shift downward, noting the owl’s incredible claws. Far more fearsome than Abbot Barnabé’s; those had concealed themselves seemingly for Bruce’s benefit. The owl’s body allows no such courtesy.

“Bruce?” Mathéo bounces the mouse in his arms. He sounds concerned. Bruce is only dimly aware of him. His eyes are drawn, inescapably, back to the owl’s.

Does he want to touch the owl’s talon? Yes, of course. But the cold dread in his chest prevents him from moving. He had been afraid of Abbot Barnabé in moments, but not like this. And yet, the owl continues to stare. Bruce feels certain that there is a raw, primal hunger in Gauvain’s eyes, that the owl sees him only as food.

The moment stretches on.

Mathéo interrupts it. He says, “poor Bruce isn’t well. He needs rest. Please excuse –”

Gauvain lifts his hand. He sets it down on the wall beside Mathéo’s head. His claws carve the stone. Mathéo falls silent. Is he afraid as well? An owl could eat a stoat, couldn’t it? At least one Gauvain’s size. The thought sends another jolt through Bruce. Predatores do eat one another, from time to time. It’s considered a sin, and a crime for which the punishment is always considerable. And yet, though he doubts so much of the Faith’s natural order now, looking up into Gauvain’s eyes, the nature of predator and prey seems absolute and undeniable, clarified by a single looming monster.

“Please excuse us,” Mathéo forces out, louder now.

Gauvain doesn’t move.

Finally, Bruce finds his voice. In a terrified squeak, he stammers, “Abbot Barnabé has told me that if anybody eats me, he will know I didn’t want it. He’ll treat it as a sin and he’ll investigate. You’ll be hanged.”

Gauvain cants his head sidelong. His horns recede some, but the crease in his brow remains prominent. His eyes lid themselves again, and the threat in his posture sinks like a sunset, inviting a strange, instinctual calm. That such slight motions can elicit such a powerful response in him makes Bruce nauseous, though that may just be the lingering horror.

“I can see this isn’t the right time for introductions,” Gauvain says, and Bruce almost believes that he hears some sort of hurt in Gauvain’s tone, some strange sorrow. Impossible. The owl bows his head to Bruce. “Another night. I do look forward to a proper conversation, when the time comes, little mouse.”

He briefly acknowledges Mathéo, but only for long enough to bid farewell. Then he simply drifts by, off down the corridor toward the dining hall, to eat something – or, Bruce suspects, perhaps some_one_ else.

---

“You have an erection,” Brother Mathéo mentions, his voice hushed. They’re inside of his room now, the door shut but not locked. No bedchamber in the whole of the abbey, except perhaps the Abbot’s quarters, has a lock.

Bruce stares at him. His capacity for thought returns in a trickle as the fear recedes.

“It’s alright. Nothing to be embarrassed about,” the stoat attempts a chuckle, but it sounds forced. He’s afraid too. “It happens to prey. A part of God’s mercy, following the First Transubstantiation. The Sacrifice of the Son of God made being devoured a more pleasurable thing, a reward to prey for keeping the Covenant, and – I’m rambling. I’m sorry.”

Mathéo carries Bruce through his room. More spacious than the mouse’s, though that is hardly a surprise. The stoat’s quarters are uncluttered, while Bruce lives surrounded by easels and canvas, rows of ink and paint, arrays of brushes.

At last, Mathéo sets Bruce down. His arms and shoulders had been hurting for a while now. He sits the mouse right on his bed, then straightens and stretches.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce says suddenly. “About my body. About this.”

“No, no. It’s natural for prey to become aroused,” Mathéo repeats. He lowers himself down again, kneeling before the seated mouse. His hands find Bruce’s. For perhaps the first time, they can look straight into one another’s eyes. The old stoat’s blue contrasts the owl’s terrifying yellow and puts Bruce at ease, and yet…

“That’s not what I mean. I don’t care about that,” Bruce starts,

“I do,” Mathéo interjects. He leans in, angling for a kiss.

Bruce continues to speak, even as Mathéo draws near. “He did that because I’m small. Because I’m a mouse. Brother Gauvain, he wouldn’t do that if I had teeth like yours, would he? Does he do that to you when you’re alone?”

Mathéo leans back into his heels. He hesitates for a moment, then answers honestly, “no. I’ve not spent much time with Brother Gauvain, but I have never seen him behave so… so brazenly,” he decides on the word.

“If I had teeth like yours,” Bruce murmurs. He sets one little hand on Mathéo’s cheek. The old stoat cups his own over it, holding it in place. He nuzzles against it. The mouse reaches his other hand forward, resting this one against the stoat’s chin. His tiny thumb traces Mathéo’s lower lip. Then, suddenly, he inches forward, fingertips creasing through the stoat’s mouth. Mathéo opens his jaw in surprise, brow furrowed, but Bruce is undeterred. He feels over Mathéo’s teeth, from the stoat’s gums up to their dagger-like points. He even tests a fingertip against them, urging his delicate skin down against one of Mathéo’s lower fangs. It takes no effort at all for Bruce to pierce his skin. He feels Mathéo’s tongue sweep over his hand, collecting up what little blood seeps from him.

Mathéo takes his wrist and draws his hand out. Suddenly, the stoat appears ashamed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have… Your blood,” he starts, searching for the right thing to say.

“It’s okay,” Bruce reassures him.

“The taste of it… It’s an instinct, little Bruce,” Mathéo attempts to explain, or perhaps to apologize.

“I know.”

They watch each other for a time. Bruce’s thoughts linger on Gauvain, on the nature of Leonsjardine, on Reynarde’s promise of all the time in the world and Gauvain’s silent promise of numbered days. Mathéo looks at him, finally, with the warmth and love that he has fantasized about, and Bruce feels –

“I want to make love to you,” Mathéo says.

“Why?” Bruce asks before he can stop himself.

“Because you’re beautiful. Because you’re so fearful, but brave enough to defy that part of yourself. Because you always smell faintly of ink and parchment. Because when you look at me,” Mathéo continues, his big hands now holding one of Bruce’s little paws. He eases the mouse’s slippers off and sets them aside, then he lifts Bruce’s paws to his lips, “I see such warmth and excitement in you. You’re always happy to see me.”

The mouse props himself up onto his elbows. He peers down at the vast mouth just ‘underneath’ his slight body, full of vicious teeth. Mathéo kisses his paws, right below his toes. His face flushes with heat. The stoat had done something like this before, a brief few kisses on the top of his paw before Mathéo moved on, and Bruce thought nothing of it. Now that Mathéo lingers, kissing him deliberately in this low, strange place…

He swallows and the thought of Gauvain’s hungry eyes fades, if only for the moment.

“I’ve never really made love,” Bruce claims, and he believes it. He thinks briefly of his time with Mathéo and Edmé during the Mid-Winter Feast, how abrupt it had been and how he came in the stoat’s mouth. He thinks of his night with the Abbot, being toyed with, thrusting himself against the lion’s stuffed stomach while Brother Côme faded away inside. No, he has never made love, he decides. Those encounters were something different, something more carnal, more about power and predation.

“Do you want to?” the stoat asks. He presses one of Bruce’s little pink paws to his cheek, nuzzling against it as he had the mouse’s hand, while he tends to the other.

“Yes. But I’m…”

“You’re worried that you don’t know how,” Mathéo intuits. He alternates which paw he kisses, and which he holds to his cheek.

Bruce nods once.

“There is no incorrect way,” Mathéo explains. He sets the mouse’s paws aside now and rises some, setting one hand on either side of Bruce’s knees. The mouse watches on as the stoat crawls forward over him, nearer and nearer, his smile revealing his teeth. “But the first thing we usually do is kiss.”

It isn’t like ‘kissing’ Abbot Barnabé, the lion’s size so fantastically different from Bruce’s own that the best they could do is press their noses together. Mathéo is twice Bruce’s height, but Bruce finds the stoat’s tongue can ease into his mouth if the stoat moves carefully, and that he can reach far enough into the stoat’s to explore, to feel his teeth. Too curious, or perhaps obsessed, he slides his tongue across one of the stoat’s fangs.

Suddenly, Mathéo moves with vigor. The stoat curls a hand around Bruce’s head, holding the mouse in place, while the other reaches briefly for the mouse’s neck, almost snatching it, before the stoat finds his composure and eases it down onto the mouse’s chest, pinning Bruce to the mattress. He feels the stoat’s tongue swirl over his. Mathéo sucks, pulling breath from the mouse. Bruce sets his little fists against Mathéo’s shoulders and makes a futile effort to shove the stoat away. He realizes, as his tongue starts to sting, what has happened; he’s cut himself inside of Mathéo’s mouth. Foolish.

And Mathéo, the predator he trusts, the one who has shown him kindness and compassion, the one he has so dreamt about, now holds him down and samples the taste of him with a monster’s desperation.

Bruce realizes he isn’t afraid. Not of Mathéo and not of the moment. Perhaps the stoat eats him. Perhaps he slides his maw a few short inches lower and rips apart his throat. Perhaps Mathéo swallows him whole. There’s comfort in finally feeling the fear at an end, replaced by a cold certainty. It wouldn’t be Gauvain, or some ritual spectacle like it was for Brother Côme. Just Mathéo. There’s comfort in that. Bruce feels aware, at last, of his whole body. Full of heat. His cock surges tight against his clothing, pinned uncomfortably by his linens.

Brother Mathéo raises his head. His breathing is heavy and frantic. Panicked, he pleads, “I’m sorry, little Bruce. I’m sorry. Don’t let me frighten you. It’s only, the taste of you, the taste,” the old monk starts to stutter, but Bruce rises to meet him in another kiss. Mathéo indulges him for a moment, then presses him back down against he mattress, subduing the mouse.

“This is a mistake. We shouldn’t. That damned owl, he has me in a state,” Mathéo lifts himself off of Bruce. He stands and paces away. The mouse sits on the edge of the bed again, rubbing blood from his mouth onto his wrist. The way the stoat eyes the red smear captivates him. “I’m not like this,” Mathéo promises. “The owl, the way he made me feel like…”

“Like prey,” Bruce observes. His tongue stings as he speaks.

“Yes. Like prey. I’m sorry. I know how that must sound. But yes. Like prey.” The stoat fails to meet Bruce’s eyes. He focuses on the floor. His hands are balled into fists. Mathéo is a respectable man in or near his fifties, but as Bruce looks at him now, he sees the fear and anxieties of someone much younger.

“Sometimes,” Bruce starts. His words catch in his throat. “Sometimes when I’m alone, or I’m dreaming – my mouth is full of fangs. A lion’s. I always feel I’m not supposed to be this thing. I’m not supposed to be small and weak and afraid. Maybe I’m a lion.”

Mathéo raises his gaze. They consider each other in silence for a time, the predator made to feel like prey and struggling, perhaps for the first time, to control his bestial nature, and Bruce.

---

In the Beginning God said Let There Be Life!

and so there was

and it was Perfect.

The Carnivore fed on the meat of the Prey,

and the Prey did not resent him.

This is Divinity.

– The Old Scripture, vol. 1, 1-2.

Divinity, here meant in reference to the natural fact of predation and the consumption of Prey, is designed by God in such a way as to establish natural principles, reflected in our bodies and thus in our natures. There are immutable facts of our being: the Predator’s teeth are sharp, meant for grasping and shredding meat; the Prey’s are flat, meant for the consumption of grass and other plantstuffs. The Prey’s body is made of meat, and the Predator’s unpalatable muscle, sinew and gristle. Thus, as consequence of these irrefutable natural facts, the Predator chooses to sup upon the Prey. It is as natural as drinking water, having sex, sleeping and waking.

For a time, this was Good. There was no hate, only two halves existing harmoniously within a perfect process. Both knew and understood their nature. The Prey feared, it fled, it hid, and the Predator made sport of rooting it out, capturing and consuming it. Even in the moment of his consumption, the Prey knew no malice, and held no bitterness, for his meat was sweet and sustained another.

Then came the Antagonist, who had come to despise God and His plans, for he had been made undesirable. He wore a spine of inedible quills, and so he was not Prey. His teeth were sharp yet he ate only insects, for he was too small and slow to Hunt, and so he was no Predator. God, in his benevolence and wisdom, designed the Antagonist so, and yet as he looked on the Divinity that was not to be his, the Antagonist became resentful. His was the first heart that ever began to hate, and he directed this hate toward God, and thus all of Creation, and sought its destruction.

He tore away his teeth so that none would see that they were sharp, and he went among the Prey and said, “look upon my cloak of thorns and see how they do not bite at me, do not Hunt me! See how I have lived for decades and decades unbitten! You too could live beyond your time! live without an ending in a Predator’s throat!”

This was the First Sin, and it was in the darkness that followed that God saw fit to send his son.

– Fr. Grégoire Laurent_, Apologetics & The Histories of the True Faith,_ 1171

He tore away his teeth.

---

“Little Bruce,” Brother Mathéo breaks the silence at last. He approaches the mouse again and, with some audible effort, he settles onto his knees before Bruce. There’s an uncertainty in his voice, the stoat struck with the strangeness of the mouse’s confession, though he asks, “should I treat you as a lion?”

“I either am or am not,” Bruce answers. He looks aside. A powerful weight sets into his chest, incorporeal but most certainly there. He cannot describe it. It feels like a part of him that should be in motion, suddenly stuck.

“It’s only us here, my little lion,” Mathéo answers.

Bruce searches Mathéo’s features for any hint insincerity, any sign that the stoat is condescending to him, and finds nothing. Confusion, perhaps. It’s evident that Mathéo does not understand, and how could he? Nevertheless, the older man, this predator with teeth so sharp simply touching them carelessly can cut, regards him with such compassion that Bruce relents. He sets his little hand on the stoat’s head, fingertips feeling over the base of Mathéo’s round ear.

Then he lifts his bloodied wrist to Mathéo’s mouth, holding it just shy of the stoat’s nose. He observes the way the stoat’s ears shift forward, the way his calm blue eyes widen, and feels the wet heat as Mathéo laps up his blood.

“You can’t treat me as a lion, Mathéo, because I’m not one.”

“We can pretend,” Mathéo offers, as if it were a sort of game.

“You can’t look at me the way you look at Gauvain. I can’t do to you what Gauvain does, or make you feel the way that Gauvain makes me feel,” Bruce attempts to explain.

Mathéo shakes his head now. His brow furrows, and he seeks out Bruce’s hand with his own. Drawing the mouse’s palm to his cheek, he asks, “why would you want to? What Gauvain does is cruel, little Bruce, and though you’re very shy, I know that you’re kind. You’re upset over the very idea of somebody being hurt.”

“I’m not kind,” Bruce insists. “I’m weak. To be kind, one has to be able to do harm, and choose otherwise. I don’t have that choice. You could bite my throat out, swallow me whole, do anything you want to me now, and you’re kneeling. You’re kissing my paws and you’re afraid to hurt me. You’re kind, Brother Mathéo. I’m not anything because I can choose nothing.”

“Ah.” Brother Mathéo smiles now, and Bruce feels for an instant that it might be at his expense, but the stoat reassures him with a brief kiss on the cheek. He avoids Bruce’s mouth, for fear that the mouse might still be bleeding. Then he rises, and backs away from the mouse by a stride.

“This will be much simpler with the both of us undressed,” he suggests.

Bruce hesitates. He asks, “do you still want to make love, Mathéo? I’d thought that, with the taste of my blood on your mind, it might be dangerous.”

“I can control my base instincts, my little lion.” The old stoat bundles his habit up to his waist, collecting it in fistfuls. Bruce glances down, learning at last that the snow white fur under his fellow monk’s chin continues down to at least Mathéo’s ankles, though his paws are tucked away in slippers. The stoat pauses, eyes on Bruce. Tentatively, he informs the mouse, “nothing has to happen.”

“I won’t let the owl ruin the evening for us,” Bruce decides.

With that, Brother Mathéo lifts his robe over his head. His slight belly shows through his tunic, drawing Bruce’s attention immediately. Unbidden, the thought enters his mind: how many of his fellow preyfolk have fallen into that very spot, to either fade away or become a part of Mathéo? He considers asking, but chooses against it. Mathéo comes to stand by the bed again, where he lays his robe down beside Bruce.

He is about to move away, to continue undressing, but Bruce places a little hand on his hip, causing the stoat to pause. “I’ve never touched somebody else here,” Bruce comments, his voice a touch soft. Mathéo chuckles and moves a half-stride toward the little mouse, so that he stands directly before the mouse, his crotch level with Bruce’s head. Even soft, Mathéo’s cock makes an impression in the linen, and even before he handles it at all, Bruce realizes it is the near the length of his forearm. He wonders, as his little hands create the fabric, probing cautiously around the outline of Mathéo’s manhood, whether it is possible to fit something of that size into his body at all. Virgin that he is, the little mouse decides, perhaps optimistically, that it must be, with effort and oil.

“Take your time,” Mathéo encourages the mouse, but the excitement of the moment at last has the best of Bruce. He sinks his fingers into the waistband of the stoat’s underwear and shoves them down, out of the way, though they catch around Mathéo’s thighs. There, for the first time in his life, Mathéo’s face is only inches from another man’s length. Soft and thick, it rests atop the stoat’s ample balls, themselves coated in snow-white fur that matches the stoat’s crotch, thighs and belly.

Overcome as much by curiosity as lust, Bruce curls his little hand around the stoat’s soft length, finding that his fingertips do not reach his thumb, and lifts it so that it points straight at his own face. Then he leans in and, following some strange instinct or impulse, he licks at the tip just once He finds that it’s like nothing he’s tasted before, sweet and strangely earthy. A sort of perfume? He wonders if Mathéo prepared for this encounter with the presumption that it might end in sex.

Mathéo strokes over his head, petting down one of his dome ears. He allows his hand to rest there. “You don’t need to use your mouth, little lion.”

“How like prey to avoid a lion’s maw,” Bruce answers. He means it to be a joke, but as he looks up along Mathéo’s old, fat body, expecting to find the stoat humouring him with a smile, he instead finds Mathéo regarding him with a strange sort of intensity, as if the phrase had struck something inside of the stoat. Uncertain, Bruce grazes his rodent buckteeth against the sensitive skin of Mathéo’s swelling glans, eliciting a sudden shudder from the older man. Then he asks, “isn’t that what you wanted to be?”

Mathéo’s cock surges to life. Bruce wraps both hands around it now, holding it just below the head, as he licks and kisses. Growing as it is, the little mouse discovers he can tease his tongue into the very tip, though not too far. Mathéo gasps, the stoat’s claws digging against Bruce’s scalp at the base of his ear, almost hard enough to break skin. Bruce lifts his head away just as a distinctive bead of precum forms at the end of Mathéo’s manhood, which Bruce eyes cautiously for a moment, before licking and swallowing. The taste strikes him. Sweet, again. Something natural about the stoat’s anatomy, or perhaps his diet.

“Wait for now,” Mathéo instructs. He lifts his hand from the back of the mouse’s head to instead press his forefinger and thumb to Bruce’s chin, easing the mouse away. Bruce regards him with a vague frown, but does not complain. Mathéo lifts away his undershirt, exposing his soft belly and chest, all milk-white without a single blemish, save the small tufts around his clear pink nipples. An old man, lacking muscle, his body round and warm from a life of ease.

Bruce considers him, face flush with heat. “You’re very handsome, Mathéo,” he says.

“Ah, I’m only an old man. You’re beautiful, little lion. Your fur, the patterns, even your tail,” Mathéo answers.

Mice consider sleek, smooth, furless tails desirable. Bruce’s, covered in as dense a coat as the rest of him, is considered unflattering among mice, and apparently charming to others. A curious thing. While Bruce ponders, for he is always pondering, the stoat moves. Mathéo lays his hands on Bruce’s shoulders and lays the mouse down, looming over him. To be made so vulnerable once again, pinned beneath a predator, with rows of needle-knife teeth only inches from his neck, elicits another shiver, another wave of pressure in his crotch. He attempts, as foolish as it is, to squirm out of his own clothes now, desperate to be as naked as Mathéo.

Sensing this, the stoat kisses Bruce’s cheek, then his chin, and finally attempts to kiss Bruce properly, fully, tongue easing into Bruce’s little mouth, where he tastes the lingering copper of the mouse’s bleeding tongue, now slowed to barely a trickle. The trapped little mouse gasps around the kiss. He wraps his feeble arms around Mathéo’s head, clutches at the stoat’s ears, all with the undeniable knowledge that he can do nothing to shove Mathéo away, should the stoat choose to linger. The stoat does, suckling at Bruce’s tongue to taste his blood again. It lasts minutes, hunger and desperation battling in the stoat, he lifts himself away with a gasp.

Noting the stoat’s restraint this time, his self-control, Bruce cants his head back, exposing his sleek cream-grey neck, and he says, “I want you to bite me.”

“Nonsense,” Mathéo answers immediately. “I couldn’t hurt you.”

“Don’t hurt me,” Bruce insists. “Bite me.” There’s a quiver in his voice. He doubts himself, and yet he lies still, head back, neck exposed. Mathéo watches Bruce’s adam’s apple bounce as the young novice swallows his nerves.

The stoat sinks his nose against Bruce’s fur. Then, gingerly, he opens his maw, and rests his knife-teeth against the skin of the mouse’s throat, enfolding it. Bruce sinks one hand into the stoat’s scruff, seizing a fistful of fur and skin. The other rests against Mathéo’s shoulder, as if he could force the stoat away, should he choose. A useless notion. Still, Bruce murmurs, “a little harder.”

Mathéo hesitates. Then, uncertain, he complies, tightening his maw a fraction of a centimeter.

A whimper and squeak escape Bruce. His head swims. “Just a little harder, Mathéo. Please.”

Mathéo’s teeth close tighter, tighter, little by little, testing the mouse’s delicate skin until – copper, again, hot and warm. Mathéo pierces into Bruce’s neck in rows. A strange, low moan rolls from the mouse’s chest, and he arches his back, while instinct seizes hold of Mathéo. The stoat forces Bruce back down with a heavy hand. His tongue slides across Bruce’s neck. A low, menacing growl rumbles from Mathéo’s throat, and for an instant, a strange, serene instant, Bruce is certain that he is about to die, to be ripped open and consumed –

– the moment does not come. Mathéo lifts his head away and wipes a streak of Bruce’s blood from his lip. He surveys the wound and finds it practically nonpresent. Hardly a pinprick. The bleeding will end in moments, if that. A ‘bite’ only by stretch of the imagination, but enough to make the mouse writhe.

“You see?” Bruce smiles up at him, sad and strange. “I’m not a lion. Not at all, Mathéo.”

The stoat does not answer. Instead he finds the hem of Bruce’s tunic and lifts it up over the mouse’s head, sweeping away the blood staining the mouse’s neck as he does. He spares a brief moment to sink his nose into the cream fur of the mouse’s belly, smelling him, lapping and lathing his tongue across Bruce’s chest. His hands work lower, feeling over the mouse’s thighs. At last, he pulls away Bruce’s trousers, leaving the little mouse nude. Bruce sighs in relief as the pressure enfolding his cock is at last removed, only to moan as it’s replaced by the stoat’s eager hand, grasping and kneading his manhood and balls all at once.

“Do you believe I’ll bite you again, little Bruce?” Mathéo asks, peering down into the little man’s eyes. Bruce only nods. With that, Mathéo lifts himself away, and kneels again at the foot of the bed. There, he takes a hold of each of Bruce’s thighs, and buries his muzzle in Bruce’s crotch. He sinks his tongue against Bruce’s taint, then licks up, over the mouse’s balls, along the underside of his cock and all the way to his tip. Bruce gasps and whines. The texture is so unlike Abbot Barnabé the lion. Barnabé’s tongue had been coarse, covered with strange bristles, but Mathéo’s is smooth, sleek, and owing to their time together during the Mid-Winter Feast, familiar. Bruce’s breath comes to him in uneven gasps.

Mathéo lifts Bruce’s knees, and the mouse sets his little paws on the older monk’s shoulders. He looks down to see his cock and balls both disappear into Mathéo’s maw, immersed in the stoat, coated in the heat of his tongue. Suddenly, he feels the stoat’s fangs against his crotch and shivers –

“Don’t bite there,” he stammers, pleading. The stoat only chuckles, the vibration rolling through all of Bruce’s little body, before his eyes close so that he may he focuses on the mouse’s flavour. Bruce lays back, wrist in his mouth. His vision blurs. He presses his paws down against Mathéo, inching along the mattress, but the stoat takes a possessive hold of his waist, restraining him. If Mathéo wants to bite him, there is nothing at all that Bruce can do. He revels in his powerlessness, and feels the way Mathéo lathes at the tip of his cock, lapping his precum. The little mouse wonders at his own taste, and imagines, through the haze of sex, being devoured like this, cock first. His whole body stiffens. The old familiar pressure rises in his balls.

Mathéo must sense it too, because the stoat lifts his mouth away, leaving Bruce’s cock to twitch and shiver in the cold air. Bruce whines and starts to complain, to plead, to say something he isn’t sure of, but Mathéo takes up his heels and lifts them, exposing the mouse’s rear. Then, without a word, the stoat licks once over the mouse’s hole and suddenly, with no concern for the very vulgarity of the notion, he urges his tongue inside of Bruce. The little mouse arches his back, buries his head into the mattress, and squeaks out at the sensation.

The warmth, the fullness, the sense of being stretched open. There’s some pain, inevitable due to the sheer size of the stoat’s tongue, but Mathéo swiftly finds something inside of Bruce that, once licked, sends a new, overwhelming, wonderful sensation emanating through the mouse’s body and most distinctly up through his twitching length. Bruce struggles to speak, to plead for some explanation, but Mathéo says nothing, only continues to fill him.

Bruce feels his whole body go rigid. He squeezes his eyes shut, and bites at his lip. His orgasm bursts from him in an incredible wave. All thought ends, all anxiety and introspection vanishing for an instant. He feels streaks of wet heat land across his chest, his cheek, forehead and belly, coating himself.

Mathéo’s tongue slides out of him, leaving him feeling dreadfully empty. Before Bruce has time to recover, Mathéo is on him again, licking and kissing along Bruce’s hip, over his belly and chest, lapping away the mouse’s cum. Bruce shivers and writhes, his whole body trembling.

The stoat reaches Bruce’s head and licks cum from his cheek. He curls his arms around Bruce, lifting the little monk into an embrace. Then, voice low and intimate, Mathéo murmurs, “mice always need seasoning first.”

He opens his maw, his shimmering white teeth parting to reveal his red throat. Bruce peers up at what could be his end with no fear, no doubt, no apprehension, only a sense of comfort and bliss. He envisions himself tucked into a ball inside of Mathéo in this moment, their bodies one, souls entwined, and he feels in this instant an absolute clarity. This is what he wants. He reaches his hands up, into the stoat’s maw, and attempts to take a hold of either side of Mathéo’s tongue to pull himself up and into the old monk’s mouth, only for his palms to slip.

Alas, or perhaps fortunately, the stoat closes his mouth and chuckles. “A joke,” he promises. “Only a joke. I’d never do that to you, my little lion.”