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#2: The Abbot & The Nature of Prey

“I did see somebody else eaten," says Bruce, the little mouse novice-initiate of the Leonsjardine Abbey. “Swallowed, that is. Other than Brother Côme. Or I believe so. It's all a bit of a jumble."

It has been only a half-hour or so since the conclusion of the Mid-Winter Feast, where Bruce Archambeau witnessed his fellow brothers of the cloth partake in a Sacramental ritual meant to appease both their hungers, and the hunger of God. While most of the brothers ate ordinary enough meals, the Abbot of the Abbey, to whom Bruce now speaks, devoured Brother Côme, a fellow mouse who evidently still wriggles and writhes in his fat belly. Bruce had been stunned, frightened and struck with an impossible curiosity that he now seeks to satisfy. He'd seen a second brother, another mouse or shrew or vole perhaps, swallowed by an owl. Hadn't he?

Regardless, once the ceremony had ended, the Abbot invited him back to his quarters, to observe the process of… of what, Bruce supposes? Of digestion? Such an unflattering word for it. Banal and of the flesh, not of the divine importance such an act demands. The church would call it a component of Transubstantiation, the sacred process by which the devoured are exalted and become as one flesh with their devourers, a gift of divine importance bestowed upon all mortals through the sacrifice and consumption of his mortal son, a lion much like the Abbot.

The Abbot's quarters were modestly furnished, as befit a monk. Everything appeared enormous to Bruce, who only measured up to about the Abbot's knee, and only if he stood straight on his toes. The Abbot's bed, meant to fit two people of the lion's size, where the Abbot now sprawled on his side, nude, his body fat and covered in lush bronze fur, save for his silver mane, and the streak of dense fur that runs from his mane to his chest and down, in a distinctive line across his belly, to collect around his crotch and thighs. He watches Bruce with kindness, patience and curiosity. The walls are lined with bookshelves and tomes almost too big for the mouse to lift, a writing desk in the corner, a proper armoir by the far wall, but most striking of all of the chamber's features was a tapestry portraying the First Sacrament, the Divine Son surrounded by prey men of all common kinds, pulled apart into pieces and to be eaten, one mouthful unto each of the prey, thus they became ensouled, so sayeth the Old Scripture.

Bruce had been washing in the adjoining bath chamber, cleaning bear saliva from his fur. A consequence of the Mid-Winter Feast. Now he crosses the room and at the Abbot's invitation, he attempts to climb into the lion's bed. He finds it a struggle to lift his weight, perhaps fatigued from the night's events, and so the Abbot reaches down, enfolds much of Bruce's arm in his hand, and simply lifts the mouse up.

Now he is naked in another man's bed for the very first time. The thought alone sends a brief jolt through him. His cock hardens and, embarrassed, he attempts to cover it with his hand. The Abbot tuts at that, shakes his head, and lifts Bruce's little hand away from his crotch. He presses his fingertip down against Bruce's length and the mouse shivers, closing both of his hands against the lion's finger. Something about the feeling of the Abbot's claw against waist excites him more than his surprisingly soft skin.

“You came to learn more of what it is to be eaten, little Bruce," the Abbot 'chides.' “Not to play with this here."

“I apologize," the mouse answers sincerely. He makes a futile effort to move the lion's hand away, then realizes a moment after that the Abbot had only been teasing him. He averts his eyes, embarrassed. The lion leaves his crotch alone for now and instead takes his chin between forefinger and thumb, turning his head so that Bruce must look into his eyes. The mouse notices for the first time that they are a placid blue, and he can find no judgement in them.

“Come close and kiss me," the lion instructs, and Bruce moves to do precisely that, shuffling forward on his knees until he's by the Abbot's head. Kneeling straight, Bruce is about as tall as the Abbot's shoulders are wide, and so he must stoop just a little. The Abbot turns his head up to meet Bruce half-way. To kiss with such an incredible disparity in size seems funny, impossible perhaps, but the mouse makes an attempt. He wraps his little arms around the Abbot's silvered mane and lays his lips on his flat feline nose, then down on his chin, before at last touching his soft black lips. He discovers that the lion's tongue won't fit inside of his mouth, and that he can't achieve much at all with his own, but the Abbot seems not to mind.

He feels the lion's palm settle across his back, dwarfing him again. Its resting weight is enough to draw him in. Then, the Abbot opens his mouth, a little at first so that he may see the rows of sharp white teeth surrounding four immense fangs. The Abbot's upper canines were each the length of Bruce's forearm. Instinctual fear seizes the little mouse, and he presses against the lion's nose and chin in an attempt to straighten his posture, but the Abbot's hand against his back has him locked in place. The lion opens his mouth wider, enough that, should he choose to pull Bruce in, the mouse's head would fall right into his waiting maw. He opens his mouth yet wider – he yawns – and it becomes alarmingly clear to Bruce that the Abbot could swallow him whole with no effort whatsoever, much like he did to Brother Côme, a mouse who was considerably bigger than himself.

To be so close terrifies him, and he attempts again to jerk away. His hand slips over the lion's chin, falling into a tangle of sleek mane. Bruce falls forward, toward the lion's mouth –

but the Abbot closes it, and Bruce instead collides with his closed jaw. A low, purring chuckle ruminates through the enormous cat.

“Isn't it curious," the lion says, “that even though you're rightfully afraid of being eaten, your body responds like this?" And to illustrate his meaning, the lion turns his head downward. His coarse tongue emerges and lathes across Bruce's thighs, crotch and midsection, coating it all with the one lick of his vast flat tongue. The feeling of tough feline spurs against his cock makes Bruce quiver. The lion licks again, and is rewarded by the sweet taste of the mouse's precum.

“That's because it's right, little one. It's right to be eaten, to want to be eaten. Swallowed whole and made a part of something bigger, something stronger. To give your life as it is to sustain another. A divine sacrifice, an exaltation, ascension, to become a Sacrament," the lion continues, murmuring between licks.

The words from his superior, from a scholar of the very nature of divinity and hunger, fill his head with truth, notions and imaginings. The thought of being shown to the assemblage of his brother peers just as Côme was, celebrated before everybody, revered and swallowed whole by the Abbot himself, to participate in a divine right. For an instant, little Bruce is free of all doubt, and believes wholeheartedly in the Transubstantiation, that he in mind and soul would continue on within the Abbot. That he wants this. That even if it were to happen now, just the two of them alone –

But they aren't alone, he remembers.

Bruce cants his head sidelong to regard the lion's fat, swollen, still-writhing belly, in which Côme presently rests. He has moved so much over the hour since he was eaten that once again, Bruce wonders. Is it painful? Are these, he hesitates to think, throes of agony that he sees, rather than bliss? The notion makes it suddenly difficult to enjoy the Abbot's tongue.

“You came to learn about that," the lion repeats. He lifts his hand away from the mouse and rolls aside, onto his back. The movement of the mattress shakes Bruce's balance and he falls after the lion, finding himself with his hands on the Abbot's bare chest. The Abbot purrs through another laugh, and wraps his arms around his belly, propping it up. For an instant, Bruce feels he can see the distinct impression of Côme's hand against the Abbot's bronze fur.

“Climb atop," the Abbot instructs. Bruce hesitates for a time, uncertain if he truly wants to, of whether he will be able to accept the answer that he finds if it is, indeed, horrible. The Abbot has already reassured him that it isn't, that to be swallowed and to fade away in the belly of one's consumer is a painless, or even pleasurable thing, but in the back of his mind he wonders, how would any predator know? By nature, a predator has never been eaten, and to his knowledge, no prey has ever returned from being eaten to discuss the ordeal.

Inevitably, Bruce's curiosity wins over his anxieties. He rises to his paws and eases his way onto the Abbot's chest, his back to the lion's face. First he lays his arms around the lion's belly, as far as he can reach, which isn't far at all. Côme moves inside of the Abbot, and although Bruce cannot be certain, it seems to him that Côme has pressed their bodies together, as best he can through layers of lion. Something of a hug through all the fat and fur, perhaps.

“Up," the lion prompts him, and so Bruce moves. He rises to his paws again and ascends, scrambling, sinking his knees and paws into the lion as he ascends, forming natural footfalls in the way the Abbot's soft body conforms to him. Soon he lays atop the peak of the cat's vast body, where he shuffles about until he faces the Abbot, so that he can look down into the older man's tranquil blue eyes. The lion's belly continues to shift beneath him. The Abbot lets his arms fall away to his sides, then tucks them under his head, allowing his stomach to 'flatten' – as much as it can flatten – underneath Bruce. The mouse sinks into it, imagines himself sinking into the other mouse already within it.

His face flush with heat, Bruce lies where he is, feeling Côme's movements. They seem to be slowing, easing, as if his fellow mouse were relaxing – but Bruce knows it for what it is. Côme is fading away. Becoming a part of the Abbot. Bruce's little hands collect by his chin. He busies himself toying with the denser silver fur that streaks down the Abbot's belly.

He is harder than he has ever been, and the lion can surely feel it, fat and all – a little mouse cock digging firm into him.

“It won't be much longer," the Abbot tells him. “Do you have anything to say to brother Côme?"

“Will he hear me?"

“Of course." The answer comes easily. “Even if not through his own ears, as my body takes him, he will hear you through mine."

Bruce hesitates, and then chooses to set his skepticism aside. “I'm sorry that I never spoke to you when you were only yourself, brother Côme. I would have liked to have been your friend then. I would have like to have… been with you. You were very handsome."

“I would like to think he is still very handsome," the Abbot answers that, faux-offended. He purr-laughs again and the vibration shakes Bruce's whole body. It soothes him in a way that he cannot understand. The way it shakes his stiff cock elicits a stunned little gasp.

After a moment, the Abbot suggests, “there is a way you can be with him now, though it may seem strange to you, little Bruce."

Bruce lifts his head, inquiring.

The Abbot answers by lifting him. He moves the mouse's little body a few inches lower along his belly. Then he sets one hand on Bruce's hip, and slides a single digit of the other between their bodies to search with a fingertip. “There," he decides, and unhands the mouse. Bruce regards him quizzically, then searches around by touch until he finds, amid all the writhing, and the soft shiver of the lion's belly, what the Abbot meant: his navel, buried and practically invisible under silver fur.

Bruce swallows. It seems the strangest thing, but nothing since the beginning of the Mid-Winter Feast had been normal. He had been in a daze since his friend, brother Mathéo, first warned him that somebody would be eaten tonight, and the sense of unreality had yet to leave in full. He wraps his hand around the root of his cock. The other rests beside the lion's navel, both supporting his weight and holding it open. Then, swallowing hard, he urgres his length inside of the lion, albeit in an orifice he never imagined making use of. The difference in their size is so enormous that Bruce is able to slide himself in to the root, which shocks him. His whole length is embraced by tender heat, the soft fat of the lion's belly enfolding him. The cat's purrs roll through the whole of him now, a strange, rhythmic shiver radiating up from his cock to the tips of his ears and toes.

Côme moves eagerly now, as if this had somehow sent another burst of life through him. Any thoughts or fears about his fellow mouse perhaps shuffering are banished, at least for the moment, as the lion's belly seems to rise up to meet him, then fall away as if to coax him down, to rise and fall, rise and fall, in time with the Abbot's breathing. He lays himself flat again, curling his arms around the lion's belly, pulling it to his chest as best he can with his feeble little arms.

Thrusting into the Abbot feels somehow disrespectful, somehow sinful. This man is his senior, his superior, and as both the leader of the Abbey and a lion, nearer to God than he, a lowly novice and mouse, could ever possibly be. Penetration feels, to little Bruce, like the violation of some inherent hierarchy. He imagines himself, once again, a little mouse with the teeth of a lion, and as he pulls back his hips and urges them down into the Abbot with all of his near-virign desperation, he opens his mouth and nips, just once, with his prominent front rodent teeth. The Abbot seems not to notice.

Instead, the lion lays one hand across the mouse, wrist up to his mid-back, fingers curved that he can tease a fingertip against Bruce's rear now. Impossible to think that the lion could ever fit a finger inside of him. His tongue, perhaps; Bruce had seen him perform that precise act upon Côme, still wriggling inside of him. Nevertheless, the lion parts his cheeks and massages against his ass, rubbing across his balls as well, unable to reduce his reach. In so doing, he sets Bruce's pace, asserting his own rhythm over the mouse's, unknowingly robbing the little novice of the bold, predator-like assertiveness he had briefly imagined himself to have. The mouse bites helplessly at the Abbot's fur again and again, as if driven by instinct now, and not once does the Abbot indicate that he feels it; Bruce cannot penetrate the lion's fur with his bites at all.

“Do you still feel him, little Bruce?"

Bruce raises his head and finds, between the soft mounds of the lion's chest, blue eyes watching him. Ever-calm, but now with something else underlying that serenity, something animal, predatory, hungry. His voice a half-octave lower than it had been before, the Abbot asks him, “do you feel my food squirm, my morsel? Do you understand what you will one day be?"

The mouse opens his mouth to answer but the Abbot presses down hard against his ass, smothering him down, burying his cock. He feels, for an instant, that he can practically feel the Côme's rough form against his body. Côme's writhing slows after that, but Bruce scarcely notices. He loses himself, overcome with lust, and each time the lion calls him morsel, equates him to food, makes dulcet little promises to swallow him whole. Every so often he asks, “do you still feel him? Do you still feel our brother Côme?" and each time the lion asked, Bruce was dimly aware that he could feel less and less. His fellow mouse's writhing was becoming lost under the lion's purring, brother Côme slipping away.

The lion rubs along Bruce's ass now, bearing down against his virginal rear, rolling Bruce through deep, fast thrusts. The elder lion opines, “it'll be your feet first, so that I may watch the look on your face as you slide away, little by little. No, hm…" He lifts his finger for a moment, affording Bruce an instant of reprieve. Then it returns, harder but slower, a different rhythm. “Perhaps head-first, so that I can play with your little mousehood while everybody watches. Unable to hear you squeaking, only knowing when you've reached your climax because your legs kick, right before I swallow you whole" –

It proves too much for Bruce. He comes in a desperate wave. His orgasm is not like it had ever been when he was alone, silently pleasuring himself into his own palm. It's not even like it had been when he finished in brother Mathéo's eager mouth, the first time he had ever finished with another man (he was half-way inside of a bear's mouth at the time). It robs Bruce of his senses, overwhelms him, floods his body with heat and passion.

Moments haze. The sensation leaves in calming ebbs and waves. Love-drunk, he lifts his head at last, eyes falling on the lion's. He crawls forward, slipping out from under the lion's fingertips, inching for what – a kiss? Something more, with the lion's mouth? He isn't certain. He follows a kind of natural, animal attraction that he does not understand, until the Abbot halts him by laying a broad hand down over his back, pinning him in place.

“Do you still feel brother Côme?" he asks, for a final time, and after a few moments of thought, with the fog of lust and, what? If you asked Bruce, in the post-orgasmic bliss, he may have said love. In the haze of lust and perhaps love, he answers at last,

“No… No, brother Côme is still." He almost says 'gone,' but chooses instead, “he's a part of you completely now."

With that, the lion lifts his hand, and allows Bruce to move on his own. The mouse remains where he is for an instant, reflecting on the the lack of writhing, the first time he has felt the lion's body moving only under its own power. The body-shaking purring lingers, of course, but he the undeniable fact that no mouse remains inside of the lion is undeniable.

The lion watches him, waiting to see what he will do, and for a time Bruce is uncertain. His anxieties have been quieted now, as if the shock and confusion of the evening had been lifted, but he wonders if that is a false-clarity brought on by sex. Ponderous, the mouse inches forward again. He wriggles about, pulling his thighs up underneath the rest of him, until he is sitting on the lion's chest, one paw to either side of the Abbot's face. Carefully, Bruce lays his hands upon the lion's cheeks, stroking down his whiskers. The Abbot opens his mouth just enough to show his teeth. The space beyond is dark, and like this, Bruce cannot see the Abbot's throat.

Bruce curls his hand around one of the Abbot's fangs, his fingers barely reaching his thumb. He appreciates the sheer size of it for a moment, the smoothness of the enamel and wonders about the power in the lion's jaw. When brother Edmé the bear had closed his mouth around Bruce's waist, pressing teeth to the mouse's midsection, it had elicited such an incredible sense of awe, fear and arousal in him. He knew, as horrible as it as, that Edmé could bite him clean in half. The notion of that power startled and enticed him. He didn't want to be bitten, but knowing he could be, knowing that creatures like Edmé and the Abbot could make meat of him should they choose…

He reaches in further and lays his little hand upon the lion's tongue, feeling its bristles, and the sheer size of it. With his hand in the center, he can't reach the sides.

The lion closes his mouth around Bruce's arm and sucks, dragging him down. Startled, Bruce sets his hand against the lion's nose and starts to shove back, but after an instant, peace overcomes him once more. For an instant, he thinks, if this is how it happens, this is how it happens, so be it, and won't it be wonderful? The lion's eyes peer deeply into his own. Won't it be wonderful to be part of somebody, to become one with them completely and absolutely? Then, he thinks, what a shame it isn't brother Mathéo –

The cat opens his mouth and lets Bruce retrieve his arm. Bruce lifts it away and holds it to his chest.

“It seems you've overcome your fear, little Bruce," the lion chuckles, low and gentle.

“I'm not so certain," the mouse answers.

---

Bruce spends the night with the Abbot, tucked under the lion's arm. It's a strange thing, the Abbot purrs as others might snore. As soothing as it is, Mr. Bruce Archambeau finds that he cannot fall asleep. He sifts through the events of the previous day time and again. He toiled at his manuscript, painting little creatures into the margins, as he always does from sunrise to sunset, when he has light by his window. Brother Mathéo came to fetch him for dinner, as he had each night for well over a week. Then he was told he might see someone be eaten that very night, if he so chose, and he did choose, and now he has been with the former brother Côme from the moment of his being swallowed to his end. Or perhaps not his end.

The Old Scripture claims that all faithful prey devoured become Sacrament, and thus experience Transubstantiation, becoming a part of the one who consumes them. Their afterlife is within the flesh of their devourer. Then, when the predator who devoured them dies, they ascend together. Prey who pass without being devoured encounter a different afterlife, undescribed in the Scripture. Some suggest they are reincarnated again and again, always as prey, until they escape this cycle by becoming Sacrament. Some, far to the south, suggest they simply become nothing, inert as clay.

Thus, within the lessons of the Old Scripture, the other man he saw eaten would also be Sacrament, and experience the same ascension as brother Côme. But did he request it? Was his permission sought? What of the owl? He did see somebody else be eaten, he's certain. He recalls a pair of feet kicking out of the beak of the brother owl, who's name he has not yet learned, but whom he has seen haunting the abbey library on the few occasions that he has needed to retrieve reference material personally – usually, brothers who can reach higher than the lowest few shelves fetch things for him, once he makes a request of brother Mathéo. The owl has always unsettled him. Another concern caused by his prey instincts, perhaps, but he ponders now if perhaps this is an occasion in which his instincts were correct, and that he was right to fear.

Then the lion's purring halts for an instant as the Abbot swallows in his sleep, briefly interrupting his purs, and Mr. Bruce realizes that he is presently resting almost comfortably in the grasp of someone who has made it abundantly clear would eat him, were he to give permission. Or perhaps even without permission. If the Abbot were to eat him now, who would question it? Who would be concerned? Again, Bruce's thoughts return to the owl. Had the owl done something improper when eating a brother? No one else appeared concerned. Even when he attempted to tell the Abbot, the old lion had been far more concerned with sex and his own appetite.

And for another matter, brother Edmé's joke – that he might swallow, before he sucked Bruce right up to his throat. What if brother Mathéo had not been there, holding him by the thighs? Would Bruce be here with the Abbot now? Like brother Côme, by morning he may have faded away inside of the bear, either to become a part of him, or to become nothing in death. And that is the fear, isn't it? The doubt slithers back into him. If brother Edmé swallowed him, would anybody object? Would anybody notice?

Morning takes its time to arrive.

Once it does, the Abbot wakes to find Mr. Bruce exhausted, his eyes dark and listless. Nevertheless, the lion rolls onto his side and draws the mouse up to him. He presses his nose to Bruce's in an approximation of a kiss, their size making the proper sort impossible.

Although still weary, the old lion speaks with experience and says, “the Mid-Winter Feast is still bothering you."

“I don't know," Bruce answers.

The lion sits. It seems to be a bit of a struggle. Last night, Bruce had presumed that his slow, sore movements were a consequence of his stuffed belly, but now as he watches the Abbot move, he realizes for the first time, this is an old man. Considerably so. Most of the brothers, especially the predators of the abbey, are all in their senior years. Prey trend younger. Mr. Bruce understands why now, with the strange clarity of exhaustion. He lifts Bruce into his arms and cradles him like a baby, flush against his chest. Bruce buries his hand in the lion's silver mane, feeling the smooth fur tangle around his fingers.

“Maybe it would be best to do it now," the Abbot proposes. “Spare you living with the fear of it." Thinking with his stomach, perhaps. He lifts Bruce and buries his nose against the mouse's belly. Mr. Bruce feels strange, being slight. Brother Côme had been fat, and when Bruce first saw that, and the famished way the Abbot looked at him, he was envious. Envious, and as he considered Côme's rotundness itself, aroused, attracted. He had wanted to bite Côme, pin him down, ravage him. He had looked at Côme and felt like a he imagines a predator must, as if his mouth were filled with sharp lion's teeth. Now, cradled in the arms of a lion, feeling the cat's tongue lathe across his slight belly, he instead feels very foolish, feeble and tired. Aware, once again, of his size.

“I want to finish my manuscript," he decides. “I love working on it. I love it here. I love living. Only…"

“Only you feel the pull now, the urge," the lion continues, licking his way up along the mouse's body, across his chest and over his neck, as if grooming him. Bruce cants his head back, lifting his chin, opening more of himself to the lion's tongue.

“Do you remember the people you eat?" Bruce asks. He realizes, once the words are out of his mouth, that there was a slight sneer to his tone, an accusation.

The lion answers ernestly, with calm and without pause, “many of them. Some have blurred together with time. Some I still feel prominently within me, as a part of me. I think those who fade from my mind are simply resting, content to wait until we all ascend together." The lion presses his nose to Bruce's again, another approximate kiss. Bruce strokes over the Abbot's whiskers. Suddenly, the Abbot asks, as if to defang the mouse in his arms, “do you know my name?"

A cold shot runs through Bruce.

Realizing the mouse can't answer, the Abbot chuckles again, another musical pur. “Barnabé."

“Everybody calls you 'the Abbot,' not Abbot Barnabé, and… I thought it would be embarrassing to ask, and so I didn't," Bruce stammers through an explanation, though it hits his own ear like an excuse. He clears his throat and murmurs an apology. If he weren't so fatigued, he would be mortified with himself. A second man he has made love with now, who's name he had to learn awkwardly. That is, if what he and brother Edmé did constitutes lovemaking. Does it? He wonders.

“Because you have been shut in that little room of yours since arriving at my monastery, young Bruce." The cat moves now. He shuffles, slow and sore, across his mattress, and then with a grunt of effort he rises to his feet. “In fear. I had assumed of being eaten. I had assumed you knew what monastery life would involve. Was it not at all similar in the city?"

“In the city, eating someone is… well, it isn't done in public. Not in the view of others. A predator will court his chosen prey, akin to a romantic courtship, and a dowry is paid to the prey's family, and…" Truthfully, Bruce didn't know. He was isolated during his life in the city and the seminary, just as he had been isolated here in Leonsjardine.

The lion carries Bruce into his bathroom, where he sets the mouse down on the brim of his bath. Bruce's paws don't reach the stone tile floor. He holds the porcelain while the lion opens the faucet. The pipes affixed to the stone walls moan in protest, as heated water is pumped slowly through the ancient building. The plumbing is, itself, a modern addition, and as with most new things, it seems to work only when it wants to. It has functioned well enough last night, when Bruce had to clean his fur of bear saliva (before becoming covered in lion saliva).

“I believe you'd find that many prey are simply eaten. Not all predators keep to the Old Scripture and duly exalt their prey. Fortunately, prey are rewarded by God all the same, for their role is fulfilled," the Abbot explains, while they wait.

“I saw somebody else eaten at the Feast. Somebody other than brother Côme, that is. By the… the brother librarian," Bruce sighs. Another name he does not know. Because, as Abbot Barnabé had correctly surmised, of his fears and isolation.

“Brother Gauvain," the Abbot introduces. Another chuckle. “Yes, this does not surprise me. He is set in his ways, a predator by nature and of an inclination to act on that nature without our preferred decorum."

“Will anything be done about it?" Bruce frowns. He sways his paws as he sits. At last, water emerges from the faucet, beginning to fill the bath. Steam billows from the surface, fogging the bathroom.

“We will soon realize who is absent, and depending on the brother's inclinations, his outstanding duties and so on, perhaps. But often no, little Bruce. This sort of thing is the nature of our abbey and faith. We would no more prevent brothers from consumption than we would prevent them from sex or love. You understand this, you have studied the faith as have we all." The lion reaches his hand to Bruce, who accepts it. Then, carefully, he eases the mouse down into the water. Bruce hisses throuth his flat rodent teeth at first, going from cold to hot so suddenly stings him, but he stands in the basin comfortably enough as the water rises around him. Were he to sit, he'd end up underneath it soon enough, as the Abbot is intent on filling it to a lion's volume.

“It just seems… It just seems something should be done. What if the brother did not want to be eaten? Not yet, or perhaps not at all?"

“It depends on the brother, little Bruce. If somebody else ate you, I would know it wasn't what you wanted, and we would regard it unjust predation. The brother would perhaps be excommunicated," the lion attempts to reassure him, but Bruce is unconvinced.

“He would be excommunicated, and I would be dead."

“You would be a part of him," Barnabé counters. He shuts off the faucet, the water now up to the mouse's chest. Grunting with effort once again, the lion climbs over the basin and into the water. His added mass causes it to rise past Bruce's chin. The mouse allows himself to float, before the lion collects him, drawing his little body over. The lion's belly serves Bruce like a shore in the bath.

“That seems dreadful," the mouse answers. Eyes meet eyes. Is this defiance? Barnabé runs his heavy hand along Bruce's back, stroking him like a pet to calm him. To Bruce's inward frustration, it works. Or perhaps the heat of the bath calms him. Or the patterns Barnabé's fur form floating in the water. “To be a part of somebody who did something dreadful to you, waiting for them to die so you can at last be apart from them."

This the Abbot ponders for a time. He reaches to the side of the bath and collects a bar of soap, which he now rubs into Bruce's fur, detangling the cum and saliva left over from last night. He washes over Bruce's belly, thighs and cock. The mouse stiffens immediately. A reflex lacking arousal. He hardly reacts to it, focused as he is on their conversation.

At last, Abbot Barnabé answers, “many of the people I have eaten over the years are silent. I do not remember them, and they do not make their way into my thoughts. Others, I feel with me often. I remember their faces, names, taste and smell. I remember how I met them, the conversations and kindnesses that led to their final moments as people with bodies of their own, before they became a part of mine. That is not so for the ones who choose to rest and wait. It could be like that."

“But you see that no such fate awaits people like you, Abbot. Only people like me."

“That is the way of the world," the lion says. He leans in and presses his nose to Bruce's once more. The mouse accepts this with another sigh.