Prologue- He Knows My Name
Story by Cymmie on SoFurry
Ayala is a mortal soul sent to live out her punishment in servitude to the sin known as Pride. She is his gopher and often thought he didn’t even know her beyond the fact she brought him coffee in the morning and he deigned her with a nickname. Lately, he has shown far too much interest in her though. Sniffing after her past when she was alive, which honestly she would prefer remained bury in mountains of paperwork. Then one day he gives her a proposition, one he swear will benefit them both. Marry him, she loves him after all, why would she ever say no?
Loving one of the sins was not easy. They were so sought after that they never looked beyond the circle of the inner crowd, they used others and were used alike. Honestly, Ayala knew she never made it into his line of sight, let alone his thoughts. Even though she brought him his coffee every day and took his signed documents every night. Even though she interacted with him in small such small ways of every weekday, Pride never knew her name. Why would he?
At first, she thought it was a compliment, the fact that he had deigned her with a nickname, 'Little Fawn.' Now she knew it was because he couldn't remember her name, she wasn't important enough to him. She should be angry about it. She should be… logically everything pointed to furious… instead she felt nothing but a bone aching loneliness and a depression so deep she wondered how she would ever find her way out.
Ayala had worked under Pride for a decade at least now, and she had worked under Gluttony for her training period for eight years before that. The sins' company had become her home. Taking and calculating mortal needs, desires, missteps, and punishments was her life.
She loved her job, she was good at it, and she often cleaned up the messes of the others she worked with. Ayala was one of those few who was the first to arrive and the last to leave. While others treated this place like a means to an end (a paycheck), she treated it like her reason for breathing. If souls breathed.
Maybe it was because Pride, her boss, was similar. Carefully working, carefully cultivating, he arrived first and though he usually left on time, sometimes she left before he even began finish his last stack of papers.
So, this morning she found herself rolling his to-go cup in between her palms, whispering her usual pep talk to herself. Promising today would be different, today he would see her.
“Coming in or what?" his voice called through the door, so deep that it rolled over her skin and goosebumps skittered across in its wake.
She hated to admit that she squeaked, and he chuckled lowly, how was his hearing so good? She swallowed, shifted her weight onto another foot, before narrowing her eyes and walking confidently through the door. Every ounce of confidence she portrayed was a lie, but that was ok, because he didn't know. Right?
He was looking at a file, tapping the fingers that weren't busy holding his head up in a steady rhythm across the hardwood of his desk. When she stepped in front of the desk and gently set the warm latte down on the designated coaster his eyes rose, meeting her from behind the frames of his glasses.
Pride was such a beautiful man, his honey gold irises that always seemed to shimmer with a thick, languid warmth. His skin was a porcelain white and his hair a blue tinted platinum. It fell in a careful mess, with just enough control, over one eye. He swept it off from the left side of head to lay the thickest on the right. He always had this odd look of keeping control of everything while it seemed like a tornado was trying to tear him apart.
The only word to describe him, feral. Dominance personified, and just completely confident. Not arrogant, only cool knowledge that he could do anything he wanted, the question was, would he?
It was why when he turned that devastating smirk in her direction, every single bit of that fake confidence left her in a rush, and in the process, Ayala felt shaky and naked.
“Thank you," he murmured, pulling the warm cup to his nose and inhaling the smell of roasted coffee and milk.
It seemed even demons needed caffeine. He sipped at it slowly, observing every twitch of her muscles as she tried to wait patiently for him to hand over his stack of files for the day. What happened next, was… unprecedented.
“Little Fawn," he said slowly, staring down at the papers in front of him intently.
“Yes sir?" she chirped, back straightening automatically.
“You were mortal before being assigned here, yes?" he asked, though he seemed to know his answer already.
“Yes…, sir?" there was an awkwardness in her answer because she honestly couldn't figure out why he cared or why he remembered to begin with.
“You must have done something awfully naughty in your mortal life to be assigned here, yet… your soul is so pure," he said, thoughtfully.
She narrowed her eyes, deep brown searching for answer in the depth of his gold irises as he pinned her once again with his lax stare.
“Why do you ask sir?" she mumbled, she felt so exposed and suddenly she didn't want to talk to him or to be noticed by him in that moment. No, she wanted her files and to go about her day.
“Just… curious you could say," he said innocently, a gentle tilt to his chin. “Your stack for the day is over there."
He pointed to the towering papers of the mortals' statistics who needed sorting so they could be tended to. Ayala, blinked at the sudden change in topic, but wasn't about to redirect his distressing attention back onto herself. Instead, she bowed her head shortly and scooped up the papers without a second thought.
“Oh, Ayala," he called before she left. “I need you to make time in your schedule for us to talk tomorrow."
She swore her heart stopped. He wasn't supposed to know her name, he wasn't supposed to notice her. There was an odd sensation of her stomach flipping and the desire to vomit pushing up her chest and throat. Instead, she swallowed harshly, coughing, and forced her body not to tremble as she walked out the room with some version of an affirmative noise.
What the fuck was going on?