Chapter Text
Exposed flesh pulsed where a heart used to beat. Rivers of blood flowed everywhere – across the dead body, across the two other dead bodies, on the ground, on the spear… A thick layer of saliva laid atop of it all, making the dark crimson almost glassy. Surreal. As if an AI had come and embellished the violence.
Skin had become fickle. On the face, it was sliced and shredded apart. But the chest’s was chewed into a physically twisted mess. Meanwhile, the legs were marred by fierce, defined claws. Teeth plunged deeper into the chest, tearing the mess of skin and veins apart in one swift pull.
A minute or two crawled away. Now a gaping void existed where the heart used to be. And so the unrelenting jaw quit the dead body and went on to the next one. It was the same process all over again.
Clothes ripped in half. A first swing of claws piercing through flesh. Several more movements of digging deeper and deeper, audibly determined ones. A loud, dark grown of ecstasy reverbating through the air. Pupils blown wide. And then came the obnoxiously loud munching.
They should’ve stayed at their base. They should’ve given up on their utmost random project that required them outside earlier that day. They should’ve hugged their teammate a few seconds longer than normal. They should’ve petted their dog before leaving. They should’ve admired the sunrise instead of ducking their head down into their own thoughts.
But, by some intended flaw of the universe, none of it happened. Instead, they crossed paths with the raw bestiality of a man.
It only sufficed a glance in his way for their fate to be sealed.
A streetlight dangled on a thin rope that went from one side to the alley to the other. It glowed a timid, reserved light upon the grey brick walls scribbled in graffitis and loneliness. Flame swore the graffitis, although vibrant in color and designs, now seemed more solemn after witnessing such a bloodshow.
Flame leaned against one of the walls, arms crossed over his chest. His gaze remained glued to the gruff floor that was many meters away, that didn’t have red seeping into it. His breaths were slow, too slow. His face was contorted into something much more complicated than mere disgust.
He wasn’t disgusted. Not really. Although he had only learnt this side of Mane not even two weeks ago, the initial shock had already faded away. Flame didn’t have a faint heart; murder, cannibalism… same thing, different format. At least, that was what he told himself.
In reality, a storm had been brewing in his head for two weeks now.
Even more so now, when Mane couldn’t help but very audibly masticate and crunch and crush the human heart.
Those sounds were, somehow, still a little quieter than his agitated voices.
This is weird. This is weird. This is weird. LEAVE. This is weird. Why does he love eating people? He is weird. This is weird. Leave. This is weird. Leave. Leave. LEAVE LEAVE LEAVE-
Flame screwed his eyes shut. He pressed his head harder against the wall. He tried ignoring all the noises. He failed.
Maybe that was where his hatred for raging crowds and busy places came from. His head was a constant rave party he didn’t want to be a part of – it was loud, it was all over the place, and it was inescapable. The voices were inescapable. How could he handle people when dozens already habited his head?
Flame had placed himself right next to the large green and black trash cans. He had hoped, foolishly so, that the nauseating smell of spoilt food and all sorts of unthinkable fluids would miraculously drown out the powerful metallic smell. But it merely accentuated it. This is weird.
He sighed heavily, screwing his eyes shut even harder. His nose was probably all scrunched up now. He forced his shoulders to drop. He hadn’t even know that they had been this tensed up until now. His whole body felt heavy, as if his bones were carrying a weight that was double his own weight.
“Flame…”
That voice. The light frown on his face deepened. It sounded terribly similar to the voice that had enlightened his days for years and years, to his cousin’s voice. Yet, it was entangled with the voice of a cannibal. Okay, perhaps he did have the tiniest of problems with it.
Flame opened his eyes again, but not before taking a deep breath of courage and giving himself a silent pep talk.
He met Mane’s gaze.
Mane was eerily akin to the dead bodies. Blood stuck to his cheeks, to all around his mouth, to the small spots between his sharp teeth, to his hands, to under his fingernails, to his not-so-orange-now trimmed netherite chestplate, to his knees… It was a parasitic presence.
But unlike the dead bodies, he was alive. More than. He was so alive that he strained against the bounds of his own existence. A raw kind of ecstasy beamed in those eyes, those eyes that had gone fully black. Fully black. Apart from that bright flicker of insanity, his eyes were fully black from dilated pupils.
Meeting his eyes for more than a few seconds was physically impossible. Especially when his eyes kept dropping to the dead bodies underneath him. Mane was still hunched over them. But even then, just staring into familiar yet unrecognisable eyes was hard. He kept glancing away.
Mane was shaking. Not by fear, not by disgust. Mane was riding an ardent wave of pleasure, of disturbing joy. It seemed to be more pleasure than his body could handle, a pleasure that was shaking him from the inside. This was beyond a simple satisfaction, it was a spiritual fulfillement.
Flame’s stomach churned. The voices pounded louder. This is weird. Leave. “You’re, uh… done?” Couldn’t have said it more awkwardly.
Mane didn’t reply. Flame quickly came to realize, upon several observations now, that Mane barely talked during this state. Said person called this state as a ‘back to the animal instinct’ moment, fittingly enough. Only Mane had laughed at that joke. Flame didn’t even have the energy to force a chuckle back then.
After several, long seconds of heavy eye contact, Mane bobbed his head up and down. A tongue darted from his mouth and licked along his lips. It took everything in Flame’s willpower not to look away.
He thought staring at him in this secondary state would help his brain understand this was Mane, associate this impulsively cannibal beast with his brother that has been in his life ever since they were kids. He wanted his brain to absorb this image as a known fact.
Yet, Flame never ceased to feel a quiet mortification, one that was sent as a chill down his spine each and every time.
Like he didn’t register that this was Mane.
“You really like hearts, eh?” He tried to make conversation while his unblinking eyes were settled somewhere on the opposite wall. Decidedly nowhere near Mane and the mess of blood and saliva he had left on the floor.
Mane let out a groan. “Yeah…” His voice was nothing like his usual one. Nothing like his silly little high-pitched voice he used when in a trolling mood, nor the serious and wise one he adopted when lecturing Flame. It was gruff and rough, simultaneously lazy and sharp on the edges.
This is weird. He sounds like a fucking animal.
Flame silently cursed at the voices inside his head. He was never allowed unconscious thoughts. All thoughts, even the most unhelpful ones, were declared out loud by those annoyingly taunting voices. They picked the most shameful ones and chanted them.
He acts like a fucking animal.
“Bro, can we go now?” Flame suddenly urged, getting off the wall. Irritation boiled lowly in his throat. “I’m fucking tired.”
“Mmh…” An animalistic grumble. “M’okay.”
And together, side by side, although with more physical distance between them than what they were used to, they left the scene to head back to their shared base.
Mane was a cannibal.
It wasn’t even his fault. His biological union as a hybrid happened to be one of the least cohesive ones. While some were much more than simply content being avians or canine hybrids, Mane was stuck with one of the most well-known predators on earth. Yay.
Not all hybrids struggled with urges like he did, or at least not with some as invasive. Cannibalism was a trait the entirety of the hybrid community had silently kept a secret from humanity, to avoid hateful hunting to arise once more. It was a secret in the sake of survival.
Although humans love to depict them as so, animals like lions aren’t instinctively inclined to eat humans. On only rare occasions do they display anthropophagous behaviors. These scarce instants were intimately linked with a sense of danger caused by a human presence.
For Mane, this worked the same way. Being approached by humans could trigger aggressive tendencies as a means of self-defense. As a lion hybrid, he also shared the enormous appetite. Mix that together, and it gave way to great emotional distress – hence the atypical behavior of cannibalism.
That explained why people could find Mane eating in appalling abundance at all times of the day. From their perspective and in their wise words, Mane was just a big-back like that. In reality, it was a way of preventing himself from eating them raw and uncooked then and there. Not as silly-coded, uh?
But of course, keeping such an intrinsic urge at bay wasn’t nearly as simple as so. If only eating was enough. Injuries, nausea, sickness, stress, paranoia, verbal threats, physical ones… nearly everything could provoke particularly dangerous thoughts.
Most of these factors coexisted during extraordinarily sanguinary, intense, strenuous battles. It wasn’t uncommon for Mane to stop fighting, and just quickly feast on a victim or two in order to calm his urges for the rest of the right. Just a quick, really quick bite to soothe the lion.
Flame was pacing across the villager hall inside his base for the umpteenth time, having stopped trading with them a long while ago. The sun had set over an hour ago, outside. No sounds busied the base apart from his own. It was quiet, too quiet when a storm never stopped brewing inside his head.
This was weird. This was weird. He acted like a fucking animal. Animal, animal, animal, animal, animal, animal, animal- He acted like a fucking animal. This was weird. He was weird. He acted like a fucking animal. Like a fucking animal.
Flame accepted Mane as he was.
That much was obvious, a given. They were brothers, bro. Brothers. Flame wasn’t going to give up on his brother, even if persisting their brotherhood lead to thinning nights and spiralling thoughts. He wouldn’t. He didn’t even need to think it through. Mane’s an accidental cannibal? Okay. Whatever.
But, wrapping his head around that fact was a whole other thing. They’ve known each other for nearly their whole lives. Flame spent his life integrating a very specific image of Mane in his head, or more so several specific images of Mane. Because there were quite a few.
The first one was public, for everyone. The silly ManePear, the one that has fucking entire YouTube compilations of him screeching in a really high-pitched voices over the plainest of situations, the one that raps and bursts into laughter mid-fight, the one that has the most chungus fucking taste in humor. The one that makes him someone’s favorite YouTuber.
The second one was also public, for those who done messed up. The dangerous ManePear, the one that fought with his chilling theme music playing, the one that hunted down players at a great speed and skill like a true lion, the one that speared through an entire team all on his own. The one that makes him feared by his enemies.
The third one was more intimate. Flame liked and also hated to think it was reserved all for him. The Flame-special Mane. That Mane could lecture him as if he were still a young boy, but could also dive into deep, almost philosophical subjects with him. That Mane taught him everything about life. That Mane was quieter, but not any less vibrant.
But now, all three images had been wrecked by that one fact about him. When he saw people call him a big-back for eating so much, Flame physically winced. When he witnessed Mane chasing down players, he felt sick to the stomach. And when Mane tried chatting casually with him, Flame’s mind was elsewhere.
A loud noise barged into the base.
Flame snapped his head around, body tensing, eyes darting around to find a nametag, right hand nearing his sword- oh never mind, it was Mane. His body relaxed. And then his body tensed once more, when his mind unhelpfully went back to the night of two days ago.
“Hey,” he quietly let out. He feigned that he had been diligently trading with villagers this whole time by going back to doing so.
Mane’s face was beaming. He shot Flame a huge smile, one that showed all his teeth. For a second, he swore the teeth had a piece of red flesh stuck between them. But another second passed and the flesh disappeared. He acted like a fucking animal.
“Lil’ bro!” Mane shouted happily, suddenly moving his arm to try and sling it around Flame’s shoulders like he always did.
Flame physically flinched away from the touch. It quickly dawned on him how he had reacted to Mane of all people. He panickedly glanced over at him. Thankfully, Mane hadn’t noticed the weird behavior. He just went to the other side of the room to sit down on a crafting table.
Relieved, Flame refocused on the conversation and tried to act the most normal possible. He continued trading with the villagers, absentmindedly so.
“Lil’ bro…” he repeated in a fake-annoyed grumble. “Bro, you gotta stop calling me that. It’s so stupid. You’re, like, hardly older than me.”
“That still makes you little, lil’ bro.”
“No, it does not.”
“Yes, it does!”
And before Flame could retort anything else, Mane suddenly bolted out of where he was sitting. He pulled his spear out of his inventory and launched himself into the air towards where Flame was. “WATCH OUT, IMMORTAL DEMON !” he dramatically yelled, as this was common behavior from him.
But what was not so common behavior was Flame’s reaction.
Flame pulled his shield up and made a few steps back. That was normal. But the instinctive “NO NO, DON’T KILL ME” that leaped out Flame’s throat ? That was anything but common behavior.
Mane landed next to Flame in a quiet thump. His spear was still in hand, the blade very far from actually reaching Flame.
Their eyes met.
A beat passed.
Mane took a good look at Flame. His shield pulled up, his shoulders so high up, his body all tense. His eyes looked genuinely stricken with something absolutely unknown between them. Those words that had spilled out of Flame’s mouth kept replaying in his head.
Many seconds passed, too many of them, before Flame quickly recomposed himself. He pulled his shield away, untensed his shoulders, turned around and went back to trading. Even when Mane just stood there, boring his eyes onto him, Flame persistently avoided his gaze.
“Bro, why’d you do that?” Flame tried to joke around, tried to make his chuckle sound real and unafraid.
“Better question,” Mane swiftly intervened, using the voice of the special-Flame Mane. “Why’d you think I’d actually spear you?”
A long silence followed.
All they could hear was the distant, jarring ticking of the string machine. Tick, tick, tick, tick. It never stopped. Tick, tick, tick, tick. It counted each second that passed between them, charged, heavy.
Flame let out yet another unconvincing chuckle, an awkward smile was forced into his voice. “Bro, you wouldn’t.” Yet, he kept glancing to Mane’s spear. He couldn’t muster the courage to meet his own brother’s gaze one more time, but he kept taking double takes at the pointy blade.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t.” Mane finally put his spear away, having noticed Flame’s insistent gaze upon it. He took a few steps towards Flame, following him throughout the villager hall. “But you said ‘no no, don’t kill me’. Bro, you looked terrified for your fucking life.”
“I didn’t look terrified!” Flame countered, raising his voice consequently. He made an abrupt, frustrated movement with his hands.
“You did!”
“Leave me alone, bro.”
Mane scoffed in disbelief. He basically lunged at Flame. He grabbed onto his shoulders and manhandled him around so that Flame would finally face him. He stared deep into Flame’s eyes, forcing him into eye contact. “No? You are scared of me, Flame.”
Flame opened his mouth, but Mane spoke first.
“You are afraid of me. You keep flinching around me. Avoiding me. Acting like I was genuinely going to just suddenly betray you and spear you.”
Flame hated that voice of his. That voice that sounded so moralizing, that wanted to be heard, that made him feel like nothing but a little ignorant kid. He wanted to shove Mane away. But he couldn’t. He felt frozen into place, like a deer stuck between a lion’s claws.
No words left his mouth no matter what he did. So he was stuck here, listening to Mane’s words. It became harder and harder to ignore his own thoughts.
“What’s wrong, Flame?” he asked, his voice having gone significantly softer now. He sounded oh so genuinely worried. It only deepened the ache in Flame’s chest, the ache that didn’t hurt, the ache that was just there to bother him all day long. He let out a heavy sigh, staring off to the side again.
“Is it the cannibalism? I know it is.”
Flame’s heart audibly sank. His voices went wild the moment Mane pronounced the word ‘cannibalism’. He acted like a fucking animal. He acted like a fucking animal. He acted like a fucking animal. He acted like a fucking animal. He acted like a fu-
“You weren’t like that before you found out.”
Flame felt sick. This was weird. His head was spinning the same way it did when he saw Mane eating someone for the first time. During those following days, all eye contact with Mane was physically painful. It was impossible, even now, to not see the flicker of insanity in those eyes, even when he is acting like his normal self. Or was that his true normal self…?
“I thought you were okay with it?”
“I am okay with it,” Flame rapidly rectified, having found his voice after searching for it for a solid minute. “It- it’s not about the cannibalism, bro.”
Mane let go of Flame, but still remained extremely close to him. When he spoke, his teeth kept poking into Flame’s view. HE ACTED LIKE A FUCKING ANIMAL. His hissing voices screamed all at once into his head. He gritted his teeth and went to cover his ears with his hands, his eyes screwed shut.
HE ACTED LIKE A FUCKING ANIMAL. HE ACTED LIKE A FUCKING ANIMAL. HE ACTED LIKE A FUCKING ANIMAL. LIKE A FUCKING ANIMAL. LIKE A FUCKING ANIMAL. LIKE A FUCKING ANIMAL. LIKE AN ANIMAL. LIKE AN ANIMAL. LIKE AN ANIMAL. ANIMAL ANIMAL ANIMAL ANIMAL ANIMAL ANIMAL ANIMAL ANIMAL ANIMAL ANIMAL ANIMAL-
Flame was shoved to the side.
His back collided roughly against a wall in a harsh thump.
He was now fully pressed up against it.
His chestplate was lifted up to the point it was up against his own neck, nearly choking him. His breathing became panicked, strained.
HE ACTED LIKE A FUCKING ANIMAL.
He fought wildly, trying to push his chestplate off of his neck. But the hold was stronger, fiercer. More air was cut off.
A presence invaded his personal space.
A voice was saying something, yelling it into his ears. Flame registered the voice without the words. The words were strangled to the death by his ever so loud voices. HE ACTED LIKE A FUCKING ANIMAL. HE ACTED LIKE A FUCKING ANIMAL. HE ACTED LIKE A FUCKING ANIMAL.
He fought again and again.
The voice grew louder and louder. It pierced deeper and deeper through Flame’s hazy and clouded mind.
When, finally, a few words reached him.
“WH- YOUR- IS- AT- PROBLEM, FLAME ?!”
An alien strength overtook him. Flame’s hands landed on a cool chestplate and they thrusted it the furthest away from him.
The presence then left his personal space.
But Flame’s whole body was still thrumming with adrenaline. A sickening adrenaline. An adrenaline that boiled all over the place. An adrenaline that made him feel on the brink of death, on a survival-mode. His blood was still violently thrashing against his veins, rising to his head.
Erratic breaths marked every half a second, accompanied by the distant, maddening ticking of the string machine. Nothing seemed clear. Everything had plunged into a deep blur. His vision kept swaying from left to right and right to left. Swayed in a ragged, trembling circle.
Flame didn’t have to think about his answer to Mane’s question. His voices had already been answering it for days and days now.
ANIMAL. ANIMAL, FLAME- LIKE A FUCKING ANIMAL. HE ACTED LIKE A FUCKING ANIMAL. LIKE AN ANIMAL
“YOU ACT LIKE AN ANIMAL !” he roared, surging forward.
The next words were spat out in a gritted voice, spat out so fast that he couldn’t possibly help himself anymore. “That is my problem. You- you are an animal that I cannot recognize, bro. I don’t see you anymore. I only see an- an animal. An animal. That can just- wake up one day and decide to eat me !”
Flame’s head went dead silent.
His voices died out. They retreated into a darker part of his mind where they would leave him alone for now.
Alone.
With words he had spat out leaving an aftertaste on his tongue, a bitterness in the air.
His shoulders dropped.
He was back to himself again.
All adrenaline had swept away. The strength it had brought with it was nowhere to be seen, now. It left nothing of his body apart from a lingering anxiety. A feeling akin to lying down on a bed in the intimate, lonely darkness of his room right after a night spent partying and drinking amidst the dancing crowd.
His heart was still audibly pounding in his chest, but at least his blood had calmed down from its high. He gasped for air a few times, before inhaling without exhaling.
Tick, tick, tick, tick.
He exhaled.
Tick, tick, tick, tick.
His vision was clear, clearer than it had ever been before. Everything was painted in surreal details. The villagers tucked into holes within the deepslate walls. The deeplslate ceiling. The spruce floor. The person standing in front of him, in the middle of his vision.
Tick, tick, tick, tick.
Flame’s heart sank.
“Mane-” he called out in a murmur. Oh, shit.
All the crippling stress that had been building inside of Flame for two weeks had finally been rid of. And now that there was no more tension neither in his shoulders or in his back, Flame could meet Mane’s eyes without needing to look away. And he saw everything he hadn’t seen until now.
Mane chuckled ever so quietly. His eyes didn’t have any flicker of insanity in them. They were… normal. Normal size, normal pupils, normal look to them. Normal, human eyes. Mane’s eyes, his brain eventually registered. Flame recognized these eyes as his brother’s.
But this time around, his eyes had two emotions coexisting in them in a perfect antithesis.
One of them was understanding. Relief.
The other was hurt. Disappointment.
His eyes held an unique sentiment to them, a direct mirror to Mane’s mind – relieved to finally know what was up, but also disappointed to find out about such a harsh truth.
Well, him being an animal had never that harsh of a truth. You get used to it. Many people had thrown that word at him before. At first, it had troubled him. But quickly, it didn’t even shake him anymore. He was fed by their fear, fed by their misunderstanding of who he was. He liked their confusion that left them more mortified than annoyed.
But being an animal to his Blindfold Brother, to his lil’ bro Flame, that was a harsh truth. It stung. Flame had killed hundreds and hundreds of people, an uncountable amount of people, in many horrendously inhumane ways. You’d think he wouldn’t be affected by Mane’s secret. Both of them thirsted for blood, for the very same blood. It wasn’t that different. It was the same spectrum.
And yet.
He had said it.
Animal.
Even then, Mane couldn’t feel any sort of anger towards Flame. It pained him, yeah. But it was a worthless pain, a pain that didn’t know how to fight, a weakling-kind of pain. It just stung. It didn’t do anything. It couldn’t be fuel to a fire. No rage, merely… disappointment.
“That took you long enough, bro,” Mane let out, giggling a bit because what else could he do but giggle? Might as well laugh at the way horror dawned on Flame’s face. “I didn’t think I’d have to do all that just to get my answer out of you, but whatever.”
“Mane-”
Mane interrupted Flame. “But I don’t want your voices to be honest with me. I want my brother to be honest with me. Come talk to me when you’re ready to be honest. You know you’ll always be my little brother.”
And with that, Mane left Flame alone in the villager hall. With nothing but the sound of the ticking machine to accompany him.
Tick, tick, tick, tick.