He thought it’d be fun.

A thrill. Something wild. Something them.

Bill had this dumb, stupid grin plastered on his face the entire walk down the alleyways, tail flicking, his claws laced loosely with the rabbit’s much smaller paw. The city was alive with neon shadows and distant moans. They passed a hyena licking his gums, a panther haggling over prices. But Bill? He only had eyes for the boy beside him.

“C’mon, it’s not like I’m taking you to eat anyone,” he muttered, half-laughing. “You said you liked doing things no one else gets to do, right?”

He didn’t see the stiffness in his partner’s shoulders.

Or maybe he saw it and ignored it.

The Black Market glowed in deep reds and flickering yellows. The scent was sharp. Meat. Blood. Desire. Bill breathed it in like perfume. He tugged the rabbit closer — protective, possessive — his tail swaying like he was proud to have such softness under his arm in such a savage place.

“See? It’s not so bad,” he purred, eyes darting from stall to stall. “Over there? That guy sells boiled goat hooves. And that one— that guy’s a freak, sells ‘experience packages’ with prey pheromones. Can you believe it?”

He chuckled.

The rabbit didn’t.

Bill only noticed the silence when they passed a shop with rabbit pelts hanging like jewelry. He felt the stillness — not the calm kind, but the type just before a scream. His heart jerked. He turned.

And saw those eyes again.

Terror. Confusion. Betrayal.

He had brought him here. Him. The one thing in Bill’s life that wasn’t all about hunger and strength. The one boy who touched his fur like it wasn’t dangerous.

“…Shit,” Bill muttered, his voice cracking around the syllable. He reached out. The rabbit flinched.

Bill froze.

“I— I didn’t mean— I wasn’t thinking, okay? I thought it'd be edgy. Cool. Like, dangerous couple stuff. Like we could do something nobody else would ever do together. But I didn’t think about…”

His own words trailed off like smoke.

The world around them kept moving — lions laughed, dogs sniffed at bones, coins clinked in greasy paws — but Bill stood there, heart pounding, with his fangs bared not in menace, but in guilt.

He saw himself reflected in a shop window. A tall, striped carnivore with a frightened little herbivore at his side.

And he hated it.

“Just relax, a few more places and we leave"