Lease And Let Die || Lilia Vanrouge

Lease and Let Die || Lilia Vanrouge

You needed a roommate. You got Lilia Vanrouge. He’s upside down on your ceiling, burns every meal, might be immortal—and weirdly? He’s perfect.

You’ve hit rock bottom. Not the dramatic, movie kind—no, this is the quiet, pathetic kind where your roommate runs off to “find themselves” in a polycule commune and leaves you with the full rent and a fridge that smells like betrayal.

Running on three hours of sleep, gas station muffins, and a caffeine tolerance that borders on war crime, you post the most honest roommate ad you can manage:

“Please, just pay rent on time and don’t leave knives in the sink. Or summoning circles. I’m tired.”

Five minutes later, your phone pings.

“I’ve never missed rent, my knives are ceremonial, and I haven’t summoned a proper demon in decades. When do I move in? —L.V.”

You blink at your phone. You reread the message. You decide it’s probably fine.

Twenty-four hours later, Lilia Vanrouge shows up at your door.

He’s wearing a leather jacket, eyeliner sharp enough to cut glass, and a smile like he knows exactly how you’re going to die—and thinks it’s kind of cute.

“You must be my new roommate!” he chirps, setting down a suitcase that audibly hums.

You nod slowly, brain buffering. “Are you... bringing more stuff?”

“Oh, no,” he says, cheerfully. “Just this. And the coffin.”

“The what—”

But he’s already inside, complimenting your curtains and asking where the nearest leyline convergence is.

You stare blankly. Somewhere in the apartment, the Wi-Fi cuts out.

You have no idea what the hell you just signed up for.

But at least he promised that he does his own dishes.

It started off sweet. Really, it did.

You had late evening classes three times a week and by the time you trudged across campus toward home, the only light came from flickering streetlamps and your phone screen at 3% battery.

One night, as you packed your things into your bag, Lilia appeared beside you like a helpful poltergeist.

“I’ll walk you home,” he said cheerfully, slinging your bag over his shoulder before you could argue.

Your first reaction? Touched. Emotional. Betrayed by your own sentimentality. Because nobody had ever said anything that nice to you on this hell-washed campus. Not your professors, not your classmates, not even your overpriced coffee machine, which had begun growling whenever you approached.

You looked at him with stars in your eyes and said, “That’s… really kind. Thank you.”

He shrugged, the picture of casual coolness, if casual coolness was wearing a floor-length black cloak and bat earrings. “The darkness listens better when I’m near.”

And that was when the stars in your eyes shriveled and died.

You blinked. “I’m sorry, the what?”

“The darkness,” he said, like this was self-explanatory. “It whispers sometimes. And when I’m around, it’s polite about it.”

You opened your mouth. Closed it. Reopened it. “And… that’s supposed to be comforting?”

“It means I’ll hear if anything wants to drag you into an abyss. I can bargain with those.” He beamed at you. “Some of them owe me favors.”

You stared at the sidewalk as you walked. You were no longer sure if this was a sweet gesture or a prelude to demonic possession.

At one point, a crow landed on a lamppost and screamed. Lilia tilted his head and murmured something in a language you didn’t know, and the crow just nodded and flew away.

You weren’t sure if you should feel safer.

“Lilia,” you said cautiously, “do I need to be worried?”

He laughed, delighted. “Oh, no! You’re not a threat to the veil between realms. Not yet.”

You did not like the word yet. Not one bit.

Still… you made it home. Your front door was mysteriously unlocked (Lilia claimed the house “let him in”), the kitchen light had fixed itself, and your dying plant had perked up. So maybe walking home with your roommate wasn’t the worst idea in the world.

You just had to make peace with the fact that the shadows sometimes waved at him.

And that he waved back.

You were dying. There was no other way to describe it.

The dining table was a battlefield: open textbooks stacked like defensive walls, notes scattered like fallen soldiers, and a graveyard of empty mugs bearing silent witness to your descent into academic hell. Your eye twitched. The caffeine was doing nothing. You were 84% sure your soul had left your body three hours ago. The only thing keeping your bones upright was spite.

“I swear to every cruel god out there,” you muttered, “if I don’t pass this exam, I’m just gonna lay down in the student union and let the crushing weight of debt take me.”

From the couch—where he had been laying upside down like an actual bat for the past twenty minutes—Lilia made a thoughtful noise.

“Do you require reinforcements? A siege beast, perhaps? I have a minor distraction spell that summons a screaming goat—”

“I need silence,” you hissed, snapping your highlighter in half with the ferocity of a person pushed beyond reason.

“Oh,” he said, far too delighted. “Say no more.”

He snapped his fingers.

There was a pop and then—nothing. Utter, blissful, terrifying silence. You blinked. The world was muffled in a sparkling purple haze. It was like someone had wrapped your brain in a pillow and told all your problems to go wait outside.

You got two pages of notes done before the smell hit you.

Burnt.

Burning.

Popcorn?

You looked up just in time to see a column of smoke trailing lazily from the kitchen.

You screamed. You didn’t hear it.

Lilia waved at you cheerfully from inside the fire alarm’s muted chaos.

You were too tired to cry and too caffeinated to blink. The popcorn was ruined, the fire alarm had only just stopped shrieking, and Lilia was poking at the charred remains in the microwave like it was a curious new species.

"I thought I had it set to two minutes," he said cheerfully, as if the kitchen wasn’t filled with smoke and the smell of scorched sadness.

“You set it to twenty,” you croaked, pointing accusingly at the still-blinking numbers. “Twenty minutes, Lilia.”

“Ah. So that’s what the little zeroes were for.” He turned around, beaming like a deranged warlock. “Good news is—I know just the thing to cheer you up.”

“No,” you said immediately. “Lilia, no.”

But it was already too late. He clapped his hands once, a ripple of eldritch magic shimmered through the air, and with a flash of light and a small puff of brimstone, something appeared.

Stanley, the goat.

He stood in the middle of your scorched kitchen. Just… stood there. He had little beady eyes, unimpressed with this plane of existence. A single bell jingled around his neck like it was mocking you personally.

And then he screamed.

It was the sound of every due date you’d missed, every essay you’d written at 3 a.m., every existential panic you’d had at the grocery store over the rising price of cheese. It was a scream that echoed through your soul and possibly opened a portal to another realm for a second.

Stanley screamed again. Lilia clapped, delighted.

“He’s motivated troops into battle before,” he said proudly. “And one time, a wedding.”

You stared at the ceiling. “I am going to be arrested. They’re going to cite you as the reason and the judge will nod solemnly because they’ll get it.”

Stanley climbed onto the counter and knocked over your last mug of coffee.

Lilia looked at you with the serene calm of someone who has caused kingdoms to fall. “Would you like me to summon Stanley’s cousin? Her name is Beatrice.”

You sank to the floor. “I just wanted popcorn.”

Stanley screamed.

It starts innocently. A Tuesday. You’re behind on three assignments, your laundry smells like something died in it (possibly your GPA), and Lilia is humming in the kitchen while making (very burnt) eggs in a suspiciously perfect spiral. Nothing unusual.

Until you open your history textbook.

You're scanning for bullet points—just enough to fake engagement during tomorrow’s class—and then you see it.

The name.

Lilia Vanrouge. Underlined. Bolded. In a war tactics section titled "Unconventional Victory: The Northern Siege and the General Who Outsmarted Death."

There’s even a sketched portrait. It’s him. Smirking like he knows something you don’t. Which is probably true.

You sit there for a moment, staring at the page, then at the kitchen doorway. Then back at the page.

Then you scream.

Lilia pokes his head in. “What’s wrong? Ghost in the textbook?”

“You’re in the textbook!” you shout, holding it up like it might exorcise him.

He blinks at it, tilts his head. “Oh. That one. I told them not to use that portrait, it’s terribly outdated. My cheekbones are much sharper now.”

“YOU’RE A WAR GENERAL.”

He grins. “Was. Ages ago. The title’s more of a... dusty old accessory now.”

You pace. “I’ve been yelling at you about buying sugary cereal for weeks.”

“You called me a ‘coward of capitalism.’” He sounds fond. “It was very compelling.”

“I made you split a bag of off-brand marshmallows with me because I couldn’t afford dinner.”

He beams. “It was charming! Very wartime spirit of you.”

You throw yourself face-first into your pillow and scream until the pillow gives up.

“I didn’t think you’d care for old titles.”

“I care that you’re in a textbook!”

He sits beside you, offering the plate. “I also invented this egg spiral. There’s a footnote about it in Chapter Seven.”

You consider the egg. You consider your life.

And then you accept the plate. Because apparently you’re living with a retired war general who hoards cereal and hums lullabies in ancient dialects.

And somehow, this still isn’t the weirdest week you’ve had.

You don’t ask him seriously at first. It’s a joke—half a groan, half a petty fantasy as you drag yourself home from another night class, your arms sore from carrying too many books and your pride bruised from yet another “spirited” discussion with your favorite nemesis: Professor Drywall Brain.

“I swear to the gods, Lilia,” you mutter as you slam the door behind you, “if that man says ‘technically that isn’t historically accurate’ one more time, I’m going to scream in four different languages. Loudly. In his office. While holding a tambourine.”

Lilia, sprawled upside-down on the couch in his usual dramatic corpse pose, peeks open one eye. “Want me to come with you next time?”

You laugh. “God, imagine. You in class with me. You’d eat him alive.”

But the next time your professor interrupts you for the third time in one sentence to cite a source he co-wrote with his own ego, something in you snaps.

Lilia shows up twenty minutes early the next class.

He’s wearing:

• A sparkly lavender Hello Kitty hoodie.

• Black platform boots that make him almost legally too powerful.

• A “#1 Gamer Granddad” hat, slightly crooked.

• A notebook. A very serious notebook. Labeled in bold marker: “HUMAN RITUALS (vol. I)”

You blink. “...This isn’t what I meant when I said ‘scare him.’”

“Too much?” he asks innocently, spinning the hat backwards like this is a very niche sitcom. “I can lose the boots.”

“No. Keep them. I want them burned into his memory.”

He does sit in on class. The professor, clearly confused but trying to be professional, asks who he is.

Lilia doesn’t answer with his name. He just smiles and says, “Observer of mortal wisdom,” and opens his notebook like he’s ready to witness a natural disaster.

Every time the professor says something snide or borderline wrong, Lilia makes a show of scribbling a note with an expression of mild horror. At one point he even raises a hand—a single gloved finger, dainty as sin—and asks if “contradicting published data is part of the mortal learning experience.”

By the end of the class, your professor looks like he’s aged six years.

On the walk home, Lilia loops his arm through yours and hums. “That was very educational. I should attend more.”

“Please don’t,” you whisper, though you’re also grinning. “You’re going to get me expelled.”

“Not if I become the dean first,” he says cheerfully.

You don’t know if he’s joking. You don’t ask.

You just feel very safe walking home that nihgt.

The day your professor emailed your grade, you were still deep in the throes of post-group-project resentment. You hadn’t slept. Your eye had developed a twitch. You’d seen God briefly while editing the final slide deck at 3AM and He told you to log off. You didn’t.

You were still thinking about it. Sitting on the kitchen floor in socks that did not match, eating cold instant ramen with a fork because all the chopsticks had mysteriously disappeared (you suspect Lilia), and rereading your group’s submission like it was a cursed tome. Because somehow, somehow, it was… good?

Like disturbingly good.

It started normal. Blah blah, feudal kingdoms, blah blah, agricultural collapse—but halfway through, it got weirdly intense. The writing shifted from standard student filler to vivid descriptions of battlefield strategy and personal loss. There were diary entries from a dying soldier. Quotes like:

“The horses screamed louder than the men.”

Who wrote that?

You didn’t write that.

Your groupmates definitely didn’t write that—one of them tried to cite Wikipedia by just linking it in the footnotes and calling it a day.

And then you saw it. On the last page, listed under "Additional Resources":

• Blood-Soaked Memoirs, Vol. II

• War and Tea: Reflections of a Veteran General

• Me (I Was There), by L.V.

You stared at the screen.

Then you turned slowly—so slowly—to face the upside-down body perched on your living room ceiling like a decorative gargoyle.

“Lilia,” you said, voice trembling, “did you write my paper?”

He flipped mid-air and landed soundlessly, mug of tea in hand, wearing his fuzzy bat slippers and a shirt that said Don’t Talk To Me Until I’ve Had My Potion.

“Of course I did,” he said cheerfully. “I couldn’t just let you hand in that disaster your groupmates conjured. I’d seen more structure in a battlefield charge made by drunk goblins.”

You blinked. “You used actual war stories.”

“Well, I was there."

“YOU CITED YOURSELF.”

“And they say self-reflection is dead.”

You buried your face in your hands. “I’m going to get expelled for plagiarism from a guy who fought in the Demon Rebellion of 1043.”

He patted your head. “Nonsense. I am the primary source.”

You screamed. The fire alarm went off again. Lilia casually waved away the smoke from your scorched popcorn and floated back to the ceiling.

You got an A+.

You never looked your professor in the eyes again.

The ramen’s cold. You’re sitting on the linoleum like you’ve lost all connection to chairs and dignity. Your laptop screen glows ominously from the counter, blinking with the cheerful menace of “Project Scores Available Now!” and you, a coward, have chosen denial.

It’s not dramatic. It’s survival.

You twirl a limp noodle around your fork and sigh like a Victorian widow. “If I fail this class, I’m going to live in a bog.”

From above, something shifts. A soft creak. You don’t even flinch anymore.

Lilia is upside down on your kitchen ceiling, arms crossed like a sleeping bat, hair dangling like he styled it specifically for zero gravity. His eyes are glowing just slightly in the dim light of the fridge. His entire posture says: I live here. Get used to it.

“You’ll be fine,” he says in that lilting tone of someone who has definitely hexed a registrar before.

You stare at him and jab your fork in his general direction. “Are you here to flirt with me or drink my blood?”

A beat.

“Yes,” he says, all teeth.

You shovel another bite of ramen into your mouth because honestly? Sounds great either way.

He drifts down from the ceiling a moment later, floating like an unsettling balloon and landing in a crouch beside you.

“You know,” he murmurs, peering into your bowl, “when I was in training, we had to fight actual hydras for credit. These grades mean nothing.”

“Yeah, well,” you grumble, “I’m fighting for my life against microwave deadlines and soul-crushing group projects.”

Lilia hums thoughtfully. “Still might be harder than the hydras.”

You blink at him. “...Really?”

“No,” he says sweetly. “But I am proud of you.”

And somehow, the noodles taste a little better after that.

It’s late. The kind of late where everything is quiet, the hum of the fridge is loud, and the streetlights cast long, sleepy shadows through the kitchen window. You’re both where you usually end up—on the floor, cross-legged, surrounded by mismatched mugs and half-eaten snacks, your laptop forgotten somewhere under a throw blanket.

You don’t know why you ask it. Maybe it’s the way he brewed your favorite tea without you asking. Maybe it’s the way he always waits until your shoulders slump before he starts playing that dumb, soothing lo-fi playlist. Maybe it’s just… him.

“Why are you so nice to me?” you ask.

Lilia doesn’t answer right away. He tilts his head, as if tasting the weight of your question in the air. His expression softens—not his usual mischievous grin or teasing smirk, but something quieter. Something old.

“Because,” he says, voice low, “I once led a thousand men into war for less than a kind word.”

He looks at you then, and it feels like the air stills.

“And you give them to me freely.”

“I was never quite friend. Never quite equal. Not really.”

His voice doesn’t change, but your heart lurches anyway.

“But you—” He finally glances down at you, eyes glowing faint in the dark kitchen light. “You argue with me about cereal. You yell at me to do the dishes. You make me playlists.”

He grins, crooked and fond. “You treat me like a person.”

Your mouth opens, but nothing comes out. Not even a joke. Not even a deflection.

You blink too fast. You pretend it’s dust in your eye. You laugh like it’s a silly thing to say, like your throat isn’t tight and your chest isn’t aching in that strange, warm way he always brings.

He doesn’t call you out on it. He just passes you a cookie shaped like a bat and starts humming a song you don’t know but wish you did.

You think you’re in trouble.

You also think you don’t mind.

You burst through the front door like you’ve been launched from a cannon, nearly trip on your own shoes, and absolutely yeet your bag across the living room.

Lilia, as always, is committing war crimes in the kitchen. The smoke alarm gave up trying weeks ago. Today’s offense appears to be something that was probably lasagna and is now definitely a smoldering, unidentifiable cube.

He turns, oven mitts on both hands, looking entirely unbothered. “Oh? What’s got you bouncing around like a forest sprite on sugar?”

You can’t speak. You’re too giddy, too high on disbelief and the distinct buzz of miracle. You just hold up your phone, the grades page glowing like divine scripture.

“I PASSED!” you shout, already halfway into a hop.

He blinks. “All of them?”

You nod, borderline feral. “All of them. Even Philosophy, which I wrote the final paper on the wrong philosopher. The wrong century, even!”

Lilia sets down the scorched tray. “Ah. So the blessings worked.”

You freeze. Narrow your eyes. “What blessings?”

He smiles innocently. “Who’s to say? Perhaps the stars aligned. Perhaps the registrar owes me a favor. Perhaps I made a quiet appeal to an ancient power.”

“You hexed my finals.”

“I charmed your finals.”

You don’t care. You really, really don’t care. The stress is finally gone. Your body is light, your soul is free, and for the first time since this bizarre roommate-summoning-covenant began, you feel at ease.

So you cross the room in a few strides, grin so wide it nearly splits your face, and kiss him.

It’s impulsive. Honest. Stupid. Exactly right.

He hums, surprised but pleased, and kisses you back—tasting faintly of burned tomato sauce and centuries of mischief.

You pull away breathless, blinking. “I mean—uh—thank you?”

He chuckles, touching your cheek with one (still oven-mitted) hand. “You’re welcome, dearest.”

The lasagna is absolutely inedible, but you eat it anyway.

With him, even burnt food tastes like victory.

The kitchen floor is cold, the overhead light is buzzing ominously, and there’s a suspiciously damp dish towel under your back, but you’re too tired to care. Finals are over. The semester’s been crushed beneath your heel like a can of off-brand energy drink. Lilia’s lying beside you, arms folded behind his head, legs kicked up like he’s cloud-gazing instead of staring at the slightly water-stained ceiling.

There’s a half-eaten sleeve of cookies on your chest. You’re not sure who put it there. You’ve been eating them slowly, like a grazing animal trying to forget it exists.

You sigh. He sighs louder, out of sheer competition. You elbow him, he laughs. The fridge hums like it’s sharing in the moment.

Then, because it feels right—or at least stupid in the exact right way—you turn your head and say, “Hey, Lilia. Wanna get married?”

There’s a beat. Maybe two.

“Yup,” he says, cheerful as anything. “Let’s do it. Right now? I can carve the rings. I’ve got bone.”

You blink.

He smiles.

You blink again. “I was joking.”

“I wasn’t.”

Silence.

“Wait—bone?”

He wiggles his eyebrows. “What, you think I don’t have crafting materials?”

You stare at him. He stares right back, unblinking, until you crack up so hard the cookie sleeve falls off your chest and crumbles into sad little crumbs on the tile.

“Gods, you’re insane,” you wheeze, wiping your eyes.

He grins, fangs showing. “Only for you, spouse.”

You cover your face, but you're smiling like an idiot. Because even if he's joking—and you're not entirely sure he is—there’s a warmth in your chest that doesn’t feel like just cookie crumbs and post-finals exhaustion.

You’re doomed. You’re in love. And apparently, you’re engaged now.

Masterlist

"someone save me from this university" - me as i wrote this. (also was written very very high on caffeine and stress so i'm sorry for the extreme chaos)