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Neteyam's palms sting. Dad drags sharp teeth down each one, tugging and pulling at the fragile skin until it slowly, carefully rips open. It’s everything Neteyam can do to choke down a whimper, but Dad still smiles up at him like he knows .
“Sorry,” he says, lapping at Neteyam’s torn skin. “I couldn’t help myself. You’re so pretty, boy.” He kisses Neteyam’s fingers, one by one. “Good enough to eat.”
Dad’s teeth dig into the sides of his hands, where Neteyam’s pinkies might be if he has one. He tugs at the loose skin with soft growls, like a nantang.
(Neteyam thinks there was a time when he wasn’t the only one around with four fingers instead of five, a world where the word freak would drift through the air without ever landing on him. He thinks he remembers telling someone it’s not so bad, just ignore them. He thinks he feels guilty about that)
Dad lifts his head, lips shining red as if he’s painted them again. He gives Neteyam a kiss, foreheads brushing together like they used to when Neteyam was little, and says something Neteyam can’t hear because the Music is pulsing suddenly in the background.
It dies down again as Dad pulls away, reaching for his bag. Neteyam’s ears twitch at the sound of low crinkling, something shiny and plastic being opened up like a body.
“Heh.” Dad glances back over at him, smiling. “Your ears look like a bunny when they go up like that.” He smooths a hand over Neteyam’s ears, flicking the tips just hard enough to sting. “Are you my Easter Bunny?”
“...east or?” He knows bunny, it’s an Earth animal, and people call him to it all the time (sexy bunny, bunny boy, bunnyslut, little bunny bitch) but Easter is new. Neteyam coughs and licks his lips, trying to wrap his mind around the word.
East. East, or. Eastern…Eastern Sea– salt fills his mouth, except it isn’t really there, and he coughs. Bitterness in his mouth, like where the Colonel fucked his throat this morning, rough and mean with his searing fingers digging into Neteyam's kuru.
“Easy,” Dad soothes. He holds out his hand and there are colorful little ovals glinting in his palm, like jewels or eyeballs–like pills, except shinier. “I got you a treat, son. Open your mouth.”
What is it? But Dad probably won’t tell, he likes his surprises, so Neteyam just obediently opens his mouth. Dad pops one, two, three of the little ovals into his mouth, carefully nudging his jaw shut.
Sweetness digs into Neteyam’s tongue like a knife and he sucks in a sharp breath through his nose, ears flattening. The Music spikes in the background, sharp as a warning, and he wants to spit them out–but he can’t, he can’t, Dad would be so mad…
“Good, huh?” His father is smiling, hopeful. Neteyam does his best to smile back.
“I knew you’d like it.” Dad’s pouring more of the little ovals into his hand, and Neteyam gingerly forces his mouth open. “They’re called jelly beans, you eat ‘em for Easter. Bunnies leave them in your yard, if you’ve been good.”
Neteyam closes his mouth, chews, swallows roughly as the glossy sludge rolls down his throat. Little fragments stick in his teeth, dragging jagged little pulses of sickly sweetness through his gums.
“And there are flowers and chocolate and shit.” Dad chuckles. “Like the bunnies are trying to get in your pants, yeah?” He nuzzles at Neteyam’s throat, teeth scraping skin. “Maybe I should get you some of those later, huh? Spoil my little bunny."
“Flowers?” Neteyam asks, hoping to distract Dad from chocolate. Dad made him eat it before and he’d done his best, but it smelled awful, tasted worse, and almost lasted in his stomach for a few hours. Dad said he wasn’t mad after Neteyam threw it all up, but Neteyam never quite believed him.
“Sure, flowers. Renewal. Springtime, all that jazz.” Dad’s giving him more…beans and Neteyam’s mouth is getting a little numb from all the sugar, but otherwise he thinks he’s doing okay. They kind of remind him of the candies Grandmother used to make for–for–
A festival. Renewal. They…they’d done something, hadn’t they, for that? Dancing, and singing, and green sprouting from the bones of old Kelutral, and–
Dad’s talking again, though, and the memories scatter away like leaves in the wind. “But honestly, the rabbits and shit, they’re just set dressing, you know? Pretty decorations.” He’s looking at Neteyam as he says that, lips quirked. “The real treasure is under the surface.”
He slips a single red jelly between his bloodied lips. “See, the Easter story, it’s not about a rabbit, it’s about a man. Lived a long time ago, before–fuck, I’ll just show you.”
Movement behind him, the familiar tug of tswin slotting into place. Neteyam stiffens, eyelids fluttering as he feels his father’s mind twining through his, familiar links in a chain sliding home. His muscles loosen, head sliding back, and suddenly the jelly beans in his mouth are some of the nicest things he’s ever tasted, cool and rich and perfect.
Dad hisses in discomfort, and Neteyam can tell he’s picking up on the Music playing in the background. “Can’t you turn that shit off?” he mutters, not for the first time.
“Sorry, sir.” He’s tried, and sometimes he even succeeds, but the sounds always come back, rolling through his head with the relentlessness of water. Even if he’s distracted enough to not notice them, they’re there.
“Fucking–” Anger spikes over the bond, and Neteyam glimpses a vast weight body in the ocean, torn up and bleeding everywhere, fins sprayed out over the ocean like outflung hands. Dad huffs and the picture dissolves before Neteyam can see anything else.
“Anyway, where was I?” Dad’s hand smooths over his belly, pressing down hard on Neteyam’s sugar-swollen belly. “Right, yeah, the story. See, there was a man a long time ago, a traveler between two worlds, between the heavens and the earth.”
The world around them ripples, shivers and twists--Neteyam can see shimmering gold, bloodspray, cross shapes like the one Prager wears, an old painting of a white human man bathed in white. His father's tongue drags over his ears, rough scraping on the tender inner shell, his nails scratching Neteyam's hips.
"He was a holy man," Dad whispers. He says holy and Neteyam sees the familiar flash of red-white-blue that's on everything around here, sees fires raining from the sky. "On a holy mission. An assignment "
Can you do that for me, son? a voice whispers, crinkling over the line between their brains. He almost cringes, hoping Dad doesn't notice; Neteyam kind of hates hearing the Colonel's voice in his head, even if it's only someone's memory.
"But he was betrayed. Sacrificed. With a kiss." Dad's lips press over Neteyam's, tongue curling down his throat. Trees loom around them, shrinking and growing with the steadiness of pulsing green hearts. "Laid down to die at the feet of his daddy, his god--same thing, really."
The cover coming down, settling over his head, the link bed humming around him as the hard drive ate his soul. The sag of a colonel in the woods, pierced with a vast wood nail, ache of stolen years in the shape of a snarling golden-haired boy.
And the rock, digging into his back. Faces, sobbing, tears in the golden-haired boy's eyes behind his mask, Mom with her face twisted and unrecognizable, babybromightwarrior bloodied and shaking, Tsireya blankly stunned.
Dad leaning over him like they're fucking, only it hurts, it hurts so much, even worse than the first time. Dad's hair liked it used to be before he started tying it back, Dad's lips moving, out of sync with the words Neteyam's hearing: deep breaths, Isaac, ready for the knife--
and the rock is a small bedroom late at night, is a white table, is the piercing cock splitting him through, is Neteyam on this bed now, breathless, struggling, drowning on dry land as the Music screams and the tulkun howls for his calf and Dad turns to face him in the woods, saying--
"Stay with me, now." An order, firm, steady, and there are more jelly beans being forced down Neteyam's throat, enough he has to focus on not choking instead of the noise or his father's eyes or the arm or the voice at the base of his skull screaming dead dead dead.
"Cut that shit out," Dad barks, and the alarm cuts off, emptiness whining like a black hole. One of the jelly beans crumbles on his tongue in a way none of the others have before, a way that he vaguely recognizes.
"It's okay." Dad says it less like a promise and more like a statement of fact: it is okay, it is always okay. A world where it is not okay, where Neteyam is not okay, is not allowed to exist. "Do you know why it's okay? Do you know what happened to the holy man?"
"He..." It's hard to get the words out, but it's only because of the sweetness and stickiness built up on his tongue, not because he doesn't know the answer, he always knows the answer (always so fucking perfect) "He came back. Like us."
"That he did." Dad's voice drips pride, spilling through Neteyam's neurons like honey and sending the world around him flickering gold. Or maybe that's the pills, or something else entirely, like the Music that never stays gone.
"My clever little boy. Coming back, that's the really divine part, isn't it? They try to destroy us, sacrifice us, betray us," Neteyam sees a broken mirror, roar of flames, feels the familiar flash of Tommy Tommy Tommy like a knife drawn up his spine, "but they end up making us into gods."
Neteyam has never felt like a god. Maybe that's the trick of being a god, you don't feel like one, but Dad and the colonel and the rest of the squad certainly feel pretty comfortable about it. Maybe that's something you grow into, like getting fucked or killing people.
You don't have to, a voice babbles up from the heart of the Music, wet and torn open. Neteyam doesn't respond, hoping it (she) will take the hint and shut the fuck up, swim away with her dead calf. Knows it (she) won't.
Dad's still talking, as his hands wander down between Neteyam's thighs. "It's not easy, of course. There are rough days--you expect your Magdalene outside your tomb, you're pissed off when he's, she's, not there."
Neteyam remembers pictures of the golden-haired boy on the Colonel's lap, the Colonel going off to the gym alone to punch himself into exhaustion again. He remembers the photo of Uncle Tommy smiling with Dad and how hard as he tries, Neteyam can never replicate that smile quite right.
"But they come back." Dad's finger nudges against Neteyam's pussy and it's wet, has it always been wet? He doesn't know. There are bits of jelly bean still sticking in his teeth, there is a growing lightness in his head, there is his father grinding hot-hard-heavy against him like a dream come true.
"We're gonna get it all back. All of them. Get what we're owed. Right, son?" Dad's smiling, teeth bared, eyes shining.
Neteyam thinks faintly of another Dad who never smiled like that, whose face was older and worn. A dad who never ,ever looked at Neteyam like he wanted to eat him the fuck alive and eat keep him safe in his belly, forever, where nothing could ever hurt it again.
He's still not sure which Dad is real, which Dad he prefers. But, as he's reminded himself over and over again, it's not his choice. There's a kind of comfort in that.
"Right," he murmurs. His belly is heavy, his head light, and it's the easiest thing in the world to let himself be pushed onto the mattress, lying flat and still (Dad, I'm sorry) as his father descends on him.
"Good boy," Dad purrs, or maybe he just thinks it, the words rippling through Neteyam like water. His father's hands press against him, inside him, because he's a good bunny, nice warm bunny, fattened and sweetened and pretty inside and out...
The Music ripples on, distant and relentless as ocean waves. Neteyam closes his eyes and tries to slip deep enough he can't hear it anymore.