Here I am, again. The typical me doing stuff that her mother would frown at.
This fic is terrible lmao there are so many warnings in here. Expect child abuse, bad touching, creepy Ardyn, possessive behaviour, emotional manipulation, rape whether it may be referenced/implied/explicit, unhealthy relationships, father/son incest, sexual harassment, emotional/psychological abuse, drug use, and of course, daddy issues.
Title taken from the song Daddy Issues by The Neighbourhood. Nothing belongs to me, this is just fanfic.
Chapter 1: take you like a drug
The hands are warm. Awfully so.
They are slow heat climbing up his sides, the rough pads tracing the skin around the valleys of ribs, rubbing soap as they progress upward. He trembles, looks at the rivulets of clear liquid splattering, sliding to the drain the moment they touch the tiled floor, run by his wrinkly toes and the bigger feet centimeters behind them.
He can see his knees shaking, can see the difference between his pale, pale skin and the man's slightly darker tone. His tiny figure versus the full grown man that washes him with big, big palms-they rub circles on his less swollen belly (he's growing, bones elongating and skin stretching along with them; no more chubby Prompto, not the fat kid any longer) draw shapes on his navel, grab his hipbones too strongly, brush against rosy nipples while a dark voice chuckles ("Do you remember, my boy? I used to bathe you this way when you were barely a toddler" No, he did not remember and preferred that to the alternative), they cover the span of his small thighs, travel almost the entirety of his body-it seems disturbingly wrong, this entire scenario.
He is too scared, too unnerved by a variety of reasons, to turn around and glance at the man and wonder why this is happening at all.
His blood, frozen. His thoughts, headless animals running without a purpose. Nothing makes sense and he is afraid.
He doesn't think it's a common thing for twelve year old boys to shower with their fathers.
Father-a simple word that had his knees shaking and skin pouring sweat in a heartbeat, in a minute, in the blink of an eye, in a moment that expanded in and out of itself for too long. For forever.
Father-he had seen the word used countless times in the awed voice of his classmates, portrayed in all kinds of media as a center of stability, the fountain of every child's guidance and tranquility; he knew it was related to terms like love and warmth, he should feel glad at the mere mention of it.
Father has many meanings, he has learned throughout the years from watching other kids interact with their parents.
His own concept of 'father' is, to say the least, less conventional than normal.
His first memory is of him. He was five years old then. It was a Tuesday night and he sat with his back straight on the table across his father. They were having dinner when his father suddenly stopped, put his cutlery down and pinned his son with a smoldering gaze that left him frozen and shivering on his seat.
Later, he'd come to learn this as a universal fact: other parents looked at their children with love in their eyes, with fond exasperation, with any type of emotion different from the blank, dark look his father always used on him. The eerie eyes that studied him as if he were an interesting experiment instead of his son. Cold, calculating, judging hazel eyes.
The quietness in the room. The heavy atmosphere. The downturn of lips. The unfriendly furniture, the iciness surrounding him. And the fear and loneliness that took over his small body in the form of subtle shaking.
Staring that went on for an eternity.
A smile that alarmed him.
"Eat." Stern and amused, two attitudes, two emotions he had imagined were unconceivable. In his dad's voice they went on hand in hand.
Eat, he had been ordered. He lowered his eyes to his plate and eat he did. While hungry eyes trailed the awkward movement of the trembling fork entering the mouth of his son.
The blonde woman looked at him, squinted eyes full of hatred and her unfairly beautiful face twisted in a painful grimace. Her cheeks were flushed from the herculean effort she had just accomplished, she wasn't able to keep her mouth closed and she heaved, trying to absorb air. Her hair stuck to her skin in some places due to excessive sweating, tear tracks told the story of her grief and the man felt this was one of those times in which he couldn't really decipher whether she looked more gorgeous like this (broken, bruised, beaten) or back when she had been full of life, before her imprisonment, before she had been chosen as a test subject and her eyes shined not with loathing but with mischief.
Oh, he was sure that if her hands had not been bound to the arms of the bed she wouldn't have hesitated to throw herself at him and claw his eyes out the sockets, yelling at the top of her lungs despite the weakened state of her body. Such was the emotion that overwhelmed her. Such was the passion inside of her, still breathing, still alive. In other circumstances he would have basked a little longer in the perfect painting of human misery that she made. However, his real interest at the moment rested on the small lump in his arms.
He held the tiny thing carefully, like he recalled doing centuries ago when he had cared enough to bother with these things. Truth be told, even then, he hadn't really possessed much of an interest in children. He thought of them as a necessary evil but not much more. He had clearly been ignorant of what it would truly feel like to hold a being that belonged to him alone, knowing the pathetic and defenseless child lived because he had deemed it so, because he had decided to bring it to life.
A long time ago, all he had ever owned had been taken wrongfully from him. He had been shunned, rejected, left for dead by unmerciful Gods and the ungrateful human vermin he had once wasted his abilities on. He had nothing. Had spent hundreds and hundreds of years never really owning anything. But right now, in the medical wing of a facility in Gralea, a woman had given birth to a baby and the baby, with this pinkish wrinkly flesh, his little hands of equally little fingers, his little mouth, and his closed eyes, was his own.
Everything about it was his.
This creature was his. His and only his. Partly made of his seed, the newborn contained his genes, shared his flesh and blood.
He smiled and an unknown feeling descended upon him as he rocked the baby in his arms, softly, gently. Things he hadn't been in years. In the background, the mother of the child cried and demanded he let go of her baby. Of her son. The baby was warm and pleasant in his grasp and when he raised his eyes away from his first born, it was merely to order the nurses standing uselessly by the door to silence the nuisance already. Couldn't they see the ruckus would startle the child?
He walked out of the infirmary with his bounty, his charge, his possession, in hand. On the hospital bed, blue vacant eyes stared after the man's retreating shadow. No words formed on her lifeless tongue.
He was seven when he, one day, for reasons unclear to him nowadays, stood side by side with his dad. Smaller hand clasped in his bigger one and they were both looking at their reflections staring back from the full length mirror in his father's main bedroom.
The small boy (even for his age), haunted eyes, swollen cheeks, pouting lips, gelled blond hair (not one lock out of place), the dots scattered all over his reddened cheeks and nose. His giant doe haunted eyes. His father next to him, who couldn't look less like his son. Unshaven jaw, sharp jaw line, reddish hair, perpetually smiling lips (but it wasn't nice, not nice at all; there was always something unsettling in the manner in which his dad smiled), eyes ablaze with a thousand secrets, hidden knowledge Prompto thought was the reason for the oddities of his dad's attitude.
Two opposites in the mirror. Two opposites in real life.
"Dad," he began timidly. Quiet. Shy. Never sure of how to address his father. The man who turned from hot to cold in a second; the man that could shatter the frail hand in his grasp if he said the wrong thing. Not that he had ever laid hands on him but the boy knew instinctually that his father was not someone to be messed with. "We don't look like each other at all."
Laugh that felt like a stream of cold water descending down his spine "You inherited your mother's looks. Indeed, there does not seem to be one bit of me in your outward appearance. A real shame."
The hand on his wrist tightened.
"But do not fret, my child, for I am here, inside of you." his free hand trailed slowly up his filled out stomach until it reached the place where his hummingbird heart pulsed, fingers splaying out possessively, "Where it matters the most."
"Every cell, every tissue, the blood running through your veins: they are all me and they all belong to me."
His deep, cheerful voice. His frightened expression in the mirror versus his daddy's pleased one.
"You'll do well to remember that."
Honestly, he didn't think there was any possible universe where he would not have shrieked at the sight of his father nonchalantly standing by the bathroom's door (which, by the way, Prompto didn't remember leaving open), looking at him from head to toe appreciatively, the same way he did when he saw something that appealed to his particular tastes.
His father always looked at people like he wanted to either fuck them or just screw them over. In his case it was always a strange mix of both plus whatever other messed up shit went through his head whenever he decided to do things like this, things like watching his son's naked frame while said son took a bath. His eyes glowed red somehow as he drank in his thinner adolescent body.
Before, Prompto hadn't known better. One vague class of sex ed, interrupted every five minutes or so by the nervous laughter of his peers, was not enough to answer his many doubts regarding hi strained relationship with the man who claimed to be his father. Now at fourteen, in the pinnacle of his teenage years, at the start of his high school life, he definitely knew better. Some thoughtless comments he had heard in the hallways while passing, some morbid jokes written on bathroom stalls, some research done one day on his brand new laptop and he gathered enough information to understand his situation a little bit more.
And Grand Six, he finally comprehended the meaning of the saying 'ignorance is bliss'.
A normal reaction would have been to yell and quickly hide himself behind the safe cover of curtain showers and he would have done this had his father been any other person than Ardyn Izunia, the Chancellor of Niflheim. His both distant and ever present dad. Who watched him overly close, kept an iron grip around him, monitored his every move, made father-son interactions into some kind of twisted awkward torture that didn't make the slightest sense to him.
Dealing with Ardyn was a mental, emotional and physical struggle. This was his everyday life. Living with the danger, dancing intimately close to that ridiculously blurred line between what was considered proper or improper, experiencing firsthand what others talked about in TV (just he was not quite there yet). Not being able to really do anything about it because there was no one to talk to, no one to run to, and nowhere else to go.
At the end of the day, he was only Chancellor Izunia's son and nothing else.
Forget the normal reaction, if they were different people his father would not be intruding on him while he bathed. But he wasn't other, he was Prompto Izunia, forced into a certain context, into this sham of a family, and therefore all he did was stand shivering beneath the falling water, praying silently for his father to go away or drop dead. He crossed his legs slightly, as discreetly as he could, trying to keep the amber gaze far from what hung between his freckled thighs (another feature he had not in common with his father: the numerous dots on his skin) and crossed his skinny arms hard across his chest in a vain effort not to draw attention to his hardening nipples.
This backfired terribly.
"Prompto," his dad said. He hated how his father enounced his given name. Throaty, owning, wanting , none of them emotions a father should ever direct at their progeny. "Why so skittisk? What are you covering yourself for?" Glint of teeth. The illusion of sanity, that there is nothing to fear. "There is not a part of you I haven't seen already".
The tone he used was supposed to sound in jest. A mere joke. He could see through the act though. Got glimpses of the darkness, the possessiveness entwined with the statement. He flinched unconsciously. Adhered his back to the wall.
"If I'm not mistaken, we still showered together when you were twelve. What happened to my little boy that he now rejects me so heartlessly? So cold. Are you ashamed of your father, perhaps?"
I'm afraid of you.
Prompto shook his head in answer, his vocal chords unable to come up with an adequate response.
The words his father said. He recalled the mirror, the small kid in the mirror and his dad expressing his sick ownership of him like a pet owner shattering his dog's freedom with the heavy weight of the collar. The collar that bound them together, master and pet. Owner and owned. Creator and creation.
His tongue was sandpaper against his lips.
"I'm fourteen now, father. I… don't think it's appropriate…" His voice died. He couldn't bring himself to finish that line of thought but knew his dad would latch onto what he was trying to say immediately.
He did.
His smile turned more dangerous than before. His eyes shined with malice and again they examined the expansion of his body casually, leisurely, as if he was looking at a piece of meat and not his own flesh and blood. Or who knows, maybe it was the fact that they were directly related that made this harassment worth it for him. And Prompto wanted to cry, scream at the top of his lungs when his dad focused intently on his waist and the happy trail leading downwards. He hugged himself tighter, bit his bottom lip and looked away.
How could he feel so violated without being touched?
Many words crossed his mind then, especially one he had seen on a news channel headline that day ("Sexual Predator strikes once more…").
He blinked to keep the tears at bay.
In a second his father was on him. He gasped at the exact moment fingers pressed softly but fiercely against his throat, against his Adam's apple, and the other five phalanges nestled where the dimples on the small of his back were located. He froze. Looking up, blue wide teary eyes, at the man who gave him life, the man he should love, the man he feared more than anything. The man that returned his pleading stare with the maniacal want and curiosity of his. Detached and so involved. Devoted and uninterested.
He leant in, to the point where he was cheek to cheek with Prompto and his unnaturally colored hair brushed his jaw. His lips brushed the shell of his hear; the boy smelled wine and blood in his breath. "I'm your family, son. You're mine. So why would anything, anything, concerning us ever be wrong?"
Rotten and foul, the ill meaning sentences whispered to him in a bathroom, his back to the wall, his dad standing over him, imposing and every bit as dangerous as a serpent luring prey. And then, fast as lighning, he turned his head to the right and kissed his first born right on the corner of his lip, right where bottom and upper lip met chin and cheek. It was wet, hot and everything Prompto dreaded-the fingers threatening to choke him, the words meant to rattle him, the mouth that wanted and pushed to take what rightfully belonged to him.
A promise seared on his flesh, not quite on forbidden land but precariously close to it.
After a lifetime, he pulled away. Prompto heaved and fet his face tremble, dying to widen the distance between his father's face and his. Crazy bastard was currently dripping wet too, for getting inside while the shower was still running and now his ridiculous clothes and hair were soaked. Ardyn didn't seem to care though. He just watched him for a while and grinned, and for a second it was almost real. The upturn of lips and the crinkling of eyes.
"I'm your father."
And with that simple fact, that certain truth, he walked off, leaving a trail of droplets behind him.
Prompto was left unable to move and thinking, as he at last crumbled to the ground on his dead legs, that he might as well have said: "I own you."