Chapter Text
The color red rolled over the texture of darkly painted brick walls like a warm, arcane mist. The flanks of the room’s furniture glinted and blushed under the light. Its source, the spinning RGB fans encased within Eren’s personal computer, was intermittently obstructed by him repositioning his legs.
The shuffling was brought on by some mild frustration. He had begun the process of masturbation minutes prior, but his cock had soon found itself loosed from his grip. Now, key-clacking sounds filled the air, each instance laced with a dash of indignation.
The fap material, a client used to bypass pornographic restrictions on generative text services, had gone awry. The thing had seemed capable of catering to his specific tastes at first glance, so he’d set up two characters and made them role play with one another. He saw initial success. The things were doing some tepid but escalating foreplay. Once the robots started fucking, though, an issue arose. Though he’d clearly specified the characters’ genders and physical appearances as males, the stupid AI had genderbent one of them all of a sudden.
In his attempts to remedy the scenario and its progression, Eren found himself engaged in battle against the client’s settings. The output as determined by the settings was dependent on text input, meaning that there were no simple switches to be flipped and that every instruction had to be described. A single adjective could make all the difference, for better or for worse.
Eren tapped his foot, groaning aloud as he rifled through an online thesaurus in order to produce a better result. Did there exist a word akin to “motherly” or “maternal” which could be divorced from any female connotation? Could the same be said for “pussy”?
Cock half-hard with a lingering sourness, he relented, and closed the client. He’d wanted the robots to just fuck each other so he could watch, he didn’t want to spend the night writing a goddamn novel just to wrangle them in.
With a sigh, he sat back in his gaming chair as he fired up his browser and began thumbing through his porn bookmarks. There’d been a reason he’d tried the jailbroken client, and it was that standard MILF and stepmom shit just wasn’t doing it anymore. It was too detached from his desires.
He pushed the waistband of his sweatpants lower as he took his shaft into his hand again and began to prime it by stroking. He scrolled languidly with his other hand, sans drive and direction, wondering if the cascade of breasts on his screen would take ever take effect and launch him into a state of arousal.
He eventually grew tired of searching and just clicked a thumbnail randomly. As the video progressed he made a conscious effort to enjoy it, but no dice.
The dim red glow of the fans and computer screen were eclipsed at once as a bright light flooded the room, coinciding with the sound of the door swinging open.
Eren panicked, he hammered the left mouse button in a desperate attempt to get the fucking window closed, and once he saw it minimize successfully, he clumsily swept his palm over his cock to obscure it. Seeing as it was still only halfway erect, he managed this, but only barely.
He swiveled around in his chair to face the door, and only then did an erection begin to stir.
A small but stocky figure stood there, bathed in the halo of the light emanating behind him from the living room to which Eren’s door was connected. He was wearing a tight long sleeved shirt that went taut where it stretched across his strong pectorals and bursting arms, and a pair of loose fitting, slightly oversized fleece pajama pants whose fabric pooled and draped atop a pair of small, bare feet. He had pouty lips and piercing cold eyes, framed by dark and silky bangs. A single delicate, veiny, calloused hand rested on the doorframe.
The beauty of Eren’s father was something that couldn’t be hacked together by generative text nor emulated by a pornstar.
“Come help wrap presents,” he said simply, with a cold authoritative ease more similar to a military man than a parent.
From beneath his palm, Eren felt his cockhead throb and leak. It had immediately begun to drool upon being commanded. His father just had that sort of voice, the kind meant for ordering men to their knees.
“Yeah, can you just… gimme a second?” Eren’s words tumbled out stilted and weak. The erection had siphoned away all the blood in his head. Once at its full height, it would surely outgrow his palms.
His father’s eyes narrowed and his brows met. It was a glare dark and icy enough to make any man quiver. To this, Eren was no exception, but the glare carried a desirable undertone: He was the subject of his father’s unwavering attention.
His father glanced downward, then his eyes returned to meet Eren’s with less severity and more… incredulity.
“Be quick,” was all he said before closing the door.
The humiliation was immediate, but it came paired with a hearty slathering of exhilaration.
How much of it had his father seen? He’d been trying to hide it, so it was unlikely to have been much. But had it at least been glimpsed? Was it large enough to impress?
He lifted his hand and let it spring up. It was dribbling, sparkling beads of precum snaking down the shaft, and his sac felt terribly heavy.
A dissonance thickened the air as he seized the shaft and began to stroke. Bubbles in his upper stomach were bursting, causing its lining to collapse into pure nausea. He’d been caught masturbating by his own father.
And yet he did not bother to rise and lock the door as he began his fervid stroking, for the same reason the door had been left unlocked in the first place. If his father could only see him bare, not as a son but as a man, then maybe…
The sourness thrashed again and his stomach tipped over, spilling forth all its putrid contents. Shameful of him to fantasize that the heavy, twitching proof of his affections was even something that his father wanted to see.
Oh, but what if it was so? What if, no matter how small the chance might be, his father felt the same…?
The pain and the arousal kicked up enough adrenaline to send Eren off toward climax. His mind swam through vivid contours of musculature and deep-set frown lines as he emptied himself. He could not hold back his voice, a broken, effeminate chime, which volleyed out of him like the glowing afterimage of a waving sparkler.
His eyes opened to the mess he’d made. Cum, thick in consistency and copious in amount, had pooled on the tile below. He exhaled, and relaxed the muscles he’d been subconsciously flexing. He had accumulated a thin glaze of sweat, wettest on his perineum and between his buttocks.
Though dreaded and unwelcome, it came: post-nut clarity rocketed through him. He’d not only have to clean up the mess he’d just made, which included wiping his sweaty ass, but he would have to step out into the living room immediately after and face his father. His father who had just caught him masturbating, who may have just seen his penis, and who may have just heard his squeaky moans.
It only occurred to him then that he could have spared himself some humiliation had he simply pulled up his pants…
𖨆♡𖨆𖨆♡𖨆
Eren’s room abutted the central space of the home, nominally the living room. It was better described as a “space” rather than a “room,” due to its uninterrupted physical expanse and the fact it held multiple zones that, in other homes, were typically divided by doors.
Upon exiting his room, Eren’s feet met hardwood flooring and his eyes met floral wallpaper and wooden paneling. The florals were more kingly than grandmotherly, the cousins of medieval tapestries and not kitschy handmade clothes. Regarding tapestries, the wall did indeed sport a few, which were modest in size and limited in palette.
Directly across from Eren’s room on the far end of the space lay the kitchen, all black stone and desaturated polychrome tile. Nary a stain, spill, or stray utensil to be spotted; this was how his father liked it. In front of the kitchen in the middle of the area, a table sprawled, surrounded by seven high-backed wood chairs. Atop each seat, a white cushion, each impossibly stainless. This, too, was his father’s doing.
The lone fruit bowl surmounting the kitchen counter, bearing the weight of four or five uneaten clementines, endured a slight chill on its back, the source no doubt the large, frosted-over window on the wall adjacent the kitchen. But its porcelain front blushed with a deep golden glow. That same glow drew over the wallpaper, turning the pink florals orange with careful fingerstrokes. It dappled the surfaces of the leather couch and armrests, as well as the tufts of the faux fur rug laid before its origin, the massive masonry fireplace, in which the crackling flames looked spectacularly bright against the dark stonework.
Between the fireplace and the carved, frosty wooden windows stood a tree of respectable size, with a multitude of lights and a shortage of ornaments. Between the tree and the couch, a wheeled end table was parked. Its surface, typically used, especially by Eren, for TV dinners, was occupied by unsigned, decorative Christmas cards. The barren white interiors of the cards were reflected immaculately in the shiny glass of the tabletop.
Between this and Eren: his father.
He sat atop the couch, attention dedicated wholly to the folding of a crease on the present he was wrapping. He’d chosen a simple pattern for the paper, just thick red and white stripes intermittently broken up by a thin line of pale glitter. His thumb slid down the crease with precision to solidify it before he plucked a little tape from the dispenser on the coffee table in front of him and adhered it to the paper. He rotated the box with his small hands, checking it for defects. There were none. It was perfect. He and it were alike.
Only once he was satisfied with his handiwork did he regard Eren. He lifted the scissors by their closed blades and held them out to his son, handle first.
“Cut some ribbon,” was all he said.
“Yes, sir,” was all Eren’s obligatory reply.
When he took the scissors from his father, he let his fingers float past the handle, nearing the blade. Their skin met. The contact was brief but worthwhile. His father didn’t seem to notice.
He settled on the rug opposite his father, so the fire could warm his back and the faux fur could caress his legs. He lifted the spool of ribbon, all plain red, and began to unravel it. The box his father had wrapped was relatively small, so he attempted to eyeball the amount of ribbon required, but soon found himself panicking.
His heart raced. Suppose he snipped the wrong amount of ribbon? Too little or too much? And rendered the strand unusable? He’d surely be scolded for the waste he would have made of perfectly good present-wrapping materials. Considering what his father had just witnessed, that was an outcome that he couldn’t risk. It was already so difficult to gauge where exactly he lay on the sliding scale of favored to abhorred when it came to his father, whose entire personage exemplified impenetrability. For all Eren knew, he could be teetering on the edge of middling child and irredeemable tumor-spawn, a position which could change for the worse given one poorly chosen dialog option.
“What’s wrong with you?” his father asked suddenly. And what a piercing stare for accompaniment.
“Huh?”
“You’re making a weird face. Are you constipated or something?”
“Oh…” Romantically and sexually constipated, maybe. “No, sir.”
“Then cut.”
“R-Right.”
He gently brought the blades apart, and let the ribbon slip between them. Yet the blades did not fall, and Eren sat, nigh catatonic.
Paper crackled for a moment somewhere beyond the periphery Eren’s out-of-focus sightline before his father once again spoke unto him:
“Are you hung up on me catching you jerking off?”
Instantly, all came into focus with a terrible singe, like cheap spiced chip dust blown up through the nostrils.
“Ghuhhh… whuh?”
Was this it? Was this the end of the run?
“Eren.”
Oh, God, oh, chat, is it over?
“Eren, I don’t fucking care. Put it out of your mind,” his father said. A pause, then he added, “Just lock the door next time.”
Eren sat open-mouthed for a moment, then uttered, “…Okay.”
What transpired thereafter was an excruciatingly slow few seconds, each one bursting at its seams with a heavy silence.
Eren ended the awkward pause before it could crawl on any longer by asking, “How much… ribbon do you need…?”
To which his father replied, “Give me about a foot.”
The scissors slid across the ribbon, and cleaved.
𖨆♡𖨆𖨆♡𖨆
“It’s mid,” Eren said adamantly before shoveling a helping of macaroni and cheese into his mouth. (The kind with breadcrumbs sprinkled on the top, because his perfect father knew exactly how he liked it.)
“It really isn’t--” Armin began, before Zeke, in a mocking tone directed at Eren, interjected with “Nuh-uh.”
“Yuh-huh,” Eren retorted, mouth full of cheese.
“Chew with your mouth closed, boy,” his father chastised, dishes clinking together as he loaded them into the washer. “You already sound like a toddler. You don’t need to act like one too.”
“How is it mid? Or, rather, why?” Armin asked.
“First off, it’s turn based. More like turn cringe,” Eren replied, cheeks red and stinging. He kept his response short in order to squeeze in a few bites between rebuttals so as to abide by his father’s wishes.
His two brothers had seated themselves across from him at the dining table for this spoken battle. He had dissed a title that Zeke and Armin proclaimed to be Game of the Year, and had been taking some major heat for it.
“It sucks to have to roll dice for everything,” Eren said. “You don’t have any actual skills if it’s just dice.”
“You did not play the game,” Zeke spat. “It is not ‘just dice.’”
“I don’t have to have played it to know that relying on dice sucks,” Eren rebuked.
“If you’d played it, you’d know you get multiple characters who have different attributes. If one character isn’t proficient at a task, you can have another one do it.”
“That still sucks.”
“Eren, what’s your game of the year, then?” Armin asked.
Without hesitation, Eren replied, “The new COD.”
The groaning was instantaneous.
“It’s good,” Eren insisted.
Armin said “Eren, it’s the same game,” in tandem with Zeke, who griped, “The new one sucks.”
Just then, their father came over and set down a basket of sugar cookies, each frosted and topped with either red, white, or green frosting, and sprinkles. Wordlessly, he left.
A chorus of “Thanks, dad!” interrupted the debate as the boys all immediately began to swarm the basket like ants clustering atop a stray morsel.
Eren, seeking to understand the extent to which he’d been blessed, turned around in his chair to face his father who had retreated behind the kitchen counter, and asked, “Did you make these?”
Occupied with something on the counter top, his father did not turn to face him as he responded.
“Store-bought cookie dough,” he said simply. So the answer was yes.
Eren said thank you again, and truly savored his first bite.
His father hardly considered himself a chef, and never cooked without a recipe. But he was largely responsible for cooking for the children, since the other one didn’t seem too big on doing that, and relied on buying or ordering food for the most part. But what delicious foods his father produced!
“Oh, Eren,” his father called out, and Eren instantaneously perked up, like his leash had been gently jostled.
“Go get your sister,” his father said. “Tell her there’s cookies.”
“Yes sir,” Eren said, and rose at once. A mission. A quest, even. A chance to prove his worth.
“Tell her COD isn’t game of the year,” Zeke taunted, smiling.
Eren shot Zeke a facetiously miffed look, before responding to his father with, “Yes, sir,” and heading toward the stairs with a light jog.
He was halfway to the steps when he heard his father say, “And push in your chair,” to which he rolled his eyes. But he returned to the table moments later to do just that.
All the bedrooms except for Eren’s were upstairs, and that included his sister Mikasa’s room. She was rarely found outside of it lest an obligation needed fulfilling, like work or college. Even though she and Eren hung out often, it was usually done inside her room.
When Eren had made his way up the half-turn stairs and down the hallway lined with bedrooms, he knocked thrice at her door, and announced, “It’s me.”
There was the vaguest hint of shuffling from behind the door before it opened. There Mikasa stood, barefoot, wearing an oversized t-shirt emblazoned with the illegible name of a metal band. It was so long it reached her upper thighs, covering the shorts that were hopefully underneath.
“Dad said to tell you there’s cookies downstairs,” Eren said, halfway done eating the one he’d been holding.
“What kind of cookies?” she asked.
“Sugar cookies,” he responded, and swallowed the final piece.
Her eyes wandered in deliberation. Eren looked behind her into the room. Hard not to, what with the legions of posters arranged on her walls, for the most part obscuring the pink paint underneath. Eren swore that every time he saw this room, she’d have added a new one, or moved one around. The posters mostly consisted of bands, some of which he knew, most of which he didn’t. There were the too-perfect faces of K-pop stars and other assorted celebrities, and a few anime and video game properties so esoteric he was sure even Zeke couldn’t name them if he tried.
He took a glance at her rug, which was in the shape of that one emo-looking Sanrio character, and noticed a pair of fleece pajama pants strewn atop it. The floor was clear otherwise.
“Okay,” she said finally, and Eren stood aside to let her pass.
They settled into a comfortable near-silence broken up only by the sound of shuffling socks and barefoot heels on hardwood flooring. This short stretch of space between himself and the stairs enabled Eren to think for a brief moment about what he’d be getting his father for his birthday. He had little time to choose, not because he’d been procrastinating, but because his father was difficult to find a gift for.
Tea was easy-- too easy. It had to be something personalized and sappy, and Eren had already gone the customized mug route twice. Once he’d tried gifting some fancy ass hand embroidered oven mitts he’d ordered off Etsy, only for them to be hung on the wall and never see any use. Same for the apron, same for the reusable cleaning gloves, same for the goddamn hand towel set with its cute little fucking teacup and herb pattern. All strung up or shelved, reduced to decor.
And high quality shit like smart coffee machines and robot vacuums were totally out of the question, too expensive. That was the other one’s territory anyway. If Eren set foot in that realm he’d surely come up short by buying a cheaper, inferior version of the other one’s gift.
Once his and Mikasa’s little parade reached the bottom of the stairs, he decided that this year he’d have to resort to straight-up asking his father what he wanted. That birthday was fast-approaching, and he needed to account for shipping time and all that crap.
It was always imperative that the gift be perfect. Eren silently thanked the powers that be that his father’s birthday and Christmas shared a date. Having to come up with two gifts every year would be much too tall of an ask.
That warm and high-spirited smell became stronger. Once Mikasa had stepped well beyond the final stair, Eren skipped the last two with a practiced hop and landed behind her.
After cookies, he’d pull his father aside and
“Eren, my boy! And Mikasa! None are immune to the allure of sugar, I see.”
Broad-shouldered, large-palmed, heavy and radiant. He held up a half-eaten sugar cookie toward Eren and his sister as though making a toast, towering and absorbent, sucking in all the space around him, like a black hole wearing the skin of the sun.
And what was worse, his other arm was around Eren’s father, holding him at the waist, the grip too firm and too comfortable, fingers pointed directly at his father’s lower abdomen as though they were about to snake into his father’s pants and dip inside. And press. Then unfold.
Even more devastating, Eren’s father’s feet looked light. All the weight in that beautiful body had shifted onto the other one’s big frame, no doubt the result of its insidious pull.
The other one. That was his name.
It was his seed that begot Eren, that was true, but he could not be called a father. “Dad” and “Father” were words for someone you loved, the other one was undeserving of such a thing. Besides, those titles were already in use for Eren’s real father.
He had another name, Erwin, which appeared on his mail, but that name could not be used either.
Anything other than “the other one” was inaccurate, because that was what he was. He was the secondary unit in the creation of Eren and his siblings. He served no other purpose than that. All other products of his existence fell within the realm of hindrances and offenses.
The most atrocious offense being his appropriation of the position of husband. Which he was flaunting. Right now.
Tragically, Eren’s father stared upward at the other one, neck craned. His face was blank. To one untrained in the subtleties of his divinity, the look might come across as unfeeling. But no, in his father’s eyes sparkled a deep admiration that sent Eren’s heart plummeting into the floor. It was the face of a man silently moved by a sunrise.
This was the sort of adoration that moved an unmovable man to gently curve his back, to puff out his chest, to rest his sharp little hand on a broad chest. Like the slope of a sleek and beautiful puma’s back as it pressed itself against a warm rock.
Dad, can you not see it? That cold face, that knowing smile.
Of course he couldn’t. The two of them looked like a wedding cake topper.
“Hi, Dad Two,” Mikasa said, her voice flat but the messaging playful.
“Pop” or “pa” were the more commonly used names for the other one, but “Dad Two” had come about as a nickname after Eren’s father stopped being his mother, something he was just barely old enough to remember but had happened so long ago it was like no change had ever even transpired, and this was the way things had always been.
The other one was “Dad” at the time, so when it came to differentiating the two parents from one another, then-young Zeke had jokingly suggested “Dad” and “Dad Two.”
The other one had said, “If anything, I’m Dad Two. Because this guy,” and he had motioned to Eren’s father, “is the world’s number one dad.”
This was not an untruth, so Eren permitted it. Still, he wished the nickname need not be uttered at all.
“Hello, Daughter One,” the other one responded playfully. “There are hardly any cookies with red frosting left, so if that’s your preference, I suggest you run up here and snatch one before they’re all gone.”
“They all taste the same,” Eren’s father said.
“Is there a difference between a pink umbrella and a black umbrella? Which would you rather have?” the other one asked.
Eren’s father’s eyes squinted, and he said nothing.
“Exactly,” the other one said, smiling. He took another bite of cookie.
Eren felt his eye twitch.
Mikasa had begun to pull out a chair to sit down, until she seemed to notice that Eren had not budged an inch from where he stood in place some feet away from it. So she retrieved a couple cookies, returned to her brother, and offered him one, which he took. She did not move from his side.
“So,” the other one continued, breaking away from his husband’s embrace (the fool) and taking a seat at the dinner table, “What did you all get up to while I was away?” He took another cookie. “Couldn’t have been anything too bad, since the house is still standing.”
“I just finished some homework,” Armin said.
“Mmh, shame hhere,” Zeke chimed in, a mouthful of cookie muffling his words.
“And you, my daughter?” the other one prompted Mikasa.
She stared blankly and replied, “Nothing.” A typical answer from her.
The other one only nodded, wise enough not to press.
His eyes then met Eren’s and he asked, “And my son?”
The act of speaking to this man had proved difficult over the years. Responses had to be dismissive but could not afford to be downright rude. It was important for Eren to communicate that he had no desire to speak to his lesser, that this sigma-presenting beta cuck was far from welcome in the home and farther still from deserving of sharing a bed with one of God’s angels. But he could not engage in outright hostility lest he sour his relationship with his father, who continued to adhere himself to the other one’s side despite everything.
Whilst contemplating this situation and his potential response, Eren failed to notice that he’d been standing silently for a good while now. He was snapped out of his daze by the five pairs of eyes that had all begun to stare at him, the attention too great for his little lizard brain to ignore.
Stage fright took hold instantly, which, unfortunately, prevented him from speaking altogether.
His eyes glazed over and his mouth ran dry, and he stood there dumbly like some kind of lobotomite.
“Your father asked you a question,” said Eren’s father sternly, unaware of the misnomer in his sentence.
“No, no, it’s okay,” the other one said, waving his hand at Eren’s father. “He doesn’t have to answer if he doesn’t want to.” He then cast an infuriatingly bright smile Eren’s way, and it took a considerable amount of willpower on Eren’s part not to visibly grimace.
No doubt with intent to redirect the conversation and remedy the atmosphere, the other one faced the rest of Eren’s siblings and asked, “So. What are we gonna watch tonight, huh? I’m in the mood for a movie.”
Zeke immediately took the helm, spouting off titles that Eren had never heard about nor cared about but which seemed to invoke Armin’s comments and attract Mikasa’s attention.
Eren’s eyes were elsewhere. They were on his father, of course, who was glaring back at him with some mild disappointment.
What a terrible situation. With the other one’s untimely intrusion, it seemed he would have to postpone asking his father what he wanted for his birthday.