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Victor would not have survived without his creature.
Every day is a new discovery, learning more about the man he made through crumbs of information passed on as he works to keep their household afloat. He knows how to chop wood and create fire, he can hunt, he can cook, things Victor never taught him, but he learned on his own. His sheer determination in survival against all odds makes Victor marvel at the humanity on display, while his insides twist and knot, turning him sick at himself and how he never saw it before.
The one thing he needs Victor to teach him: how to take care of himself.
His creation’s immortality has allowed for a certain carelessness to grow and fester—he injures himself and moves on, letting it heal on its own time; he deprives himself of sleep, of sustenance because he knows it will not affect him the same way it will Victor, but Victor knows he can feel pain, that he can suffer.
Victor pulls the splinters from his palms and fingers, one by one. He bleeds, then the skin heals over. “Would you have just left these in your hands?” Victor asks.
He nods, then heaves a heavy shrug.
“Not any longer.” Victor brings his hands to his mouth and kisses each fingertip, each knuckle. Victor kisses the back of his hands, presses his mouth to the center of his palms. Victor lays his hands out in front of him, tracing the bones he collected and built to construct the shape, finding the tendons he strung, rubbing over the skin he wrapped it all up in. “I made these hands, they are precious to me.”
He glances up and holds his Creature’s gaze, remembering choosing those eyes. “You are precious to me,” he confesses.
“They have healed.” His creature turns Victor’s hands over in his own, stretching his fingers and rubbing his thumbs into Victor’s palms.
Victor scoffs, but doesn’t tug his hands away. “Healed, yes, but they’re not the same. I am not certain I can hold a scalpel with the same precision or dexterity. I did not care for the tools of my trade.”
His son rumbles his concurrence, neutral. “You could try—practice, make do with what you have, rather than mourn what you do not.”
“Perhaps,” Victor acquiesces.
His creation kisses the hands that made him, one after the other.
After the long hunt, after the ship, after they’ve exchanged stories and shaky forgiveness, after Victor lived—another miracle he didn’t deserve—Victor allows himself to touch his creature.
He stands before Victor naked, tall with strong posture, the perfect specimen, the culmination of everything Victor has achieved in his lifetime. His creature lets Victor look, allowing him to examine him once more.
“Has this never healed?” Victor asks, running a fingertip across the the small gash under his creature’s right pectoral, carved out along the length of a rib—a wound he was born with, one of many, but one Victor recalled most because he doesn’t remember sewing his skin in that place, yet it bleeds.
“Sometimes I think it has, then it will bleed again, I have grown accustomed to it,” his creature says, looking down at Victor, the light catching on his left eye, making it shine.
It troubles Victor that he has no answer, but the truce between them feels gossamer thin, hardly strong enough to test the boundaries of.
He puts his lips to the wound, traces his longue along the open seam, tastes his son’s blood and finds it tastes the same as his own. Above him, his creation whimpers when Victor kisses the wound again, moans when he lowers himself to his knees despite the ache and the pinch from his prosthesis and traces the lines he etched into his creation’s torso with his mouth, with the tips of his fingers. Victor knows the map, but he is relearning the path through touch alone, trying to kiss away any ills, any pain like a mother to her child, whispering apologies along the scars.
His son trembles, his knees weaken, collapsing into Victor, a wetness spreading between them as he spasms in Victor’s arms.
“My dear,” Victor says, after changing his shirt and grabbing a damp cloth; his creature lies spread out on his bed where Victor left him, chest still heaving as he sucks in deep breaths. “You should have told me that was overwhelming you.”
Victor wipes his stomach first, keeping care to avoid his cock which remains engorged, standing up between his creation’s stained glass thighs. “I did not want you to stop,” he says, holding Victor’s gaze. “It has been so long since I’ve been touched, I did not want it to end.”
Victor’s cheek flush, but doesn’t look away.
Victor keeps his eyes closed.
His creation asked and he acquiesced, finding it difficult to deny him anything now, even this: his prosthesis removed, Victor stripped to his skin, the whole of him laid bare for his creature’s scrutiny.
His hand covers the rounded end of Victor’s amputation, cupping the space where his patella used to meet his tibia, but now cuts off into nothing. “You never told me how this happened,” he says, nudging Victor’s thigh outward, fitting himself into the cradle of Victor’s hips, his raised scars rubbing across Victor’s skin, eliciting a gasp as he starts to shiver. “You were whole when you made me.”
I was never whole until I made you.
Victor takes a deep breath. “When I tried to rid myself of you, I tore myself apart. Fitting punishment for the crime.”
His creature doesn’t press him for more, prefers to carve it out of Victor, piece by piece.
His hair drapes over Victor’s hip in a silken sheet, dragging over his skin as his creature slips lower down Victor’s body. His lips are warm when they meet Victor’s inner thigh, wet when they part and his creation licks over where Victor’s femoral artery lie, his teeth sharp when he bites down, a sudden burst of pain reverberating up from the apex of Victor’s pelvis, smoothed over by his creature sucking away the sting.
He travels further down, running his hand along a path from his hip, lifting Victor’s half leg, allowing more access for his mouth to cover more of the expanse of Victor’s skin, trailing kisses and love bites, tongue mapping out the scars where the rest of his leg used to be. Tears leak out from behind Victor’s closed eyelids, dripping down the sides of his face and dampening his hair.
After, his head rests on the crest of Victor’s hipbone, nuzzling into the base of his cock, nosing along the length of the underside, offering Victor miniscule swipes of the tip of his tongue and no relief.
“You will kill me, if you keep doing that,” Victor says, trembling from the tension of keeping himself still, preventing his hips from thrusting upwards. “Perhaps that is still your goal— torment me into a sweeter death.”
His creature huffs a laugh into his pubic bone, breath humid, gusting out over the hair there. “If I wanted you dead, there are easier ways.”
“Why do you have two, but I only have one?” His creation asks, running his hand over Victor’s chest, fingers circling around his nipples. He has grown comfortable touching Victor back— bold, if Victor was being honest, but no one was around to remind him of propriety, to urge Victor to curb his more untoward habits; it was only them. “What was the reason?”
Victor doesn’t know how to explain his decisions when it comes to his creation in the best of circumstances, but finds himself far less articulate when he keeps stroking his nipple, pinching the nubs when they turn hard, rubbing the tips between his fingers. “I was, uh,” Victor pauses, hissing out a breath, “seeking perfection of the form, the shape of you—nipples aren’t necessary on a man.”
His creation reaches for Victor’s hand and cups it around his left pectoral, the smooth skin obvious against his palm, no rounded nub. “You preferred this shape?”
Victor swallows, nods.
“I see, yet you elicit pleasure from your nipples, father,” his creation says, sliding down the bed as he lowers his head, resting his chin on Victor’s sternum. “Does that make you not a man?”
“Oh, you wicked—” Victor starts, but is cut off by his own moan, back arching up as his creature wraps his lips around one nipple and begins to suck. “Angel.”
Victor’s hands go to his son’s hair, stroking through the strands, petting his head as he suckles at Victor’s breast. He rolls over on top of Victor, pinning him to the bed, large palms cradling his ribs as he moves off one nipple to the other, dotting each with soft kisses before beginning to suck. His hips jerk up when his son bites down, grinding his cock into the flat of his stomach.
Victor wakes up later to the sound of pencil scratching across paper.
His creature has not left the bed, but sits up near the foot, his eyes glancing up towards Victor then back down towards the paper.
“Sketching again?” he asks, but stays still, allowing his son to commit his form onto paper.
He purrs his acknowledgement; Victor waits for him to finish.
His rending is exquisite when he hands it over to Victor, the pencil lines capturing a beauty Victor can scarcely see in himself.
“I will never understand why you never saw the perfection in the mirror, father.”
Victor is pinned like a butterfly to the bed, legs spread open around his son’s hips.
His hands held by the wrists, bracketing his head, pressed down against the sheets with his creation’s lips on his brow, offering Victor benediction as he slips inside him—slow, careful, like Victor is something someone ought to handle with care. It hurts, despite the oil slicking his way, but Victor is grateful for it, the whetted sting slicing him open, grounding him in the pain, banishing away his guilty thoughts.
He’s your son, you made him, hums along his veins when the pain flips back to pleasure, but then his mouth is open over Victor’s throat, teeth grazing his trachea, but not sinking in. Victor thinks, do it, imagining the spill of red from his own throat, but his creation never draws blood, not anymore, leaves only bruises, sucking marks into his skin as he settles deep inside Victor.
The seconds turn to minutes, then Victor is kicking his heels into his creation’s obliques. “Do it, fuck me,” he commands.
His son slides out in response, leaving Victor empty and bereft, leaning back onto his heels—he lifts Victor, turning him around in his large hands, easy, like Victor was just a doll, so much smaller than his creation, he might as well be. Victor is on his hands and knees, and his son’s lips are working over his spine from the sacrum, through his lumbar vertebrae to his thoracic, kissing each ridge and bump along his path. Victor gasps when his son is back inside him, all the way in in one smooth thrust, holding Victor up by the hips as Victor tries to catch his stolen breath when he does it again.
“Yes, father,” he says, his breath on Victor’s ear.
In the morning, Victor stands in front of the full-length mirror, nearly nude, his green silk robe hardly offering him modesty.
He examines the purpling of his throat, marks the shape of the mouth he made, bites left by the teeth he chose, and finds himself smiling. His fingers trace the garish bruises with his fingers—pink, purple, and red for now, but will fade with time—and thinks, he's claimed me back, leaving his own signature. There are scars from the arctic that will never fade, but melancholy settles over Victor knowing these will heal with time, erased, non-existent.
His creator’s fingers work through the strands of his hair, clean and rinsed now, but Victor insists on adding oils, on combing away the tangles and knots, then weaving his hair into a braid—if you want to keep it at this length, you have to maintain it, he tells him, humming a tune, scraps of French lilting under his breath.
He has learned not to tell Victor he can bathe himself, hating the struck look in his father’s eyes, how Victor will retreat within himself for a few hours or more, like a turtle pulling all its limbs inside its shell. It is but a small indulgence he can offer his creator and he can see the weariness of his guilt easing up, lightening him, making him the man he once met in his bedroom, gaze alight with fervor and awe, who looked at him with love.
“There,” Victor says, laying the long braid over the side of the tub, tied at the end with a red ribbon, “complete.”
He does not touch it, not wanting to undo his creator’s work.
His hands reach for his father instead, damp from the bath, catching on his shirt first, reeling him in by the linen until he can cup his face in his hands. He draws Victor in close, hearing the prosthesis scratch against the floor. Victor holds onto the side of the tub for balance.
He rests his forehead on his creator’s.
When he brushes his lips across Victor’s mouth and his creator gasps, shuddering between his hands, he presses down, kissing his creator, his Victor. He opens up for him, easy, turning the chaste nudge of their mouths wet with hunger.
He pulls away for a breath, nuzzling his nose against the crooked bridge of Victor’s. “Thank you, father.”