Chapter 23:
“The old one wasn’t fair,” he continued when Baikal didn’t say anything. “I want a new one.”
“Why should I?” Void cocked his head. “I already have everything I want.”
“Not everything.” He should stop. Now. Before it was too late. “You said you wanted me to be yours. I assume you meant all of me.”
Baikal’s eyes narrowed, a calculative expression washing over his features. “I’m listening.”
“You mentioned freedom before,” Rabbit reminded. “Be free or be yours. You twisted things so I had to choose the latter. Twist things again.”
“I won’t let you go,” he warned.
“I’m not asking you to. I’m done trying to convince you we’re not good together. I’m done trying to convince myself I don’t enjoy the push and pull between us. I even like this,” he rested his hands on Baikal’s hips and pulled him closer, “How you pin me down and make me confront my own feelings.”
“This speech of yours better be heading in a direction where you surrender yourself to me in full, little bunny, or so help me, I will make you pay for stringing me along. And that, you will not like.”
“Be free or be yours,” Rabbit repeated. “Change it. Make it be freeandbe yours, and I’ll accept.”
Baikal stared as though trying to see through him and find the trap. “In return?”
“You do everything you can to follow through on the first part. I want to be free, Baikal. I’m tired of struggling.”
He seemed pleased when Rabbit called him by name, but then, “You want to quit playing the beiska.”
“I don’t know.” He sighed. “Does that disappoint you?” It certainly sounded like it had.
“You’ll play for me,” Baikal ended up ordering. “Whenever I want. If I ask, you’ll play. Understood?”
It wasn’t even that he minded, but Rabbit hesitated to make it seem like he wasn’t a pushover. Instead of getting the reaction he anticipated however, aka another pushy threat from Baikal, the other man looked a bit…desperate.
“You wanted to know how I’m handling my father’s impending end?” he asked. “Not well. Not well at all in fact. You came along at just the right time, and maybe it isn’t healthy for me or fair for you, but it is what it is. I don’t just want you, Rabbit. I need you, and whether you want to believe it or not, your music is a big part of who you are.”
“You don’t want to lose it,” he guessed, only for Void to correct him.
“I don’t want you to.”
Rabbit wasn’t sure how to respond. On the one hand, Baikal was right, but on the other, so much of music and his mother were tangled into one mess. He wanted to undo the knots. Wanted the chance to figure out how much of that love was actually his and how much was simply the little boy inside of him, still desperate to earn his mother’s affection.
But he wouldn’t be able to solve that problem right now.
“Just for you,” he conceded, and the Brumal Prince nodded right away.
“I won’t make you do it in front of an audience. So long as I can hear you, that’s enough.”
“Why?” Rabbit recalled their earlier conversation. “You said you’d been watching me for a year? Why?”
“My father,” Baikal told him. “A few weeks after I found out he was dying, I saw you.”
Rabbit tried not to feel hurt by that, but he wasn’t fast enough to keep it from his face.
“Hey,” Baikal cupped his cheek. “It’s not what you think. Yes, listening to you play calms me, but it isn’t the music itself, Rabbit. It’s you. It’s the way you open yourself up to your own emotions whenever you’re holding the beiska. The way you did that night when you came while a hundred strangers watched you from below.”
“I’m still pissed about that, by the way,” he stated, because it would go down as one of the most mortifying experiences of his life.
And the most invigorating.
In many ways, that night had been a catalyst for Rabbit. Up until that point, he’d only experienced life in snapshots from afar, only feeling when he was up on stage playing the beiska. He’d resigned himself to his fate and had stopped trying to look for a way out.
