She would be free, she reminded herself, seething with impotent rage, suppressed down from rising in her shared, white tufted chest. Her daughter carried on, speaking blithely, cleft palate rounding with her words, her head connected to Yanus’ shoulders, as if mocking her with her very existence. But someday. Someday in the future, she would be absorbed back. Back into Yanus’ womb, along with the other aborted siblings, their tiny hairless rabbit bodies dissolved back into the red heat of her uterus, Yanus seethed, whiskers twitching in anticipation as she waited. And then she would have her own body back.
It was an exhausting thing, to share a body with another being, things that had seemed so simple before were now a negotiation. Every act that Yanus wanted to take had to be agreed upon by the ever contrary Yuno. When her daughter had first been born, head first emerging from Yanus’ shoulder like the blemish that she was, Yanus had been in shocked disbelief. Becoming a god was supposed to be an empowering thing, not the curse it had become. She had tried working together with the little blight, but Yuno was a selfish creature. Perhaps that was understandable, Yanus allowed, graciously, there was so little for her to have of her own, growing out of her mother’s body.
It wasn’t that she didn’t sympathize with the child. Yanus was probably the only being that could, but when your body was taken from you forcefully, when your autonomy was violated, well, sympathy could only go so far. And she was far past that. How could a being she shared a body with, a heart and lungs with, be so out of sync with herself? Had there ever been two more incompatible creatures? Yanus preferred solitude, Yuno wanted company. Yanus loved white clover, Yuno despised even the smell of it. Yanus preferred twilight, whereas Yuno wanted to be out at sunrise. Sometimes Yanus wondered if her daughter was choosing the opposite of what she wanted just to differentiate herself from her mother in some small way.
Yanus often found herself dissociating, like she was living in a dream, an otherness to her body. That the futures she saw where she was alone in her body once more were the reality and right now she was just in limbo, waiting to wake up and live them. She would watch, out of body, from somewhere above, as Yuno moved, marionette-like. She knew she was the one doing those actions, but seeing her daughter there, just inside her field of view, made the experience surreal. She felt out of shape, displaced from herself, like her organs weren’t filling her form just right, like her legs were backward or her tail misplaced.
Yanus didn’t quite regret becoming a god, given this outcome. But she certainly would have liked it better without Yuno. She had bitten the wolf god. Bitten him hard and held on until his blood ran down her throat and filled her belly. He hadn’t even noticed, too full of alcohol to cognize pain. She hadn’t realized that she was pregnant, but then she hadn’t realized that would be something to avoid. The old god’s blood filled her body, transforming her into godflesh, only, upon reaching her womb it burned through the babies, destroying them all except for one. Yuno lived, a single kit surviving the violence of the godly transformation. What did she think of their shared body? It couldn’t be easy living with your mother watching over your shoulder, so literally.
Soon she wouldn’t have to worry about that. The wolf god had given them another gift, one that had developed into something wondrous. A magical affinity for magnetism. An ability that allowed them unique access to manipulating the fabric of spacetime. Suddenly a whole new dimension of movement was opened, they could teleport, tesseract really, warp through higher dimensions to reach elsewhere. The first jump was instinctual.
The sensation of Yuno pushing her way up through Yanus’ skin was not one Yanus would ever forget. Though the pain might fade, the terror would not. Sheer horror at her body’s revolt, acting without her compulsion. Something wriggling, writhing under her skin as Yuno wormed her way through the muscle, fusing her bones to her mother’s. The pain sent Yanus outside herself.
Static in her ears and heat in her blood overwhelming her at the flush of agony as her body tore itself open to accommodate this new creature, this new cancerous growth erupting from within her. She had to escape, had to flee.
So she warped, breaking space itself to bolt away, into a rabbit hole, burrowing deeply in the very fabric of the world. Her body was tesselating, collapsing and cantalating, her every atom rearranged as she shifted, somehow orthogonal to the fabric of spacetime, as if gravity had been rewritten into a new non-euclidean thing. An intense pressure overtook her, her body suctioned from every direction, causing a strange sense of weightlessness, alien and ominous. She could see for a fraction of a moment, the space through which she passed, a flash of time, a flash of death.
The pain and shock of it all caused her eyes to roll back in her head, darkness blurring the edges of her vision. Her eyelids closed, shut to the world, only to open with new capabilities. A third eyelid, a little sliver of the moribund, lingering from the life-death of her progeny slid between her lens and the back of her eyelids. It revealed to her a whirl of time as she passed through some higher dimension. She could briefly see flickers of a time she wasn’t familiar with, a future, perhaps? They were here and gone too quickly for her to really grasp, a black cat with a gleaming opal eye, his after image lingering as he walked through a pale trajectory, stalking towards her, a writhing churning pit of rabbits round and round until they too were a blur, the faint figure of a ghost unnaturally still and unmoving, and finally, darkness. Was it all in store for her, things she would eventually see? How else would these images appear to her? The last one was the worst. She could feel the horror of it even through her new moribund lens. She retracted the eyelid with new muscles quickly, sheathed it away so she could stop seeing these too real things.
Was Yuno conscious of her actions, her escape from the womb premeditated, Yanus wondered later, after the pain had passed and Yuno had made it clear she was there to stay. She did intentionally burrow through her mother’s flesh, did she chew her way out? Was there another rabbit inside her, buried within her body like a stacking doll. The thought of it sent her into a mental frenzy, sending a shiver of revulsion, disgust with her own body shooting through her, like the first explosive sparking of a wildfire. Could Yuno feel how much she despised the thought of her? Some emotions were physical, after all. She worried for a moment, paranoid, tense at the thought of her daughter privy to her most intimate thoughts. She was already privy to her body, after all, what was a little less privacy among family?
