#keeps cheap horrid ones around just to give to people he dislikes

[nekojitachan]

Okay, so I’ve had this stuck in my head lately and I figured I’d get it out here. Consider it my head canon on why Neil doesn’t like sweets. And OMFG, I did something that wasn’t ten pages! I did something short!!! Yay!

Uhm, so yeah, this deals with Neil’s/Nathaniel’s childhood, let’s just say the usual TFC warnings apply (Nathan, shall I say more?).

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Nathaniel was never really allowed chocolates when he was little; his mother would sneer about ‘too-sweet American crap’ and his father... well, his father didn’t believe in ‘spoiling’ him, didn’t believe in any type of treats. The most Nathaniel’s mother would do was give him some hard candy from time to time, little tart balls in bright cellophane which he could suck on to keep quiet.

Quiet was good, and the tart flavors cleared his throat of the thick taste of copper and salt and mucus, of sniffing back his tears or licking away the blood that trickled down from his nose.

His first real taste of chocolate came when he sat in the emergency room while waiting for the x-rays to come back for his broken left arm after having ‘fallen down the steps’, and one of the nurses wanted to reward him for being ‘such a good boy’. His mother, a false smile on her face and fingers clenched tight around her purse, gave him a slight nod to show that it was all right to accept the bar of chocolate, then had to unwrap it for him. Stomach queasy from pain, he did his best not to wrinkle his nose in disgust at the overbearing sweetness of the candy, to choke it down while the middle-age woman stood there smiling at him and commenting on his manners to his mother and talking about all the accidents her two boys had gotten into while they had grown up.

He felt sick for the rest of the night, especially when he got home and had to stand there with his arm in a cast and his mother’s slender fingers digging into his shoulders, the taste of chocolate in his mouth while his father grabbed his hair and told him that if he ever saw him talking to a stranger who came into the house again, he would break more than Nathaniel’s arm.

The taste of blood from his father’s blows finally cut through the cloying sweetness.

After that, it always seemed that sweets were associated with something negative, with something painful. With visits to the hospital, the rare time that one of Nathanial’s ‘accidents’ required professional treatment and the nurses thought to give him something to cheer him up. There were strained parties Nathaniel’s father would put on where he and his mother would have to attend in their best clothes and smile and pretend that they were happy, would stand there with plates of elaborately decorated cakes in their hands that they would take bites of from time to time in an attempt to discourage people from talking to them.

Then there were the years on the run, and the horrid, cheap, waxy chocolate that Nathaniel’s mother would buy now and then when they were desperate for a quick jolt of sugar, when they had bled out too much from the various, numerous wounds and needed something to go along with the bottle of juice to help keep them on their feet, to keep them moving forward. Something that wouldn’t cost too much, that could survive being crammed in the bottom of a duffel bag or in a glove compartment, something to be choked down along with too-strong coffee and stale bread little better than cardboard and peanut butter often eaten out of the jar.

Nathaniel - and Chris and Stefan and Tomas and Jason and Alex and... all of them, everyone he’d been - grew to dislike the taste of sweets, of chocolates in particular, to enjoy the rare times when he could talk his mother in spending their dwindling money on fresh fruit, on something tart or sour or naturally sweet without being cloying.

So when he became Neil, one of the things that amazed him was that he could buy whatever fruit he wanted without anyone telling him ‘no’, that it was a waste of money (as if he didn’t keep an internal count of how much he had left at all times), that it was foolish and to buy something else instead, something not as perishable. It wasn’t as big a revelation as that he could play Exy again, but those first few times he had stared down at the oranges or apples in his hands while in the grocery store, until someone would come over to ask if he needed any help and then he realized that he was attracting attention so he forced himself to stop.

No, Neil didn’t care for sweets at all after everything, so it was a surprise to find out that he didn’t mind it whenever he kissed Andrew, when he tasted whatever improbable chocolate concoction his boyfriend had just consumed (how many different flavors of ice cream were there, really) before asking him ‘yes or no’, fingers tight in his hair and mouth almost harsh on his own. Somehow that taste, just like the bite of tobacco, had become tied to Andrew - to cold nights beneath the stars, open roads stretching on before him, scathing comments followed by a warm, gentle hand to his nape... by the sense of home. Of a sense of security and pleasure and peace.