Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/ works/9984413. Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Major_Character_Death, No_Archive Warnings_Apply, Rape/Non-Con, Underage, Choose_Not_To_Use_Archive Warnings Category: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Multi, Other Fandom: Far_Cry_3, Far_Cry_(Video_Games) Character: Hoyt_Volker, Cobus_Volker, Awande_Moloi Additional Tags: Incest, Xenophobia, Racism, Domestic_Violence, Mother-Son_Relationship, Father/Son_Incest, Rape, Drugs, Crimes_&_Criminals, Unhealthy_Coping Mechanisms, Implied/Referenced_Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced_Suicide, Odipeus_Complex, Molestation, Forced_Marriage, Apartheid, Abuse, Parent/ Child_Incest, Isolation, Lima_Syndrome, Stockholm_Syndrome, Offensive Themes, Trigger_happy_-_Freeform, Pedophilia Stats: Published: 2017-02-27 Words: 4002 ****** Of Fathers, Mothers and Their Sons. ****** by AlmesivaMoonshadow Summary They adored each other in all the wrongest ways imaginable. Notes Requested by Anons on @JustFarCryImagines:   I've got a pretty juicy one; Child! Hoyt being creepily close with his mother. How would this deliciously sad and unsettling scenario play out? + More Hoyt headcanon and backstory; Papa Cobus seethes with jealousy when he witnesses Awande and Hoyt's connection. How would this delightfully quasi-incestous love triangle play out? =============================================================================== Hoyt.   It’s difficult being a child. It was difficult for him as well - make no mistake. It was hard to tell, though, he was very well aware. Now and then and always. He was a born actor, an artisan in lying, in fabricating, in make-belief. He had feigned every memory, echo, behavior pattern, story. Truth was - Hoyt Volker had no fond nostalgia for anything. No softness he could recall - casually mention. Cling to - bring up during a cocktail party. A high-lane gathering, a wine toast. The past was cold and dark. Blurry, almost.     And hell, he despised vivisecting himself and analyzing his own shit like some manner of emotional masochist with a predisposition for pain he couldn’t even use. He was hardly that idle. He had better shit to do. There was work to be done, little time for recollection. He didn’t attribute much value to psychoanalysis despite of using it constantly. On a victim. During interrogation. Work. Vaas Montenegro. Buck Hughes, when he was drunk enough. His old boss, the fat, greasy fucker. On an unsuspecting client who believed he knew more then he really did in his irritating cockiness. A feeble, enslaved piece of human-merchandise with nowhere to run, squeezed under his boot-heel like a dying cockroach. For fun and sports. Laughs and giggles. Because he was bored, simply enough. Because he goddamn could. On his own father even. That old, drained rat. He played his own Papa plenty of times purely for the warmth it filled him with when nothing else brought him joy anymore. Not even cocaine. During the good old days of the bad old days. On anyone and anything, really. His mother once told that he’s far better then that - on one occasion when he returned home beaten, bruised and bloody after a pack of black children attacked him down in the suburbs. The main part about being a child sharing a heritage like his is that he assumed that perhaps the oppressed, the broken and the disposed would relate to him, at least a tiny bit if the purebred, well-off colonialist scion his father consorted with didn’t. He was a naive fool back then. Thank shit he grew out of that phase. The Somalian refugees crammed together in a sad collection of ramshackle huts somewhere on the outskirts of town, surrounded by constant police and mercenary surveillance hardly agreed. They viewed him as less then one of them. An outsider. A crossbred mongrel. To the blacks, he was far too white. To the whites, he was far too black. Somewhere around those years he realized only his mother viewed him as more then an inter-switched color palette of walking, breathing, living controversy meant to offend this side or that side just by existing. The battered, common- law wife of Cobus Volker only saw her son - not a race. Not a panel for political disagreements. Only her boy. He was aware of that too. An unspoken truth. A sanctuary when he crawled into bed with her, resting against the crook of her neck after she cleaned his wounds, in secrecy, in silence, within the darkness of her isolated, attic-converted room - so father wouldn’t see. Throw a tantrum. Beat him even further. Punish her as well. Make him watch. He kept them hidden like this from the public eye. So nobody would question it. Raise suspicion. Realize who and what manner of wretches a respected, wealthy Diamond Magnate with strictly ultra-national ideals decided to make his family He didn’t need even more dust raising. He didn’t need the humiliation. Cobus Volker was far too proud for that. Far too proud. Guess they had that much in common.     It would be an innocent act.  Pure. Sweet.  A child sleeping with his mother - seeking comfort. It would be - if only he wasn’t well over seventeen at this point.   A young, keen-eyed man before the bloom of his very prime. By all accounts Hoyt had regular encounters with women by now.  Prostitutes, the occasional back-alley shag.   He’s killed quite a few too already, in all honesty. Sometimes - men as well - he had no qualms. A hole is a hole.   And he still slept with his mother - has ever since he could remember.  It was the only place he truly, sincerely felt safe in the whole wide world.  And to an extent, he dared say he was in love - oh, no, not that way.   Or perhaps, it was that way? He couldn’t tell anymore. Being a teenager is hard and confusing. He was in love with what she represented. Acceptance. Sheer, unflinching, total acceptance. The kind he never encountered from anyone or anything in life. When she first discovered him hiding his needles, she accepted it. When he started smoking and drinking, she accepted it. When he requested if he could wash her burning, stinging belt marks and share a bath after a particularly violent encounter with Cobus, she accepted it despite of him being far too old for this. When he got into street brawls, skipped school, his classes and his private lessons, gambled, stole, got arrested and ransomed through father’s bloody smuggling money, she accepted it. When he first confessed he wanted father dead and buried, she accepted it. Hell, she agreed! When he described the way in which he raped and murdered his first victim - she accepted that too, after a while. She cried herself to a dreamless rest beforehand, though. He heard her praying to God to save his soul all night on a makeshift altar crammed with saints he couldn’t name. He’s been eavesdropping. He wasn’t religious. He was merely curious. A voyeur, plain and simple. When he told her that he has nothing but hate and contempt for all humanity - she accepted it once again. She probably felt the same all her life. The only time she didn’t accept a thing he did was one she discovered the scars underneath his sleeve and the mangled, wretched, cigarette burned-skin he mutilated in rage because he despised the pigmentation of his flesh. She commanded him never to do it again - and he never did. It was then when his self-hatred turned into searing narcissism. The unhealthy, sharp, troubling kind, they’d say - but, what would they know? Everyone but him was most likely to be a cretin anyhow. So instead of hurting himself he started to hurting everyone else instead - because he suddenly perceived himself beautiful. From the worst, to the very, very best overnight. He must have been, at one point in time - beautiful - before the drugs drained most of it away, making him lose nearly thirty pounds. How can he not be beautiful if his mother was? She really, truly was - you know. He had no remaining photographies. Ebony skin. The curly mane properly hidden beneath her scarf to avoid attracting attention. Pronounced cheekbones from her Colombian ancestry. Slender. Green eyes here to cause a contrast worthy of poetry. Ladylike after a lifetime of hard work. Long, coarse fingers. For all these years, Hoyt wanted nothing but to look like Papa. Pale, tall, cruel, golden and shimmering. Someone everyone would call handsome. Amiable. Lovable. A good catch. Someone worth chasing after. He even took up Wagner in hopes that he would miraculously change for the “better”, as they say. That the bombastic melody would transform a scrawny frog into a perfect marble-prince. It never did. It didn’t quite work that way. When he turned nine, he learned that.     Now, he wanted no more then to be similar to her. Hoyt was enamored with himself and mamma started crying more often. She did when he kissed her, mouth to mouth, like lovers - when he touched her. Hugged her, told her everything is going to be fine - that he’s gonna make shit better. Tried to suck her breast-milk, like he did until age fifteen, and she slapped him. She told he was turning into his father - through and through, in every single sense. Only Cobus Volker would ever attempt to force himself upon her like this. Only he was ever so lecherous, sleazy - creepy, some would say. Now he was attempting to do the same, unknowingly. He’s been doing the same thing Papa did to him as well, countless times. Only when he grew fully did he accept that it was rape - simply enough. Doesn’t mean he stopped doing it, though - everyone wronged him too. Why shouldn’t he wrong them right the fuck back? Someone had to pay. Tit for tat.     But, being a child was difficult. Being a teen was difficult as well. For him, more then anyone else. Especially when you’re requesting getting tucked into bed, having hair brushed and your lullabies sung to you on a regular basis way past the appropriate line-up of years. For now, Hoyt was content with just that. Here, in this old, dusty attic trapped in the embrace of graying, dry cobwebs surronded by mother’s sewing kit, her praying beads and her books - the place where he was born and where he grew - he was no Kaffir. He was no mutt. He wasn’t mixed. He wasn’t black. White. Dutch. European. Colombian. South African. Outlawed. A bastard. A maid’s babe. A young delinquent. A criminal in the making. A pirate. A loser with no future. A no-good thug asking to get shot. A malnourished snake. A kid with a police record. Or an unwanted burden. He was merely her son. She? His friend. Possibly the only friend he had when it mattered the most. The only friend that dared approach him without fear of some sort of retribution or mockery. A secret friend. The friend he never spoke of, even later - when he bragged about his father’s accomplishments to his men almost three decades later. His fearful, rosy-cheeked, blushing flock. Cobus did this! He did that! His company this and that! Blah-blah! Gooseshit! Not once did he mention her. Not once did anyone inquire. Maybe it was better that way too. What would he say to begin with? That he coveted her? Idealized her? Cared for her? Perhaps, hated her, for a while - for bringing him into this world wrongfully? That he hasn’t seen her for a great many years? That he killed his own father for her? For himself as well? That she expired in his arms - a coke-addicted, worn, tired, intoxicated whore stranded in some derelict private-manor turned brothel there for Volker Senior’s friends and associates to use as they saw fit, long since abandoned and forgotten by anyone - disregarded by patrons no longer there? That she didn’t even recognize who he was anymore? That she was convinced he was Cobus in her final hours? That she shouted the old bastard’s name out, shrieking in terror like a woman possessed by some frightful demon of the netherworld only she could see, cursing, shaking and shuddering several times in a row rather violently before calming, drifting into a heavy sort of silence. Hoyt wasn’t entirely certain, to this very day if it was the strength his own fingers around her throat that caused her to fade away into complete and utter silence or was it the fact that her heart gave out? The drugs? The stress? The alcohol? The pills? The overly-strainful fucking? He didn’t think of it too long - their family was all bound to give into vices sooner or later - be it greed, be it substance abuse - but, he’d be smarter then that, more cunning, certainly, he was convinced - simply laying down, next to her corpse, so cold and numb, allowing himself a moment of humanity - much like he did when he was a child - feeling young, clean and innocent all over again, caressing her frigid cheek. By the time they got around to finding her on her mattress so alone - if by anyone’s intervention at all - much like a ghost - a virus - a disease or a shadow, Hoyt was long since gone, certain she’d never even have a grave to her name he could find refuge next to again.               Childhood was difficult. Growing up was difficult. Adulthood, commerce, gain and enterprise as well. So goddamn difficult. Everything was, in actuality. He? Most of all. More then anyone else in the whole bloody world. Awande Moloi was dead. It meant nothing. Nothing meant nothing. Everything was nothing. Save for money and power. Now, that was something. And the globe just kept spinning in the manner of an eternal, lackluster gambling wheel. He was winning on red and black alike. He hoped she would be proud, if all that religious nonsense and fear-mongering was right all along. Ah, but who was he kidding after all? She probably wouldn’t be. =====================================================================  Cobus.     They loved each other. That much was painfully, abundantly clear. Far too obvious from the very day the scrawny mutt was born. She loved him - despite of hating him as the natural father. Disliking his pasty, sickly visage, as she called it. Unattractive, ghostly, pale and colorless. She was the only one who believed him hideous. Everyone else was gawking at him in utter praise. He was gawking at himself as well - why wouldn’t he? He had assumed she would no doubt loathe the child as well. Maybe, somewhere, somehow, deep down - not truly admitting it. After all - Hoyt was pretty much half of everything she thought deplorable. Undesirable, worthy of ridicule, avoidance, mistrust, fear and critique.   But Cobus understood, from the hour - nay, the minute they took the unwashed, bloody little thing out of her, crying and wiggling and struggling about - all those midwives and maids - that Awande adored her son when he could not. He was ugly. Simply put. All children were ugly, especially ones so young. Hell, most people were ugly as well! Especially these, if he had to say - natives and ethnics. A terrible business. He was hardly an idealist and one for sugared, gentle words. He tended to call things by their proper name whether someone had the tendency to get offended or not. He was blunt. Honest, he believed. Well, some would call him cruel and distasteful - but, the fuck did they know? Racist? Xenophobic? What did that even mean? These newly-brewed, Americanized, Yankee terms! Jesus Christ! Oversensitive fools. His bastard wasn’t a pretty sight to look at. Not at all. And he scolded himself - not really knowing what he expected when he bedded the kitchen chef’s kaffir Colombian daughter with a Nigerian father to top it all off. But, at least Cobus Volker assumed that perhaps Awande would be of similar disposition to his own stance on the matter - that she would dislike the brat. He knew she could be quite the cunt when she wanted to be! It had his green eyes. The high cheekbones. A shade certainly paler. A Dutch name. Yeah, he did that one on purpose. He liked the irony. It made him laugh. Should’ve chosen something even more Old-Country in resonance. Like Gustaaf? Fridrich? Gothfrid? Hans? Cobus The Second? With a hard European K just for the shits and giggles? What a joke! But, no - she didn’t. She didn’t hate him. Not ever. Was she pretending? Lying? Masking disappointment? She had to. Mothers could feel negativity too. Disdain. But, for a year? Two? Ten? Fifteen? She filled the hollowness in her bed intended only for him, her employer, lover, boss and master with their son because he was afraid? Because she was the only one the kid trusted? Because he sought comfort with her? Gooseshit! The bitch was doing this on purpose. She knew it would irk him and she irked him often just because. Not even beating her senseless stopped it. Prevented it. Women always put their children above everything - fuck’s sake! The brat on the other hand - Hoyt was a piece of shit. A noose around his neck ever since the day he was born. First - he refused to submit when punished. Wrong. Very, very wrong. He’s killed for less. Second - he lived to see his own maturity and didn’t simply drop dead. Third of all - she loved him. More then she loved anyone else and certainly more then she loved him - the father of her goddamn pet. And he hated both of them for it. Intensely. Immensely. He didn’t enjoy being tested like this. And he didn’t share. He couldn’t, he assumed.   But, it went much further then that, didn’t it? Cobus had a mother himself and he never ogled her so. He never touched her and never kissed her and held her. Not in a manner which suggested that he actually desired her. That he wanted to know her in the literal Biblical sense. The old hag would probably have his head for it. Rightfully so even - The Volkers were civilized! He had all his hired whores for that, after all. And he was craved - craved by everyone. What was the point of money otherwise? And they dared call him the savage? The savages called him the savage? Very sweet and very ironic indeed. Such lack of self-awareness and hypocrisy. He really should have kept to his own fucking kind. These people were fucking their own ma’s, for crying out loud.   Yes, he was jealous. Envious. Passionately enraged. There! He was. But, every sane man would be when his own son is on the verge of seducing their lover, bound by blood from all sides, at that. Something that belonged to them. Property. Any man would go mad. Would go rampant. Would lose their mind. It was sick! Foul! Unnatural! Then again, Hoyt had it in him. He really did. He had his way with words. Like a sinister, unseen venom laced with good intentions and preciousness. It got under the skin. It withered. Festered. Mutated. He despised to admit it. The boy was him. Through and through. It was like looking into a mirror. A very mocking, degenerate, depraved mirror - but a mirror nonetheless. Cobus Volker never imagined, in his four decades of walking god’s good green earth that he would find his very own self in a mixed, African colored and if someone ever told him - if someone dared - he would most certainly mount their head next to his safari lion pelts and trophy collection of gazelle horns and then push a Colt against his own forehead and pull the trigger to save his own soul. But, here he was - realizing he accidentally sired his equal, his worst enemy and someone who stole the heart he always wanted to possess, for years now - and not that he didn’t try to whip the habit out of the boy. He did! With belts and canes and everything he could get his hands on. Ever since the day he could speak and form coherent sentences! But, much like his mother, he never flinched. He never broke down. Not truly. Not permanently. Little fucker! Was he feeling an odd tinge of pride? Admiration, even? If Hoyt was only slightly different in appearance they would no doubt be Sunday golf-mates and have Cognac toasts together in his summer Villa in Cape Town while he brags on what a joy his heir is to have around to his associates and entrepreneurs from abroad - but, as things were he could only express his fondness in equally unnatural, hidden ways. Cobus and Awande were getting back at each other for decades now. In their own, personal, petty, covert, sad ways - hell, some would even say that they were miserable, miserable people - then again, miserable people hardly had diamonds on their timepiece, on their fingers and around their necks - but, he assumed she’d be thrilled to know their son loved Papa as much as he loved Mama. That he made him into a man. A real man. That if Hoyt knew anything about anything it’s because he learned it from him. Including how to fuck. He turned hypocrite while living with hypocrites in a house full of hypocrisy.   As for legacy? The boy wanted to be him - was him. Idealized him, despised him, copied him. Started smoking the same kind of branded tobacco. Wanted to enter the same business, wore the same clothes. Listened to the same music - The Wagnerian German Opera. Slicked his hair back, tottered golden chains, adored his whisky. Hated his own kind more then he hated those who abused him. Put bitches, whores and harlots like herself in their place constantly. Something Awande Moloi, darling dearest, could never change. And she wept often because of it - he’s heard it - witnessed it. In the quiet hours of the night - her dark chamber in the attic. Praying to the Virgensita Maria, or whatever she called that crap. It was less and less because of him, which equally enraged him. She tended to cry when he hit her, insulted her, ravaged her. Now - she was crying because Hoyt was his father’s son. And, he was - you know, especially the day he first tried to kill him.   It was an unsuccessful attempt - a fist fight turned sour over some stupid, irrelevant debate he couldn’t quite recall anymore, nothing out of the ordinary - they had these incidents often and almost on a daily basis downright to the point where even the gardeners and the janitors were pretty used to it - they had to be or he’d fire them and their sorry asses or have the police called on them for whatever reason he deemed fit - bribery always works - being Cobus Volker works even better - being as white doesn’t hurt either - but it was then and there - when Junior promised to do him in one day. Soon. Very soon. Killer stare. Hard. Frozen. Chilling. Haunting. An envelope cutter drawn and pointed at him as a warning. It was like a moment of divine providence for Cobus and yes - he did drugs. All the drugs. Every and any. Leisurely. He was a gentleman, after all. But, this was different - very different - this was like staring into the core of his own being and being punctured to the bone - for lack of a better description. Hoyt was his carbon copy. And he assumed that there was no greater vengeance, no greater harm, no grander cruelty he could inflict on Awande on all her dreams, aspirations and hopes then to let her know that her child, her angelic baby boy, her own refuge, her salvation, grew up to become everything she ever hated. Wanted to defeat. Rise above. He wouldn’t be some overblown political activist. A voice of the future. A helper of the impoverished, downtrodden, helpless and oppressed - the scumbags, if you will. A self-imposed revolutionary. A loud, obnoxious ruffian which carries around his stupid notes and shouts obscenities about the Apartheid on the street while frightening the children and blocking the traffic of honest people. A good man. A noble man - as she’d call it, in her naivety, bless her Latin American heart. Oh, no. No, no. This one would be so much different. Hoyt Volker would be a murderer, he knew then and there. A liar. A trickster. A violator. A tormentor of the likes of her. He realized he could live seething with jealousy. Sure. Why not. It hurt. Hurt like hell. But he’d survive. He’d prevail. He would endure watching them laugh, smile, embrace, whisper lovingly, play, hug, kiss, wipe away each others tears, mend wounds and walk around hand in hand without him like a family. Yes - he’d live. He’d live without that kind of love. Very strange for a materialist. A capitalist. He hasn’t lived through anything worse, albeit. No. He couldn’t use that old, dusty excuse - but, he’d give it his all this time around. Every ounce he had and every ounce he didn’t. Every vestige of spite. Anger. Bitterness. But, she wouldn’t live knowing she raised another Cobus by accident. Two years later - he was proven right.         She died alone, early spring - April, rain season - he knew it was from heartbreak and cocaine. Then again, so did he, as promised - he outlived her by about six months.   Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!