Andy's Shorties - 6. Prompt #286

“Is that really the gift you’re giving him?”

Jarren shook his head at his wife’s annoying persistence. She had berated him over his choice of birthday gift for their son, Mirkel, for the past two weeks. “What else am I supposed to give him? Today is his sixteenth birthday, and you know the law just as well as I do.”

“I do Husband, but that-” Jaxa pointed at the gift in the corner “-is not exactly following ‘the law’.”

“So certain events have meant that I have had to make arrangements that I know you do not approve of. But do you really want to lose our son to Malvadian legalism?”

“Jarren, you know I don’t. That is what makes this whole situation so screwed up.”

The door to the room opened and Mirkel entered. “Mother, Father. I heard raised voices. Is everything all right?”

“Yes, Son, everything is fine,” Jaxa said. “Just your father and I having a slight disagreement over our laws.”

Mirkel then noticed the big red bow in the far corner of the room, and saw what it was attached to. “Yes . . . the law. I’m sorry, but I can’t change things. Don’t you think I’ve tried?”

“I know Son,” said his dad. “You are still my son, and you are still the heir to the Sacred Orb of Thranal. Nothing will ever change that.”

“Unless the law is not honoured,” Mirkel whispered to himself, unaware that his parents had heard him.

“I know how you feel, Mirkel,” said Jaxa.

Being addressed by his given name before the ceremony surprised the boy. Addressing a child by their given name was only done to acknowledge someone as an adult. It was more usual to refer to children as ‘Son’ or ‘Daughter’ until they had satisfied the Malvadian legal code of what defined an adult. With some children, rightly or wrongly, it was satisfied as early as their thirteenth birthday, in Mirkel’s case it would have to be satisfied today or not at all.

“We both do, Son,” added his father. “The rite of passage into adulthood is not an easy time.”

“It’s an even worse time when the law still hasn’t been honoured by the time a child turns sixteen,” said Jaxa. “I had to undergo the same ritual as you now have to, Son.”

Mirkel’s parents left him alone with his gift. He had always questioned where such a bizarre law had come from in the first place, but nobody had ever been able to give him a satisfactory answer. Here he was, on his sixteenth birthday, faced with having to fulfil a legal requirement he didn’t believe in nor see the point of.

It had been decreed long ago that a child’s life would be forfeit if they were still innocent by the time they became an adult, by the time they turned sixteen. Parents had resorted to many tactics in recent times to ensure that the things that needed to happen did happen.

Some would guarantee that there were close bonds between two young children, raise them as close friends, in the hope that they would one day freely give their purity to each other.

Some parents had even gone to the lengths of blurring familial relationships between children, if it appeared that the law was going to be satisfied. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that children being cousins shouldn’t get in the way of fulfilling legal custom.

In the case with children like Mirkel, children who were gay, ensuring they lost their virginity before becoming an adult was a much harder thing to guarantee. The biggest stumbling block was simply that a large number of gay children had a tendency to hide their sexual orientation, so the chance of two boys meeting up for a little freelove was virtually nonexistent . That was why Mirkel’s parents had purchased the services of a pleasureboy for his sweet sixteen.

Today Mirkel would either give himself to a boy he did not know and would probably never know, or he would be put to death come nightfall.

Would he hold onto the hope that he had always held, of remaining pure until giving himself freely and willingly to a husband on their wedding night, or would he simply submit to the law and enjoy everything that the pleasureboy offered?

Link to prompt