The Crocodile God

Part 9.

Dinner is a chicken hamin stew, with rice and boiled-to-brown eggs in the shell. Hummus and pita lighten it up at the end, and the bite of sunny tartness inexplicably reminds Mirasol of the sinigang she made for Haik that first evening--suddenly she doesn't want anymore.

If Haik changed his mind about his children being gods, can he become human again?

No, the voice in the sky tells her gently, and she finally pins it down to a man's voice. You cannot take back a god's gift nor their punishment. And you cannot unmake a god and turn them human, even to return them to their birth state.

Haik thought the gods were all dead until today, she points out.

A dead god is still a god. Does a dead bird become human?

She wants to ask if shapeshifters count, just to be a bitch, but Haik's laugh jolts her out of it.

"Your eyes are too big for your stomach, ay?" He nudges her shoulder. "You've been staring at that for a couple of minutes."

"Okay, too full." She had a good helping of the hamin already, so all she has to do is finish her bread to Berura's cackling. "I think I'll go to bed now. Haik?"

"Mm-hm." He finishes the last bite of his egg, tucks his plate under hers, and puts them in the sink. "Me too."

So Hadassah points them to her room, the second door down the hall. (She'll sleep on the couch, she tells them.)

---

Mirasol goes straight to the bed after she changes, curling up under the blanket in a chill of loneliness, but Haik drifts over to the mirror, shed clothes trailing after him.

There is his arm full of crocodile batok and his modern-day sleeve tattoo, so different and yet so at home on his skin. His crocodile back-ridges stretch down until they meet the pe'a. Most of it's covered by his boxers, but the lines go from his waist to his knees.

"Oy. Tatay," Haik asks the ceiling, and the sky-voice laughs. "Why did you put them all back?"

Don't ask me, he chuckles. It's you.

"These aren't all of them--you also had face and chest tattoos," Mirasol says.

"Still." Haik traces a hand on his modern sleeve, from shoulder to wrist. "I'd think 'the two biggest tattoos' are more of a message than 'a bunch of little ones.'"

There are tattooed bands on his ankles--too thick and heavy for a woman's anklets, Mirasol remembers from the ones on Filipino women.

She can't help it--she heads over like a moth to a very dark flame, and he laughs and sits down so she can look. "Did you get the pe'a because your sister married a Samoan?"

"They wanted to," he chuckles. "I mean, with this right in the open--" his crocodile-arm, what else? "And my cousins' tattoos, and how we were all dressed--it's pretty clear the girl who washed up a few months ago was important. But I had to wait till my niece was born."

More family, Mirasol thinks with a sting of longing. What was his niece's name? How old was she when Spain arrived? Mirasol hopes she was old enough to remember how things used to be. Would she call Mirasol Auntie, or Tita? What's the word for aunt in Tagalog?

"Ali," Haik whispers into her hair. "Or ale, depending on your accent. Uncle is amain."

"Why did they wait till then?"

"They didn't wait--I did," Haik says. "It was a bit more relaxed for Samoa, but in Luzon, you could not get tattoos without blood ties to a community. The Samoans were not my people--they were my sister's. Why would I demand a tattoo from people who have no blood ties to me? Tattoos are connections to the people and the land, and you cannot pretend to have them, even if they offer the tattoo. At best you were a liar and you'd get humiliated once word got out. At worst you'd get cursed by the gods, or the ancestors of the people you stole your tattoo from."