Chapter Text
It’s hot.
Bam’s body burns and burns and burns. He’s huddled up as far from the light that used to warm him as he can be, shuddering as his body begs and begs.
But he doesn’t. He keeps his teeth grit and his eyes closed. He turns himself away from the myriad of colorful scents and sounds, the knowledge that something was up there and was calling for him.
Bam knows what they’re actually calling for and it’s not him.
The tall stone tower crumbles a bit as a pair of feet slide down. “Bam?!”
He doesn’t turn. He doesn’t have the strength. “Hi Rachel,” he rasps.
“Bam don’t talk, here.” There’s a scraping sound, a tray. She doesn’t approach, it’s not best. “You need to roll over so I can help.”
“I‘m okay,” he promises. “Can’t… uhm…” For a moment, he smells something on her sleeve, persimmons, he thinks, and his brain pleads, knocking out his thoughts. He clamps down and bites his tongue. Clarity returns to him in a burst of pain. “I can’t move much, Rachel. You can leave it… I’ll… later.”
“Bam, it’s been hours.” It has? These heat things really make time go by fast. “You need to eat and drink something.” Frustration makes her voice like acid. “Please? For me?”
If she was an alpha, she could make him. She could tell him to sit up and he would. To eat from her hand and he’d do it.
But then if she was an alpha, she wouldn’t visit. Authority forbade alphas from associating with unmarked omegas. Even as a beta, she has to take a purification bath when she leaves, to not carry his smell with her. To be born an omega was a crime in this place. Someone would have to choose to absolve him for him to get out.
And no one wanted Bam out.
This used to hurt, but it means Rachel is staying with him, still his friend. So he smiles instead.
She scoots over to him and rolls him into the light, her gloves on. Bam groans. His body cries out and he bites his lip. This sheet is ruined, again. Again.
“You look horrible,” Rachel tells him sympathetically. His eyes are blurry with tears but he can still see her blond hair shining in the light. She’s bright.
Bam squeezes his eyes shut and sighs. “‘M sorry.”
“It really hurts, huh?”
Slowly he nods. Even moving his head is like breaking his bones.
“Can you open your mouth?”
He hesitates. “Sounds funny.” He’s mumbling through his teeth.
“It’s okay if you do,” Rachel soothes. She still doesn’t get any closer. “Let me help, Bam.”
Bam sighs and opens his mouth. She tips the bottle towards his mouth and he gulps as much as he can without spilling. But it’s not enough, it’s not what he wants and eventually his mouth knits shut and he can’t drink anymore.
He can see her clearly. He can see the way her expression doesn’t quite tell the truth, the mix of discomfort and concern warring in her face and scent. There’s envy too, he knows what envy is. It hurts him in a way he doesn’t like to think about.
“You can leave the food, Rachel… you’ve done enough already…”
She sighs, putting her hands on her hips. “You always get like this in heat, dummy… I don’t mind being with you. We’re friends. Every other time I have to go you cry and get sad. Am I not good enough or something?”
She’s teasing, he thinks. But he often wonders if she is. Bam wonders how Rachel really feels, though she’ll probably never tell him.
“If I was an alpha,” she muses, without waiting for an answer. Rachel rolls on her back, staring up at the broken ceiling. “If I was an alpha, Bam, I could take you up. I could get a better sleeping place too, maybe under the stars!”
Bam mumbles acknowledgement. He doesn’t really understand when she says these things. He never does. There are no stars down here. There are warm places to sleep and softer bread up there but anything else just seemed too fantastical. A place like the tower -
“You can change your gender in the tower, Bam! Both of them!”
Where people are happy and chosen -
“Everyone gets enough food and water there and there wouldn’t be a cave-”
Where Bam can be free and not punished for a crime he doesn’t remember committing? For being born something extra.
“And we’d seen an open sky full of stars-”
It’s too much to ask. And yet, and yet, he wants… Some part of Bam desperately wants a place where his pain will just stop. Anything more than that is too much for a person to have.
“I hope you can go up there, Rachel,” he says in a rasp. And he does. He would like to be there, of course, if only to make up for all she’s willingly given to him.
She rolls over and looks at him. One of her strange smiles crosses her face. She wets a cloth and wipes his forehead. “Silly,” Rachel says with all the affection in the world. “You’re coming with me of course. We’re friends, aren’t we?”
Bam wants to believe her, more than anything.
But the thing is… Rachel has lied before.
And even if she didn’t lie about this, they both had to know. If Bam was going up ever, it would be because she’d let him go. She couldn’t save him.
As the heat took him again, and he bit his mouth bloody to stop from begging, Bam knows that she wouldn’t save him either.
She’d lied.
Bam figures Rachel lied, of course. She’d lied all the time about not stealing food, about where his clothes had come from, that someday an alpha would appear who loved him and wanted him.
She’d lied about always coming back.
There was no one interested in her up there, but he’d always hoped.
She had told him to forget her, to go back to the loneliness and aches between his legs with no relief, not even water and food that didn’t hit the ground and explode on contact.
She wants him to go back to licking puddles and crawling towards a taste of close to rotting meat. He can’t, he can’t, he can’t-
And maybe that makes him selfish, but he just can’t do it. If she could stay, then maybe he could bear it. But alone? He can’t bear that loneliness.
And she is wrong. He doesn’t step into the tower and become a beta or an alpha. His body still yearns for something no one will give him, even if it’s not making it impossible for him to move to retrieve it.
But the first human scent he gets that’s not hers, not theirs, is an alpha’s, crisp as the sound of leaves falling, singing of blood. For a moment, his body nearly gives out, but he must ask Rachel why. He has to ask her why so he doesn’t submit, not to death, not to fear.
“You have a weird scent, for a beta,” says Yuri Ha Jahad, who seems very important. But she runs her fingers through his hair and looks into his eyes and gives him something that means a lot to her. As if he is valuable and precious. It’s not something he deserves, but it placates a hunger in his belly.
She trusts him and he won’t betray that trust. He will never betray that trust, even if he gets betrayed a thousand times over.
Perhaps that’s why Black March warns him with so much kindness.
But he needs to know why. He needs to know why. He needs to know if Rachel is an alpha now and if maybe this time, he can stand by her, instead of remaining crumpled by her feet.
If he can’t… he’ll understand. Bam really thinks as long as he hears it from her mouth, he’ll accept it.
(He’s wrong, but he doesn’t hear it anyway.)
Lero-ro smells it first.
The last omega that Lero-ro had ever met had been his stepmother. She’d been ill. Her last child was born fifteen years after she'd met him, an alpha who died in the tests sixteen years after she died. Most omegas fell ill after birthing children in the tower. Those that didn’t get used until they became ill and died, anyway.
That had been centuries ago but when the shinsu washes away the room of people full of muddled scents and muddied children who only thought they’d stained their hands in blood, all Lero-ro can smell is fresh jasmine flowers and ocean water, with an untarnished scent of pomegranates.
He knows the scent better than anyone else.
Omega.
All omega always smell like the sea-scented sky, as betas of clean springs and alphas of fertile earth.
He glances about the room and sees that boy, Bam, the only one immune to shinsu’s pull. Another quick glance around the room and he can tell-
No one can see it. No one knows. They’re stuck on being trapped. Alphas and betas are free here. There’s nothing trapping them until the tower. They came to the tower because of desperation. New regulars wouldn’t understand the feeling of someone else escaping their fate.
Most people wouldn’t be able to stand it.
In seconds, it occurs to him that no one can ever, ever know this secret. An omega couldn’t be in the inner tower.
So he tells Bam two things after a fun little game. First, he warns Bam not to trust Khun Aguero Agnis. He knows the stories of that child after all. The second thing is that no one can find out he’s an omega. If they do, he’ll never find Rachel.
The first doesn’t get an answer. Bam just looks at him with genuine confusion. At the second warning, Bam only smiles up at him, with the utter certainty of someone who hit rock bottom but had no choice in digging.
“No one wanted me before now.” He clutches his weapon to his chest. “That won’t change here."
He’s wrong.
It’s naivete, innocence. Alphas marry alphas in Khun houses, Jahad princesses are all alphas, unable to be swayed by betas. Betas now prayed to take a knot without blood nor pain, to handle the weight of an alpha in full rut. In the inner tower, few could.
An omega would change that.
Of course the Khun will take Bam in for himself, if only so no one else will mark him or can take him. His interest in Bam only proves that. That is only the way of things in this tower. Bam will have to protect himself.
Lero-ro tells no one of his findings, but then, who on the staff remembers what an omega tastes like, let alone smells like?
(He’s wrong, he’s so very wrong.)
Khun Aguero Agnis is born from the last omega in the Khun family.
Omegas have been declining for thousands of years. His aunt had called it a blessing. His mother had called it a curse. The betas of the family, who looked down on her for being born, agreed.
Betas had, of course, developed the way to survive an alpha’s rut. Omegas were outdated and unnecessary. That was the decree of the gods. He didn’t hear if it was actually enjoyable or not.
His sister had been an omega too, but she was dead now, so it was irrelevant.
Still, he remembers his sister’s heat. He remembers hearing his strong, cold, proud sister, sobbing and begging to die and die and die if only the pain would just end. Begging for someone to hold her hand, begging for water and love and fluid.
As a child, wanting someone, especially people sexually, had terrified him.. Even after his first rut, he’d never broken like that. Khun could never imagine desiring so much it broke you down.
He’d woken up to Bam sick once already, and a swooping warm sensation in his gut. Every alpha in the cafeteria had been antsy in their chair without him, but he’d come down in the afternoon, cheerful and warm as ever, and the world had gone to rights and Khun had promptly forgotten about it.
He shouldn’t have forgotten.
Because he checked on Bam and remembered his sister’s pleading sobs for someone, for anyone.
He remembers calling out to her. He remembered asking her what he could do.
He remembers her saying, “kill me”.
He’d succeeded then, eventually.
If Bam had told Khun to kill him, he doesn’t think he would succeed now.
Heat hits Bam during Hoh’s funeral.
Outside, the dead move on with prayers and tiny rosary beads, Rachel had told him, to ward demons from his flesh and blood, beads made from their bones and the wood of the crosses on their necks.
As a criminal, Bam’s body would get burned, before its smell turned everyone on each other. Rachel had told him this with shaking hands.
In this place, the dead get water coffins, returned to shinsu and then to the earth when the water has had its fill. You drink for them. You feast for them. You honor them.
Unfortunately, heat hits all at once the minute Bam’s door closes. He’d been aware of it earlier, a tingling in his spine, the scent of everyone around him becoming too much, too good, a sickening feeling twisting between his legs.
Retreating into the comfort of pillows and blankets, Bam breathes and sobs, half in grief, half in blissful agony. Everything is too much. It itches and hurts and he’s alone and now, even if she wanted to, Rachel could never help him.
She couldn’t even help herself with her ruined legs.
Bam lets out a sob. Phantom hands lunge for him with a knife, tug on his hair, and he remembers, remembers the look on Endorsi’s face, like she didn’t understand him, like he was the one doing unspeakable awful things.
He remembers Hoh’s face, laughing with gone sanity, glaring at him because friends weren’t real, nothing was real.
As the heat compounds again, all Bam can think is -
Maybe Hoh-ssi is right.
In the buildup to a series of unfortunate events, Rachel and Khun had met twice.
The first was when she came to visit, touching his hair and sighing at Bam. Her fingers were rough, calloused and gentle on his cheek. In the brilliant light of the room, Bam had looked almost sickly in comparison.
She herself has the clear linen and freshwater scent of a beta.
“He needs someone who can take care of him,” she had said. “Where we’re from, no one ever could. They made me purify myself every time I visited him. It was frustrating for both of us but… he always smiled at me. He needed a lot from me, things I couldn’t give him. I can’t burden either of us that way anymore.”
He hadn’t been able to put into words why this had felt off and bothered him.
Maybe it’s the infantilization of someone who is trying his best to make his own decisions. Maybe it’s the assumption that she knows what’s best, that she is so certain her way is the right one.
Hoh’s funeral isn’t about him. It’s not about the stranger teammate who had made so much possible but failed everyone he loved. The merrymaking and drinking isn’t for his life, it’s because of his death. When the coroner confirmed his sister’s death, it had been a celebration of gratitude, a delight that they had ripped the final omega from their ranks, a delight for the sweetest alpha alien to rise and bring their family glory.
Funerals are for the living. Funerals are for those who the living love.
Bam isn’t here. It’s less interesting without him. He doesn't care about Hoh, he cares about the person who he mattered to.
Khun takes a bottle of soju and some food and goes to find him. No one notices, mainly because Rak is singing a ballad of his people. (It kills something in Khun that he has a pleasant singing voice.)
Wandering the quiet halls is soothing compared to the thumping of music, the bitter lines now erased, the wish of a single person to be heard.
But alone, he can’t blame the strange scent wafting into his nose on someone else.
The smell isn’t his. It’s someone else, nearby. It’s not a presentation, no one is young enough except maybe Bam. They had no clue how old he was after all. It didn’t seem likely-
Khun drops the food. The soju bottle crashes and shatters against the floor, food splattering on the ground. He pays it no heed because panic sends him running back the way he came and then past that, all the way into the staff quarters. Khun pounds on the door. He is mature, but he is still seventeen years old and he remembers, remembers his mother sobbing behind a door his father had gone through, he remembers her in pain. Khun remembers his sister begging, he remembers cousins talking about alphas like food. He needed to be sure. He needs to be absolutely sure.
An omega hasn’t been born in the tower in over twenty years.
At least, those are the Khun family statistics. They died out in the Bloodmadders first, the Po Bidaus second, the Yeons third, the Ha’s and Eurasias close after and on and on. He knows in the non-great families, they’d died out in the past few centuries. In the families that weren’t nobility at all, they’d stopped about fifty years ago. In the middle area, they hadn’t been around for at least a few centuries.
People claimed it was a curse from the time of the great warriors, that the distance that had grown between them has caused it. Some said it was just that omega were rare to begin with and no one tracked the genetics. He sure as hell didn’t research this. Omegas didn’t climb even if they were born. They just didn’t anymore. Jahad’s army captured them or killed them. So they hid it or just didn’t climb. It was the smarter thing. His sister would have, but that was fucked now.
Hence why Khun feels panic splintering his brain. He prepared for a lot of things, but an omega presenting or in heat? How would any non-Ranker deal with that?
Lero-ro’s door slides open and Lero-ro does not answer. It’s Quant looking hungover and ready to kill him. He stinks of wine, and it makes Khun’s stomach roil. The ranker raises an eyebrow and takes a sip of cola.
“The fuck is that smell on you, kid.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Khun says, collecting himself. “Everyone else is drunk or worse. If they smell that, we won’t exactly have a testing group anymore.”
They’d kill each other by accident or worse, start having sex. If more people were sober, it’d be different. Alcohol made them all worse. They’d all do things they’d regret.
Quant grunts. It takes Khun about twelve seconds too long to realize the man is naked from the waist up. “Ro! Put pants on!”
Khun doesn’t want to know, he really doesn’t want to know.
Lero-ro comes out to see him, also shirtless, but thankfully wearing boxers. He takes one whiff, also like Quant but unlike him he’s clutching a bottle of water. He also only seems intrigued, like he was expecting something else right now. “I was hoping this wouldn’t happen,” he says, perfectly coherent and mild-mannered like the asshole he is.
“You knew,” Khun says, without… anything really. Did Bam know? Did Bam keep it a secret from him? Who taught him? Rachel must have known… which put a lot of weird shit into perspective, actually.
“Yes, I did. I thought he would have told you.” Lero-ro doesn’t invite him into this room, thank god, he doesn’t need to see the state of some couple’s bedroom post-coitus. “He didn’t seem concerned if you knew or not.”
That… helps a little. Somehow. “Can’t we hide him somewhere?”
“He’s a requirement to pass the upcoming test,” Lero-ro reminds Khun. The one you signed up for. “We can delay it, but the delay would be suspicious. The best solution would be for an alpha to take care of him. It would keep him from going after anyone else, we can ventilate the halls, and as long as an alpha is providing, no one would question it. They’ll think it’s a weaker rut of someone taking heat inducers.”
As long as you were the alpha, seems to be implied and Khun bristles at the thought at first.
“You want someone else to look after him?” Lero-ro looks surprised.
The polite surprise is almost worse, it’s patronizing. But he’s touching on a good point. “Not particularly.” Khun wants to say fuck that and fuck you, but self preservation wins out. The others like Bam, probably against their best interests, but they wouldn’t be kind about it, just to get the whole thing over with. And Bam... he does like Bam. He doesn't like this situation, but he does like Bam and Bam riding it out on his own seemed like a very, very stupid idea.
He idly wonders how fucked over Endorsi would be if she helped Bam, and promptly decides not to think about it.
Khun exhales. All right. He can do this. “Do you have Plan B or pregnancy tests?”
Lero-ro snorts. “There hasn’t been a heat on the test floor in the past five centuries. Count your blessings that we have condoms."
Khun is absolutely going to develop an ulcer. "Fine," he says, knowing what he stole from his father is five centuries out of date. "Where are they?