Chapter Text
The nightmare ends the way it always does, with Jimin's own voice waking him.
He trained himself out of screaming years ago, back when screaming meant footsteps in the hallway and a door opening and things getting worse. What comes out of him now is smaller. A thin, cracked sound, high in his throat, cut off the second he surfaces.
He lies very still in the dark and waits for his body to understand that it is twenty years old and not thirteen.
It takes a while. The dream shreds itself, leaving only texture behind, a hand closing around his wrist, the particular weight of someone bigger, the smell of a room he will never stop knowing, and underneath all of it the worst part, the part that is his, his own scent blooming for the first time, sweet and new and announcing him to the whole world like a dinner bell.
In the dream, he is always trying to put it back inside his body. In the dream, it never works.
The clock on his desk says 4:47 in red numbers, which means he got almost three hours, which is honestly not bad, which is a sentence he knows he should not be allowed to think.
Jimin sits up, pulls his knees in, and breathes the way the pamphlets say to. In for four. Hold for four. The omega residence pamphlets have a watercolor cloud on the front and a font like a children's book.
Feeling overwhelmed? That's okay! Try taking a deep breath!!
How about I just kill myself instead.
He is not sure who they think is reading them. He reads them anyway, sometimes, at 4 a.m., because the cloud is sort of nice to look at.
When his hands have mostly stopped shaking, he starts the routine. Lamp on, lowest setting. Water glass, refilled the night before, because morning Jimin cannot be trusted with tasks when he’s like this.
Then the pill organizer, lavender, days of the week printed in rounded letters, a gift from Haewon two birthdays ago.
She'd meant it as a joke. He had cried about it in the shower, privately, because she'd noticed he forgot things, and noticing felt like being held.
Tuesday's compartment: two white, oval suppressants scored down the middle. He swallows them dry out of habit, then drinks the water anyway, the whole glass, because that counts as taking care of himself and he is collecting evidence today, building a small case file titled Jimin is fine that he can present to himself later when the doubt comes.
The patches are next. He peels the old ones off slowly, behind each ear, the back of his neck over the gland, the inside of each wrist.
The skin underneath is pink and a little raw. He's supposed to rotate sites. He doesn't have enough sites left to rotate. The new patches go on cool and medicinal, and within a minute, the faint sweetness that had started leaking out of him overnight is gone, sealed under a smell like a hospital corridor, like antiseptic.
The smell itself is triggering, but he tries not to think about it. He likes the nothing. He has worked very hard for the nothing.
The last part of the routine doesn't live in the lavender organizer. It lives in an old mint tin at the back of his sock drawer, under the socks, under a folded sweater. Inside, wrapped in a square of tissue, are the grey ones.
The type of pills that don’t have a score line or imprint and no name a pharmacist would recognize.
The boy who sells them to him is a beta with a nice smile and a phone number saved in Jimin’s contacts as Laundry.
That is not his name.
Jimin does not know his real name, actually. He had told Jimin once, maybe, early on, in the alley behind a closed pho place with a busted neon sign blinking pink across his cheek, but Jimin had been cold and anxious and busy trying not to look like someone who could be robbed easily, so the name had slid right off him.
Laundry had laughed when Jimin put it in his phone.
“Smart,” he’d said. “Pretty and smart.”
Jimin had smiled because smiling was sometimes a way out. He has met dealers before. That is the thing people do not understand when they talk about it like every exchange happens in a movie with guns and teeth and someone getting thrown against a wall.
Some of them are nice. Some of them are genuinely, confusingly kind.
One girl used to bring him ginger candy because the suppressants made his stomach hurt.
A man with a silver tooth once walked him three blocks out of the way because he saw a group of drunk alphas by the bus stop and said, very matter of factly, “Nope. Not tonight, sweetheart.”
Another dealer, old enough to have laugh lines and two kids on his lock screen, refused to sell to Jimin if he looked too tired.
“Come back after you eat,” he’d said once, like he was Jimin’s uncle and not handing over illegal hormone blockers in a paper bag.
So Jimin tries very hard not to be dramatic about Laundry.
Laundry is not mean.
Laundry does not threaten him. Laundry does not raise his voice. Laundry does not grab him by the arm or short him on pills or make him wait in dangerous places for no reason.
Mostly.
Laundry is nice. He is nice in the way some men are nice when they want credit for not being worse. Nice in the way that makes Jimin feel rude for noticing how close he stands. Nice in the way that turns every boundary into something Jimin has to defend softly, with a laugh, like he is apologizing for existing.
“You came all the way across town like that?” Laundry says sometimes, eyes dropping too quickly to Jimin’s, god forbid, collarbone, then away again, like the looking does not count if he makes it brief. “You should’ve called me. I would’ve picked you up.”
“I’m good,” Jimin always says.
“You shouldn’t be walking around here by yourself.”
“I know.”
“I mean it.” Laundry smiles. His teeth are very white. “Pretty thing like you? Bad idea.”
Jimin laughs because that is what the moment wants from him. Not because it is funny.
The first time Laundry offers him a ride, Jimin thinks it is normal. Or normal enough. It is late, and Jimin has his hood up, hands shoved deep in his pockets, the inside of his wrists itching under the patches. The street is mostly empty except for a drunk man arguing with a bicycle and two betas smoking outside a shuttered betting shop.
Laundry jingles his keys.
“Come on,” he says. “I’ll drop you off.”
Jimin shakes his head immediately. “No, it’s okay. I’ve got the tram.”
“There’s no tram from here for another twenty minutes.”
“I don’t mind waiting.”
“I mind.” Laundry says it lightly, like a joke. Then softer, like concern. “Seriously. I don’t like you standing around here.”
Something about that lands wrong. Just wrong.
Jimin smiles again, smaller this time. “That’s sweet. But I’m okay.”
Laundry looks at him for a second too long. Then he lifts both hands, surrendering, still smiling. “Okay, okay. Independent omega. I see you.”
Sigh.
Jimin cannot help it. His face does something.
Just the smallest involuntary pinch at the corner of his mouth, his nose wrinkling before he can stop it, before he can smooth himself back into something softer and safer and less visibly disgusted.
“Oh, you don’t like that?” Laundry says, warmer in a way that makes Jimin feel too close to him. “Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean to offend the independent omega.”
Jimin laughs immediately because the moment is weird as fuck now, and laughing is how you put your hand near the animal’s mouth without getting bitten.
“You didn’t.”
Laundry tips his head, studying him openly now, like the denial is cute. Like Jimin being uncomfortable has improved the night for him. “You made a tiny little face. Like this.”
He copies it, an exaggerated face. Nose scrunched, mouth pinched, eyes gone wide and wounded, a pantomime of Jimin’s own flinch made soft, made silly, made omega.
It is just light enough that if Jimin reacts, he becomes dramatic, sensitive, or god forbid, difficult. An omega who cannot take teasing from a man who is only trying to help.
Laundry laughs under his breath, fondly, and the fondness is worse than the mimicry.
“Cute,” he says.
Jimin’s stomach drops. He wants to leave so bad.
“You know,” Laundry says, “most people would say thank you when someone’s trying to look out for them.”
Jimin’s fingers curl inside his sleeves. He makes himself smile. “Thank you,” he says.
Laundry’s eyes flick over his face again, quick and pleased. Not because he believes Jimin means it, but because Jimin said it anyway.
“There,” Laundry says, almost gently. “See? Wasn’t hard.”
Sigh.
After that, the offers keep coming.
Just often enough that Jimin starts planning for them.
If he meets Laundry near the station, he can pretend he is already late. If he meets him behind the convenience store, he can leave through the front and disappear into foot traffic. If Laundry texts him after dark, Jimin waits until morning to answer, even if his hands are shaking by then, even if the tin in his drawer is empty, even if the soft animal part of his brain has started scraping at the inside of his skull.
Laundry notices things.
He notices when Jimin changes shampoo. Notices when he loses weight. Notices when his hands shake too much to count money quickly. Notices when his scent blockers are too fresh and says, “Hospital day?” like he is joking, except Jimin has never told him about any hospital.
He remembers Jimin. That should feel considerate. Sometimes Jimin catches him watching with an expression that disappears too fast to name. Like Laundry has built a little private version of him in his head and is pleased every time the real one shows up close enough to confirm it.
But Jimin does not know that. Jimin only knows the surface of things.
A beta with a nice smile. A phone contact. Grey pills wrapped in tissue. Cheap fuck-ass cologne. Warm, sweaty hands. Too many compliments. Free rides he never takes.
Laundry calls them G’s, says it like a brand of candy.
“Half if you’re being good,” he tells Jimin once, pressing the packet into his palm and letting his fingers stay there a beat too long. “Whole if you’re really struggling.”
Jimin pulls his hand back with a laugh that sounds almost real.
“I’m always good.”
Laundry’s smile changes. “Yeah,” he says. “I can tell.”
Brother eughhhh.
He does not think about any of that because the pills cannot come from a person if Jimin is going to keep needing them. They have to come from a transaction.
Jimin looked them up once and then closed the tab very fast and did not look again.
The forum threads used words like seizure threshold and permanent and my cousin, and Jimin had decided, in the way he decides most things, quietly and completely and without telling anyone, that not knowing was the only way to keep doing it.
Because the white pills handle the heat and most of the scent. But the grey ones handle everything else.
The soft animal part of him that wants to chirp at kind voices and tuck itself into corners and trust people, the part that got him hurt, the part he has been holding underwater since he was thirteen years old, patiently, both hands, waiting for the bubbles to stop.
He takes half of one. He's been taking halves for a week now. There is very little left in the tin.
He should probably text laundry. He really doesn’t really want to.
Jimin closes the tin, puts the socks back on top of it, and decides not to think about that today. He is very good at deciding not to think about things.
It is, arguably, his primary skill, more developed than painting or dancing, more developed than anything.
If they gave degrees in it, he'd have graduated early.
The Han Residence for Omega Students is the prettiest building on campus and everyone says so, usually in the tone people use for describing a nicely decorated cage.
It has window boxes. It has, god fucking dammit, a CURFEW that is NOT CALLED a curfew, it is called quiet hours sign-in, for your safety.
It has soft cornered furniture in the common room, low to the ground, arranged in nooks, because some committee somewhere decided omegas like nooks, and the worst part is that the committee was right, Jimin does like the nooks, he likes them so much it embarrasses him, and so he never sits in them where anyone can see.
It also has a visitor policy.
Betas may visit until nine. Alphas may visit until seven, only in common spaces, only after signing in, only after presenting university ID, only after wearing a residence-issued scent-dampening band that makes most of them look so personally offended Jimin has to pretend not to enjoy it.
No alpha visitors are permitted beyond the second floor unless pre-approved by residence wellness, student safety, and, according to rumor, dis dick.
No overnight guests. No unsupervised nesting in shared spaces. No excessive bedding accumulation, which is both the funniest and most hateful phrase Jimin has ever seen printed on institutional letterhead.
All heat products must be stored in the resident’s personal room and registered with the front desk in case of emergency, which sounds reasonable until one remembers that heat products means all heat products.
Sigh.
God forbid the university say anything plainly when it can bury the violation under six layers of wellness language. The form says personal regulatory devices.
Residents are expected to disclose the presence, model type, material, battery status, charging method, sanitation plan, and intended emergency use of any personal regulatory devices used during heat, pre-heat, post-heat, or “instinctive distress episodes.”
Sigh.
Jimin had read that sentence once, standing in the lobby with his orientation folder clutched to his chest, and felt something inside him leave his body.
There was a checkbox. There were several checkboxes. There was a blank line for frequency of use, which made him want to peel his own skin off and mail it to the Dean with a handwritten note that said, respectfully, are you people deranged.
The worst part was the tiny little paragraph underneath, printed in gentle blue ink.
Disclosure allows Residence Wellness to support omegas in maintaining safe, shame-free heat practices. Failure to disclose relevant heat-support materials may result in a welfare review, emergency room-access authorization, and/or supervised intervention if staff determine the resident may be at risk.
Jimin thinks about that sometimes while curled alone on his bathroom floor during heat, teeth in a towel, thighs shaking, with a high fever, cramps wrapping from his back to his shoulders, his body begging for things he refuses to own because owning them would mean listing them on university paperwork.
Shame-free. Right. Safety in the way everyone feels better once they know exactly where the omega is, what the omega owns, what the omega needs, what the omega might do if left alone too long with a locked door and a body that still belongs to the state in all but name.
They do not call it humiliating an entire category of students into hiding their own pain. They call it wellness.
At 6:10 in the morning, the lobby is empty except for Mrs. Gu at the front desk, a beta woman of indeterminate age who has worked there since before Jimin was born and possibly before the building was built.
"Early again," she says, not looking up from her crossword.
"Studio," Jimin says, and signs the log. Name, time out, expected return.
Alphas and betas just leave buildings, apparently, just walk out into the world like it's theirs, which it is.
"Did you eat?"
"Mm," Jimin says, which is not a lie because it is not a word.
Mrs. Gu looks at him over her reading glasses. The look lasts one second too long, and inside that extra second, Jimin can feel her cataloguing him, the way everyone catalogues omegas, automatically, a campus-wide inventory system. Too thin. Too pale. Sweater too big, but that one's deliberate.
He smiles at her, a pretty pupish smile, the one that ends conversations, soft and closed-mouthed with his eyes curving, the smile that makes professors say isn't he sweet and stop asking questions.
It works. It almost always works. It is the second most developed skill he has.
"Take a muffin," Mrs. Gu says, pointing her pen at the basket on the desk, and because refusing would extend the interaction, Jimin takes a muffin, says thank you twice, and carries it out into the blue cold of almost-morning, where he will hold it for three blocks and then put it in his bag next to a granola bar that has been there since the start of term, slowly becoming geology.
He means to eat. That's the thing he could never explain to anyone, so he doesn't try. He means to. Eating is on the list every single day.
But meals require him to stop working when he’s locked in, to find food, choose food, sit, exist, and somewhere in that sequence he always slips through a gap and comes out the other side at 11 p.m. with a charcoal-black thumbprint on his jaw and a feeling in his stomach that he labels as, normal.
His body has stopped arguing about it, mostly. That should probably worry him more than it does.
The campus at this hour belongs to delivery trucks and one rabbit on the quad lawn, frozen mid-hop, watching him.
Jimin stops walking to watch it back.
The world through the suppressants is a muffled world, scents flattened to almost nothing, the morning reduced to its visuals, and the visuals are good this morning, mist coming up off the grass, the sky doing something lavender and complicated behind the clock tower. He files the colors away. There's a violet in that sky he's been trying to mix for two weeks.
The rabbit decides he is nothing and finishes its hop.
"Same," Jimin tells it quietly, and keeps walking.
His first class is Art History 340, Color and Meaning, 8 a.m., taught by Professor Im, who is sixty and beta and refers to every student under thirty as a child but refers to Jimin, specifically, as petal.
Good lord.
Professor Im says petal, what do we think Rothko is withholding here in the same voice she uses to say careful on the stairs, and the class smiles, all of them, this reflexive ripple of warmth, because there is an omega in the room and the omega spoke, and it's like a cat walking across a piano, whatever comes out is going to be received as charming.
Jimin says what he thinks Rothko is withholding. He has thought about it a lot, actually. He thinks about withholding the way sommeliers think about wine, with a trained palate and professional respect.
He talks about the maroons, how the paintings refuse to resolve, how the color sits and how the refusal is the subject.
There's a small silence when he finishes.
"Lovely....," Professor Im says, with real fondness, and writes nothing on the board, and calls on a beta boy named Dohyun, whose answer about chromatic abrasion she engages with for ten minutes.
Jimin draws a tiny rabbit in his margin and gives it a scarf.
It's fine. He knew the room when he walked into it. Every room has a reaction to him and this one's is cheap, honestly, condescension is cheap, condescension is practically free compared to what other rooms have cost.
He gets to sit here and learn about color. He gets to be twenty and enrolled and alive, and three hundred kilometers from the house he grew up in.
By the math that actually governs his life, this is winning.
The floatiness starts around 9:15, in the middle of a slide on Goya. He knows the feeling by now, has known it for a week and a half, since he started halving the grey pills. It begins at the edges of things.
The hard line where the projector screen meets the wall goes slightly soft. Sounds arrive a half-second late and slightly rounder and bounce off eachother. Something loosens by a single degree, and the loosening feels, treacherously, horribly, like relief.
Like bubbles.
That's the closest he's gotten to describing it, in the privacy of his own mind where descriptions are safe. Like his blood is carbonated, gently, and the bubbles rise through him and lift things on the way up, lift the weight off his chest, lift the edges of the world, lift his thoughts right out of their files so they drift loose and glossy and pretty, and everything goes a little bit shiny, a little bit pearl, the way the inside of a soap bubble is every color if you let your eyes unfocus.
Omega space.
The pamphlet cloud font calls it instinct rest.
The clinical name is a dissociative regulatory state and the street name is going soft and the truth is it is the place he was built to visit, daily, safely, held, and he has not let himself set foot in it for properly for seven years, and now the border is thinning because the chemicals that enforce it are running out.
The worst part, the part that makes him dig his thumbnail into the pad of his finger under the desk until the room sharpens back up, is how much of him wants to go.
He surfaces with his heart pounding.
Goya is gone. The slide is Turner now, a ship dissolving into weather. He's lost six minutes.
He writes the date in his notebook very firmly.
You're fine, he tells himself, in the voice he keeps for himself, which is not a kind voice exactly but is at least a calm one.
You're fine. Refill the prescription on thursday. Text Laundry again. Studio till close. You're fine.
His phone buzzes against his thigh.
haewonie: hero
haewonie : meet me in the dining hall in 15 mins.
haewonie: this is not a question
haewonie : park jimin i can see your read receipts
He looks at the messages for a long time. The bubbles make her words go warm and dimensional, he can practically hear her, the specific gravel of her morning voice, and the wanting that opens up in his chest is so fast and so total it scares him.
To sit across from her. To let her pile food onto his tray with that aggressive tenderness she does everything with. To put his head on her shoulder platontically for four seconds in the middle of the crowded hall, which is allowed, which she invented an entire protocol for in first year, four seconds, free of charge because she figured out early what touch does to him and built him a way to have it with the dignity intact.
She would smell the patches going stale. She has an alpha's nose and a cop's instincts and she has been suspicious of him for two weeks already. He can tell, her texts have acquired a certain tone.
And if she looked at him this morning, really looked, with the floatiness sitting visibly in his eyes the way he knows it does, she would figure out everything within one meal.
He doesn't deserve the four seconds this morning.
He knows, distantly, that I am protecting her from me is the oldest lie in his particular book. Knowing doesn't help. Knowing has never once helped.
jiminie: can't!! 😭 crit prep, im so behind
jiminie: rain check?? plspls im sorry.
haewonie : you said that tuesday
haewonie : and wednesday
jiminie: i lavvv u 🐥
haewonie : don't you DARE chick emoji me
He puts the phone face down on his notebook, next to the rabbit in its scarf, and he does not cry in Art History 340, because the case file says Jimin is fine, and you don't cry over a text about breakfast if you're fine, you simply don't, so he doesn't.
The painting studios live on the top floor of the Soyeon Building, under a sawtooth roof of north-facing glass, and they are the only place on campus, possibly the only place on earth, where Jimin's body unclenches.
His easel is in the corner.
He chose the corner the first week of first year, two walls at his back, full view of the door, and if anyone ever noticed that this is the seating logic of prey, they were polite enough not to say so.
Over three years, the corner has become his in the way that territory becomes anyone's, by accretion.
His brush jars. His good light. A postcard of a Lee Ufan taped to the window frame. A small ceramic dish Haewon made him in a one-credit elective, lumpy and glazed the wrong color, holding his charcoal.
The current canvas is the biggest he's ever worked on, a meter and a half square, and it is either the best thing he has ever made or evidence that should be destroyed, depending on the hour.
It started as an abstraction.
Most of his work starts as abstraction, layers of thinned oil dragged and lifted and scraped back, colors fighting it out under the surface where it's safe, and ordinarily it would have stayed there, ordinarily, he polices the threshold where abstraction starts becoming about something.
But three weeks ago, at 1 a.m., with his guard down and his hands smarter than his fear, a shape had surfaced in the middle of all that, and he had let it.
It's a nest.
God fucking dammit.
Not a literal one, he tells people, when people ask, it's a study of interiority and enclosure, it's about negative space.
Sure, sure.
But it is a nest, rendered in charcoal and then half-buried in paint, blankets and soft volumes in greys and one impossible tender pink, built with the obsessive structural correctness of something his hands have wanted to make for seven years and have never once been permitted to.
And in the center of the nest, where a body would curl, where the whole composition spirals down to and waits, there is nothing.
Raw canvas.
A body-shaped absence, primed and empty and glowing faintly with the underpainting around it, like the Rothko threshold.
People find it adorable.
That's the thing he cannot tell anyone, because there is no one to tell. Soyoung from the cohort stood in front of it for a full minute last week, and said, "Oh my god, it's so cozy. It's so omega. I love that you lean into it," and squeezed his shoulder.
And Professor Kang, in the midterm walkthrough, had stood before it with his arms folded and his head tilted and delivered the verdict Jimin has been carrying around ever since:
“Lovely instinct work. Genuinely lovely. The hand is exceptional, Jimin, nobody in this cohort draws like you. Now I'd like to see what happens when you attempt something rigorous. Something outside the, ah." He'd gestured at the canvas, at the nest, at Jimin, a small circular motion encompassing all of it. "The natural register."
Instinct work.
As if his hands weren't the most disciplined thing about him.
The alphas in the cohort paint enormous angry diptychs about late capitalism and nobody calls it instinct work. Jimin paints the exact shape of a missing person and gets told it's cozy.
He paints anyway. He paints today from 10 to 2 and then from 4 until the building's closing announcement at 11, and at some point the muffin gets eaten, half of it, he finds the other half at 9 p.m. and can't remember stopping, and the granola bar stays in the bag, and the coffee count reaches four, which is medically inadvisable for omegas in the same soft-voiced way everything is medically inadvisable for omegas.
Campus Wellness says caffeine may aggravate emotional dysregulation and interfere with healthy instinctive responsiveness. Which is a very long, very polite way of saying it makes the soft animal part of him shut up.
Jimin drinks it black.
And none of this registers as information because the painting is going somewhere, the pink is finally right, the pink took three weeks, and tonight it's right, and when the painting is going somewhere, his body is just an easel that holds him up, and he treats it accordingly.
It's in the studio, around ten, that he notices the smell.
Under the turpentine and the linseed, under the antiseptic flatline of the patches.
Something warm-sweet, milk and blossom sweet, rising off his own wrists where the patch edges have started to lift from being washed too many times.
Jimin stands very still at his easel, brush in the air, and his body does two things at once.
The trained thing, a cold spike, gut drop, cover it, fix it, now, the fear that has a basement smell attached to it forever. And underneath that, quieter, newer, worse, the other thing.
Some deep-down circuit going oh and going soft and warm and bubble-glossy at its own returning scent the way you'd go soft at a photo of yourself as a child, before, when the world hadn't happened yet.
He still really doesn’t want to text Laundry.
The prescription refill is Thursday. He can make it to Thursday. He repeats this on the walk home through the cold, past Mrs. Gu, did you eat, mm, up the stairs, through the nightmare that is waiting for him at 3 a.m. , this one violent enough that he wakes on the floor between the bed and the wall with his back wedged into the gap, no memory of moving there, knees to his chest, and the awful thing, the thing he will not put in any case file, is that the gap feels better than the bed.
The gap feels correct. Pressure on both sides, wall at his back, small and contained and hidden.
He makes himself get up and sleep the rest of the night in the bed like a person.
He can make it to Thursday.
Haewon ambushes him on Wednesday.
He should have seen it coming. She has the patience of a predator when she chooses to, and what she does is simply station herself outside the Soyeon Building at noon with two convenience store bags and an expression like a court judge, and when Jimin comes down the steps and freezes, she points at the low wall by the bike racks and says, "Sit."
“Haewonie, I have a critique in two hours.”
"You have lunch. With me. Right now. Congratulations on your busy schedule clearing up."
There is no version of resisting Jung Haewon that has ever worked for anyone, so Jimin sits on the wall in the sun, and she sits beside him close enough that their arms press together, shoulder to elbow, a long warm line of contact, and he hates how instantly his whole nervous system calms.
She hands him a banana milk first, straw already stabbed in, because she knows the order of operations, and that is….well….sugar.
Then triangle kimbap, two of them, his flavors. Then she watches him with open, unembarrassed directness while he eats, the way only alphas and toddlers watch people, and Jimin makes himself eat slowly, normally.
“So” she says. "When did you sleep more than four hours."
"Last night," he says, which is technically a lie.
"Uh huh. Interesting.”
Jimin pauses with the straw still in his mouth. “Why is that interesting.”
“Because at 3:12 a.m. you reposted a reel of a deer being stuck on a metal slide.”
Jimin stops chewing.
“You also reposted a ceramicist making a bowl shaped like a little frog.”
Jimin stares at her.
Haewon stares back. “And at 3:31, you liked my story.”
“You posted a picture of your fit.”
“I posted a picture of my fit at noon, Jimin-ah.”
He looks down at his kimbap.
“Maybe Instagram was delayed.”
“Maybe I’m going to start confiscating your phone like you’re an ipad baby.”
“It wasn’t me,” Jimin lifts his chin, “Actually! I was asleep.”
Haewon blinks.
“My thumb was awake.”
Silence.
A bird lands on the bike rack behind them, screams once, and leaves.
Jimin takes a long sip of banana milk, which is extremely brave of him considering the circumstances because he knows, with the dim and ancient wisdom of prey animals and younger siblings everywhere, that nothing enrages Haewon faster than being made to wait for nonsense.
“Your thumb,” Haewon repeats.
“Yeah.” Jimin nods, “Sometimes when the body is resting, smaller parts of it can still perform tasks. Like dolphins.”
Haewon’s face goes completely blank. “God,” she says. “Give me strength.”
Jimin nudges her knee with his. “Half the brain sleeps. Half the brain does Instagram. It’s biological.”
Haewon inhales through her nose, slowly. “Okay,” she says finally. “I’m losing brain cells, so we’re moving on.”
“That feels unfair—”
“Have you eaten before this?”
Jimin opens his mouth.
Haewon lifts one finger. “Careful. You're already on thin ice.”
Jimin looks down at the kimbap in his hand, then at the banana milk, then briefly at the sky. “I consumed nutrients.”
Haewon groans. “I am going to put you in rice.”
“I don’t think that works on omegas.”
“I’m going to find out.”
He smiles into the straw, small and terrible.
Haewon points at him with the corner of her kimbap. “You think you’re funny because sometimes I have to ask whether you’re joking.”
“I would never exploit that.”
“You are exploiting it right now.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Yuh-huh.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Yuh-huh.”
“Nuh-uh times infinity.”
Haewon stops moving.
Jimin, catastrophically, does not. “Nuh-uh times infinity plus one.”
“Are you five?”
“No.”
“You just said times infinity plus one.”
“Academically, that’s advanced.”
“You are sitting on a wall drinking banana milk through a straw and arguing with me like a child in a grocery store.”
Jimin points the straw at her. “Says you.”
Haewon stares at him.
Jimin stares back, cheeks full of kimbap, eyes too round on purpose.
He knows exactly what his face does when he makes it go soft and blank and tragically sincere. He knows Haewon can withstand manipulation, threats, academic pressure, alpha posturing, and once, memorably, a man trying to explain mezcal to her for forty minutes.
She cannot withstand Jimin looking at her like this. It breaks something in her every time.
“Eat the fucking kimbap, Jimin. You smell off."
Jimin’s mouth is full. This does not stop him. “Your mom smells off.”
Haewon goes still.
Jimin chews.
“My mother,” Haewon says carefully, “is a very nice woman.”
Jimin swallows with visible effort. “Then she should smell normal.”
“Are you insulting my mother’s scent profile right now?”
“I’m making a broader point about rhetoric.”
“You are making a broader point about needing a nap.”
“You smell off. Ever think about that?”
“I smell excellent.”
Jimin looks away, wounded.
Haewon points at the kimbap again. “Eat.”
He mutters something into the straw.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“Jimin.”
He looks at her from under his lashes, with very soft eyes. "I smell like nothing. That's the whole point of me."
Haewon’s face changes.
“Right,” she says, quieter. “Except you don’t.”
Jimin looks down. “I do.”
“You don’t.”
“That’s literally what blockers are for.”
“No,” Haewon says. “That’s what they do. That’s not what you are.”
Jimin tries to smile, and Haewons brow is doing the thing, the single crease.
“Your scent has gone off,” she says.
Jimin’s stomach drops.
“It hasn’t.”
“It has.”
Haewon leans away just so slightly, not touching him, and that is how Jimin knows it is serious. Haewon is a toucher by nature. She corrects the world with her hands. If she is keeping them to herself, it means she is thinking too hard. “It’s not bad. It’s just different.”
“Different how.”
“I don’t know.” Her jaw flexes. “Your blockers smell stale.”
“They’re fine.”
“Do you need money?”
He looks at her too fast.
Haewon’s expression sharpens instantly. “Because I swear to god, if you’ve been stretching doses to save money I will actually—”
“They’re not expired.” He puts his smile on. The one that has gotten him out of offices, classrooms, pharmacies, conversations, hallways, and trouble. “Refill’s tomorrow. I’m fine. I’ve just been deep in crit prep, you know how I get.”
“Yeah,” Haewon says. “I do know. That’s sort of my whole problem with you, bud.”
And then she does the thing he was both dreading and dying for, she hooks her arm around his neck and pulls him in and tucks his head under her chin, scenting him the platonic way, cheek to hair, brisk and proprietary, the way she's done since first year, a gesture that means mine, in the friend way, registered and protected, complain to me directly.
Her scent through his dampened nose is barely there, cedar and something peppery, and even at one percent volume, it goes through him, precisely where it's good.
Four seconds. She gives him seven. She's never given him seven before. That's how he knows exactly how worried she is.
"Tomorrow," she says into his hair, "you pick up your refill, and then you come to mine, and we watch trash, and you sleep on the good cotton pillow. Non-negotiable. I'll write it on your hand if I have to."
"Okay," Jimin says, very quietly, into her collarbone.
He means it when he says it. That's the thing he'll keep returning to, afterward, in the wreckage of the week.
At 12:40 on Wednesday, in the sun, with her heartbeat against his ear, he absolutely means it.
But Wednesday has a night in it, and the night has the worst dream yet.
The basement one, the presenting one, except this time the suppressed parts of him are awake enough to participate. This time his body chirps in the dream, distress-calls into the dark like the pup he was, help, help, someone, and no one comes because no one came, and he wakes at 2 a.m. with the sound still happening, actually happening, out loud, in the real room, a high broken trilling from somewhere behind his mind that he has to physically clamp both hands over his mouth to stop.
And in the morning, with his hand trembling, he shakes the tin and finds nothing left inside.
There is nothing really he can do, so he accepts the situation before he panics, before he thinks too hard about his own sweetness wafting off his skin faster than the patches can erase.
You cannot sleep at Haewon's like this. You'll chirp in your sleep. You'll scent her pillows. She'll see what's under all of it and then she'll have to carry it, she'll cancel her life and stand guard over yours, because that's what she does, and you will have done that to her.
jiminie: haewonie i'm so sorry, crit got moved, i have to lock in 😭 this weekend i PROMISE
jiminie: i swear. im really sorry
He watches the typing bubble appear and disappear three times.
haewonie: ok
haewonie : jimin-ah. you'd tell me if something was wrong. right?
He looks at that message for nine minutes. The bubbles in his blood lift it, make it shimmer, make the love in it almost unbearable to look at directly.
jiminie: ofc ofc
It is the cruelest thing he has ever done with two true words. He turns his phone off afterward, all the way off.
Thursday is when the world starts coming back in, and the world, it turns out, is enormous.
It happens in increments, in order.
Smell first. He walks out of the residence into a morning that assaults him, wet earth and bus exhaust and someone's shampoo and the bakery two streets over and the cold itself, cold has a smell, when did cold get a smell, and under and over and through it all, people.
Every person on the quad is broadcasting.
Beta-neutral, alpha-bright, stress and coffee and contentment and one girl by the library who is heartbroken, actually heartbroken, he can smell it on her and he has to stop walking and breathe through his sleeve because no one warned him that other people's feelings would have that.
The pharmacy says his refill will be ready after 2.
Sound comes back during his morning seminar.
Three conversations braid themselves into his head at once and he cannot find the mute he's had his whole life. He leaves at the break, walks with his eyes down, and even the light is participating now, every surface gone glossy and significant, the bubble-sheen spreading from the edges of things toward the center.
He is so tired, especially because there's a space that keeps offering itself, patient and shining, come down, come down, you don't have to hold any of this, come down, and holding the border closed is taking everything he has.
At 2:04 he is at the pharmacy counter, and this is where the institution gets him one last time, almost gently, the way it does everything.
Technically, the pharmacist clocks him before he reaches the counter.
He is three people back in line, hood up, sleeves pulled over his hands, paper ticket clenched damply between two fingers, and the man behind the counter looks up from the screen, glances over the waiting area, and finds him immediately.
When his number appears on the little screen, he has already opened his file.
"There's a flag on the account," the pharmacist says.
He has a soothing voice that he deploys at the first sight of Jimin's ears, the omega voice, the good boy, easy now register. "Suppressant scripts for unbonded omegas need a guardian co-signature or a university exemption on file. Your exemption's expired, sweetheart. End of last month."
"I, " Jimin's voice comes out wrong, smaller than he sent it. "I renewed it. I submitted the form."
“I’m sure you did. It's probably sitting in a queue somewhere. You know how the wellness office is."
A sympathetic smile.
The room is so loud. The fluorescent lights have a sound, and the pharmacist smells like latex and fermented soup and fucking hand sanitiser.
"Tell you what, give me a bit, I'll call over and see if I can get a verbal authorization. Take a seat, okay? There's water by the window. Sit down before you fall down, hm?"
Jimin sits by the window for fifty-five minutes while two adults on a phone discuss whether he may be permitted to have his own medication, and the part of this that he will remember afterward is not the humiliation.
The humiliation is ambient, the humiliation is just the temperature omegas live at. Like that part is whatever. What he'll remember is the window glass against his temple, and the bubbles rising, and how hard he had to work, by the end, to remember what he was waiting for.
He can hear the pharmacist’s voice lowering and lifting at the counter, patient at first, then patient in the way people get when you get put on hold one too many times.
“Yes, I understand that,” the pharmacist says. “But the student is here now.”
A pause.
“No, I can see the flag. That’s why I’m calling.”
Another pause.
Jimin keeps his eyes on the rack of travel-sized tissues by the window. Little pastel packets stacked in rows. Pink, blue, yellow. The yellow has ducks on it. The ducks have no idea there are account flags in the world. Good for them.
His knees bounce once. He stops them. Normal people sit in pharmacy waiting chairs with their feet on the floor and their backs mostly straight. Normal people do not fold inward or tuck their hands into their sleeves and press the covered knuckles against their mouth because the pressure helps.
Jimin puts both feet flat on the floor. Locks in....for approximately eleven seconds.
Then the bubbles rise again, lifting through his chest. His own body turning carbonated under his skin. His vision pearls at the edges, the pharmacy shelves going glossy and haloed, cough syrup and prenatal vitamins and heat-safe electrolyte packets all arranged in bright little columns.
He thinks he is just tired. He has been tired before. He is very good at tired.
The pharmacist glances over at him.
Jimin smiles automatically.
The pharmacist’s expression does something soft and stupid in response, something warmer that Jimin is too exhausted to name and too used to being looked at to be surprised by.
People have looked at him his whole life.
Predatory attention. Protective attention. Curious attention. Administrative attention. Attention that wants to help. Attention that wants credit for wanting to help. Attention that says, without saying it, I see what kind of body you are in.
Jimin has been seen so much he should be transparent by now.
So when the beta man two chairs down glances up from his phone, and the girl by the lip balm display pauses half a second too long, and a student near the cold medicine turns her head as if catching something sweet in the air, Jimin does not panic.
He presses his wrists deeper into his sleeves. The patch edges itch.
Do not touch them.
He touches them. Just once. The left one has lifted at the corner.
No.
No, no, no.
He smooths it down with his thumb, gently at first, then harder.
At the counter, the pharmacist says, “I’m not asking you to override policy. I’m asking you to confirm the exemption renewal is in process.”
Pause.
“Yes, Park Jimin. Student number—yes. Yes, unbonded.”
Jimin’s eyes close.
He knows no one cares. He knows everyone has their own problems. No one is gathered in a circle chanting unbonded, unbonded, unbonded.
Still. His ears burn.
He gets his phone out very carefully. The screen flares bright enough to hurt.
He opens the chat to haewon.
can u come
His throat tightens so fast it almost makes a sound.
As if she would not come. As if she would not leave class, lunch, studio, sleep, a burning building, her own body if she had to. As if she would not arrive already angry and gentle.
He deletes the message one letter at a time.
come.
co.
c.
Nothing.
He locks the phone and slides it under his thigh. The whole pharmacy has gone pearl. The pharmacist’s voice arrives in layers, consonants first, meaning later.
“No, I’m not sending him across campus like this.”
Jimin’s eyes open.
The pharmacist has one hand braced on the counter now, head dipped toward the phone. He looks over at Jimin again and his face changes in that awful quick way people’s faces do when they are trying not to show they are worried.
Jimin sits up straighter. He grips the sides of the chair.
Fine. Fine. Fine. Look normal.
“Hey,” the pharmacist says, covering the phone with one hand. “You doing okay over there?”
Every person in the pharmacy seems to hear it.
Jimin smiles.
“Mm.”
The pharmacist watches him for another second, then returns to the phone. “Yes, he’s present. No, I’m not asking you to make a clinical judgment. I’m asking you to read the note in the portal.”
Pause.
“No, not that note. The renewal note.”
Pause.
“Listen, I’ve got a twenty-year-old unbonded omega sitting in my waiting area with active suppressor failure signs, and you are telling me the person who can authorize a thirty-day refill is at lunch?”
Jimin almost laughs.
The pharmacist’s eyes flick to him, then away, and something guilty crosses his face. He had not meant Jimin to hear that. Or maybe he had forgotten Jimin was still a person capable of hearing things, which is different from forgetting he is there.
Jimin looks back down.
His knees have come up without permission, both feet on the chair now.
The pharmacist hangs up. For one glorious, stupid second, Jimin thinks it is over. Then the pharmacist exhales, pinches the bridge of his nose, and dials another number.
Jimin almost makes a sound. Almost.
The pharmacist hears the almost, somehow. He looks over and gives him a small, apologetic smile, the kind people give animals at vet clinics right before they get put down.
“Sorry,” he says. “They’re checking with another office.”
Jimin nods.
The pharmacist’s smile fades. “Still with me?”
Humiliating question. Worse because it is accurate.
Jimin stops nodding. “Mhm.”
The pharmacist’s face does the half-in-love thing again, helpless and inappropriate and not quite his fault. Jimin is too tired to resent him properly.
“Okay,” the pharmacist says. “Good. Just sit tight.”
He is sitting so tight he may merge with the chair.
The counter gets far away. The beta blasts fucking instagram reels on full volume, and the sound is so overstimulating that Jimin considers suicide for one very hot second.
The door opens and closes, and each gust of outside air brings wet pavement, car exhaust, alpha, beta, rain that is not falling yet, someone’s expensive shampoo, someone’s stress, someone’s coffee, someone’s heat suppressant taken correctly and on time, and Jimin’s brain tries to catalog all of it and cannot.
Too much world. Too many smells. Too many people.
He presses his temple to the glass.
Cool. Cool. Cool.
His eyes close.
The dark behind them is not empty. It is pearled with bubbles, rising and rising, little silver strings through black water. There is a place below him opening up.
Come down. Stop holding. Come down.
His shoulders loosen, just a little. But the relief lasts a good few seconds before he jerks himself back so violently his knee knocks the underside of the chair.
The pharmacist says into the phone, “Thank you. Yes. Yes, I’ll document it on our end.”
Jimin cannot feel his hands. Then all at once he can, too much. Pins and needles under the sleeves. Fingertips cold. He looks down and realizes he has been holding his breath.
He inhales. For one second, a sound is trying to climb out of him. The air catches high in his throat.
The pharmacist hangs up. Really hangs up this time.
The counter drawer opens. A label peels free with a soft sticky rasp. Jimin watches the white paper bag appear in the pharmacist’s hand.
His whole day, his whole body, his entire ability to remain legally and socially and chemically himself, reduced to one white bag moving across a counter.
The pharmacist comes out from behind the counter instead of calling him up.
Oh. That is bad. Kind, maybe. But bad. Because it means the pharmacist has decided Jimin walking six steps is now questionable.
Jimin starts to stand anyway. The pharmacist is suddenly closer, not touching, one hand hovering near Jimin’s elbow with visible restraint. “Easy,” he says.
“M' fine.”
“I know,” the pharmacist says, which is a lie but a graceful one. “Here you go.”
The bag touches Jimin’s hands. He has it. He got it. Task complete. Medicine acquired. No wellness office. No Haewon. No intervention. No one had to come. No one had to carry him. No one had to know how close he got.
“Thank you. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” The pharmacist’s eyes are too soft. “Do you have someone who can walk you back?”
Jimin smiles. He does not have the energy to make it good. “I’m close.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
For a moment, the pharmacist looks like he might say more. Might insist. Might use the word wellness. Might become, despite his pretty concern and his helpful calls and his almost unbearable gentleness, another hand of the system.
Jimin holds the bag against his chest with both arms. “I’m okay. Thank you so much for your help.”
The pharmacist looks at him.
Jimin looks back. He is very good at being looked at.
Finally, the pharmacist exhales. “Go straight home,” he says.
Jimin nods and gets to the door without fainting or falling. The bell above the pharmacy door gives one small bright sound as he steps outside, and the late afternoon hits his senses.
It’s 3:01.
At 3:01, the timer in his body says enough.
It is like somewhere deep in him, there are lights going off floor by floor. The street noise rushes in close and then recedes to a great glossy distance. The sweetness of his own scent lifts off his skin in a slow bloom, patches finally, fully spent, and he is announced to the street the way he was announced to the world at thirteen, helplessly, all at once.
It is fucking traumatic.
His back finds the pharmacy's brick wall. His body folds him down it, carefully, knees to chest on the cold pavement, paper bag crushed, and he thinks, dimly, pleadingly, not here, please, not outside, anywhere, not outside, and the thought drifts up out of reach and pops.
And then he hears it.
Thin and high and broken, rhythmic, every exhale.
He's chirping.
In public, in daylight, on a street, he is making the sound, the distress call, and he cannot stop, he presses his lips together and it comes through anyway, through his nose, through his bones, his body bypassing seven years of silence to do the one thing it was always designed to do when everything else fails: call out.
"Hey. Hey, you can't sit here."
A shadow over him. A staff lanyard, university crest, a clipboard. A woman's voice, beta, brisk, the voice of someone with four more buildings to inspect before five.
"Are you on something? Hey. Look at me." Fingers snapping, twice, near his face, "Do you have your student card?"
"I'm fine," Jimin says. He hears himself say it from very far away, his most rehearsed line, and it comes out slurred with sweetness, barely a sentence at all. "M'fine. Sorry. I'm sorry. Just, a minute, I just need— "
"You're not fine, you're—“ The woman leans closer and he watches her face change as the scent hits her, watches her nose register what he is. Annoyance to something else.
He has watched faces do that math his whole life.
"Oh, you're kidding me. Okay. Up. You can't be out here like this, do you understand me? Unaccompanied, in this state, on a public street? Come on. Up. We're going to the wellness office."
"No—“ and there's actual terror in his voice now, because the wellness office means forms, means calls, means a system getting its grabby hands on him, "no, please, I just need a minute, I'll go home, I—“
She grabs his arm.
Jimin whimpers. He hears it before he feels it leave him.
It’s tiny and high and humiliating.
The woman’s mouth tightens with irritation. “Oh, don’t start,” she says.
Something in him goes very still.
“I said up.” Her grip tightens when he doesn’t move fast enough. “You can’t sit on a public walkway scenting up the street. Do you have any idea how unsafe this is?”
The bruising grip makes his eyes sting. It really hurts.
Her hand is bigger than his, stronger than it should be, the heel of her palm locked against the tendon, her thumb digging into the tender place where his pulse is already racing too fast. She is tall enough that when she pulls, his whole body has to follow the angle of her arm. Up and forward. No negotiation.
“M’going home. Please.” he says. Or tries to. It comes out broken into little pieces by the chirping he still cannot stop.
“Clearly not.” She leans closer, and he can smell her now. Hand sanitizer and cheap mint. No instinctive response at all, nothing in her body that understands what he is doing except as an inconvenience. “I said stand.”
“I’m trying.”
“You’re sitting.”
“I can’t—”
“You can. You just don’t want to.”
His chirping breaks higher.
The woman glances around, embarrassed by him, not for him.
“Stop making that noise.”
Jimin tries. God, he tries.
“I can’t,” he whispers.
Her face hardens. “Then I’ll call campus security.”
The terror is immediate. “No, please no.”
“Yes. If you won’t get up.”
“No, please, please don’t call them.”
“Then stand.”
“I can’t.”
“You were walking thirty seconds ago.”
That almost makes him laugh. It comes out as air.
People are looking now. A couple by the bus stop. A student with headphones paused halfway through, pretending not to stare. Someone is slowing down on a bike.
The woman sees them too, and her grip becomes performance.
“Sweetheart,” she says, visibly sweeter, loud enough for witnesses, “I’m trying to help you.”
Jimin’s vision blurs. “I’m not your sweetheart.”
The woman’s eyes sharpen.
“If you make this difficult, I will make sure it goes in your file exactly like that.”
The woman tugs his arm.
Hard.
His shoulder jolts forward, and his knees scrape the pavement. Pain blooms there too, smaller, distant. His body reacts before his pride can stop it: he curls inward, bag to chest, chin tucked, chirping breaking into something wetter.
“Please,” he says.
“Oh, for God’s sake. You’re going to get every alpha on this street turning around if you keep that up.”
Then her thumb digs into his arm again, and the chirp tears out of him, sharper than before. The bruise is already forming. He can feel it, deep and blooming under her fingers.
Her eyes narrow.
“You are not in a position to say no.”
A bus sighs at the curb, too loud. Someone says, “Is he okay?” and the words arrive stretched and slow, like they are being spoken underwater. A bicycle bell rings once, bright enough to hurt and make his ears sensitive. The pharmacy sign above him glows blue-white in the corner of his vision.
Blue-white. Blue-white. Blue-white.
Then her thumb presses harder, directly into that soft pulsing place, and the count shatters. His right hand opens. The bag drops. Only an inch, maybe less, because his left arm catches it against his chest.
A sob breaks somewhere behind the chirping. Jimin stops fighting all at once.
The people by the bus stop blur into tall soft shapes, color without faces. The pharmacy door opens behind him or maybe it does not. Light pours over everything, white and gold and too clean. The bubble world comes back.
Jimin goes with it. He cannot stop going with it.
He is in no position to say no.
He is above and inside and far away.
He watches the woman’s mouth move.
“You’re going to stand up now.”
Her hand hauls at him again, and the pain comes from a great distance. His shoulder jerks. His head lolls forward. The chirping skips, breaks, resumes, thinner.
The woman stiffens. For the first time, something like uncertainty crosses her face.
“Hey,” she says sharply. “Don’t you do that.”
Jimin tries to look at her. His eyes do not quite obey.
“Look at me.”
He does not. Her fingers snap near his face. Once. Twice.
“There you are,” she says, satisfied. “See? You can respond.”
Cruelty, Jimin thinks distantly, has such bad logic.
The woman shifts her grip again, and her nails bite through the thin skin inside his elbow. His hand has gone half numb, half burning, like she's pressing on a vein, and the pressure is doing something wrong in there. Cutting off something. Pinching something. His pulse beats frantically against her thumb, trapped under it.
His ears fill with the rush of his own blood, except even that is too far away. His scent blooms once, then loses shape. His chirping dissolves into small wet breaths.
Up, up, up into the glossy elsewhere.
Then the lights go out, and somewhere far above his body, that cunt bitch voice is saying his name off his student card, saying it wrong, saying I need wellness response at the east pharmacy, now, I've got a dropping omega, no, alone, completely alone, and the word follows him all the way down.
Alone. Alone. Alone.