Chapter Text
The quarterly earnings report reads like a eulogy for his attention span.
Tagah leans back in his leather chair, twirling a pen between his fingers, and stares at the spreadsheet until the numbers blur into something that vaguely resembles the face of his CFO. Which isn’t an improvement. He sets the pen down, rubs the bridge of his nose, and—
Noise.
Not the ambient hum of the Upper Ring. Chanting. A rhythmic pulse of voices rising from the courtyard below his office, three stories down.
He stands, crosses to the floor-to-ceiling window, and parts the blinds with two fingers.
The courtyard of the Ba Sing Se Financial District—a manicured plaza of stone and imported jasmine bushes where executives normally sip matcha and pretend to read the morning briefs—is packed. Two hundred people, maybe more, spilling off the granite steps and pooling between the fountains. Signs bob above the crowd like buoys on rough water:
PROTECT THE LOWER RING WETLANDS
BIOSON INDUSTRIES DESTROYS WHAT IT TOUCHES
SONAM CORP: YOUR LUXURY SUV IS KILLING OUR RIVER.
Well. That’s one way to read the quarterly report.
A grin pulls at the corner of his mouth. Not anger—he’s been protested before, it’s practically a line item at this point—but something closer to amusement. Boredom, curdled into curiosity.
He grabs his jacket from the back of his chair, shrugs it on, and takes the elevator down.
Alphas, betas, a few Omegas—the usual cocktail of a public gathering. He moves through the outer edge of the crowd, and people part for him without seeming to realize they’re doing it.
A woman stands on a makeshift podium—a shipping crate draped with a blue banner. Small but electric, one hand gripping a megaphone. Copper-tan skin glints in the afternoon sun. Waist-length curly hair swings with every gesture. She’s young—mid-twenties, maybe—and she’s loud, her voice cutting through the din.
Tagah leans against one of the stone pillars at the edge of the courtyard, arms crossed, watching her work. She’s good. Passionate. The crowd responds to her.
“—and when the Lower Ring wetlands are paved over for another parking structure, where do the migratory herons go? Where does the water go? Where does—”
She doesn’t finish the sentence because the crowd erupts—cheers and applause and a few whoops that carry the enthusiasm of young people who believe they’re changing the world.
Tagah doesn’t clap. He watches.
Citrus.
Bright and sharp, like someone peeled an orange. Clean air underneath it, the kind that belongs on a breeze after fresh rainfall, not in a courtyard surrounded by steel and glass.
His head turns before his brain gives the order.
There—bobbing through the crowd like a buoy that forgot how to float properly. A young man, thin and quick, moving with a bounce in his step that makes the word graceful feel insufficient.
He’s hopping, really. Between clusters of people, ducking under raised signs, weaving through the press of bodies with ease. Gray eyes catch the light as he turns, bright and enormous in a face that’s all smiles and enthusiasm.
An Omega. Tagah’s nostrils flare almost involuntarily, and the scent hits him again—stronger this time, layered. Under the citrus there’s something warm, something that makes the base of his skull hum.
The young man is passing out flyers, a stack of them tucked under one arm, handing them to anyone who’ll take one. His buzzcut is a dark thatch of hair on his head. He's laughing at something a beta woman says, and the sound carries—light, unguarded.
Tagah pushes off the pillar.
He doesn’t think about it. He simply steps forward, angling himself so he’s directly in the kid’s line of sight—the path of least resistance, the widest gap in the crowd. He doesn’t wave. Doesn’t call out. Just stands there in a charcoal suit that costs more than most people’s rent, and waits.
The Omega spots him. Gray eyes lock onto Tagah’s hazel brown. The young man’s step falters for half a beat.
Then he bounds over.
Not walks. Not approaches. Bounds. Like gravity is a suggestion he’s politely declining.
“Hi!”
The word comes out bright and warm, and the Omega thrusts a flyer toward Tagah.
“I’m Aang. Aang Noma. You looked like someone who might want to know what’s actually happening to the wetlands instead of just—” He gestures vaguely at the courtyard, the crowd, the world. “—standing around looking handsome.”
The compliment lands without pretense. Aang just says it, like it's a fact, bright and honest. Then he continues his pitch, rattling off information about the wetland preservation that Tagah is only half listening to.
Tagah smiles. The slow drag of his gaze moving down the length of Aang’s body and back up again. He steps forward—one step that closes the distance between them to something indecent for a public courtyard—and reaches for the flyer.
His fingers brush Aang’s.
Deliberately. The pad of his thumb drags across the Omega’s knuckles as he takes the paper, and the contact lasts a half-second longer than it needs to.
Aang stops talking.
Just—stops. The torrent of words cuts off mid-sentence, and his mouth stays slightly open, the next syllable trapped somewhere between his brain and his tongue. His gray eyes go wide, then wider. Tagah watches the pupils dilate—dark swallowing light—as the Omega’s body responds to what his mind hasn’t caught up to yet.
The scent of him shifts, too. The citrus sharpens, spikes, and underneath it that warm note blooms thicker, int something that makes Tagah’s pulse kick against his ribs.
Tagah knows what his own scent does—has calibrated it, weaponized it in boardrooms and bedrooms alike. But watching it hit this particular Omega—watching those bright gray eyes glaze and soften, the lean body sway forward a fraction of an inch like a plant turning toward light—that’s something else entirely.
“Well,” Tagah says, his voice dropping into the register he reserves for things that interest him, “aren’t you just the sweetest little Pet .”
The daze holds for one more second. Two. Aang’s lips part, and a flush creeps up from his collarbones, visible even against his light tan skin. Tagah can see the moment the Omega’s hindbrain is still reaching for him, still pulling toward the Alpha scent that’s wrapped around him.
Then the spell cracks—the Omega’s brow furrows, his chin lifts, and the scowl that replaces the softness is so immediate, so theatrical, that Tagah has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.
“Pet ?” Aang’s voice jumps an octave. “Did you just—I’m not—”
Tagah’s smile widens. He doesn’t correct him. Doesn’t push. He just stands there, radiating calm and heat in equal measure, and lets the kid posture.
Because he can smell it—beneath the indignation, beneath the righteous fury and the crossed arms and the scowl that’s doing its absolute best—the slick has already started. Faint, barely there, but unmistakable to an Alpha who knows what he’s looking for. Aang’s body is lying, and his scent is telling the truth.
Tagah lets Aang have it. Doesn’t call him on it. Just watches the performance with his head tilted slightly, the flyer dangling from one finger like an afterthought. Because that’s what it is—an afterthought. The paper could be blank for all the attention he’s paying to it. What he’s paying attention to is the way Aang’s nostrils keep flaring, the way his pulse is visible in the hollow of his throat, the way he keeps shifting his weight from one foot to the other like standing still has become physically impossible.
Bright and bubbly to bratty in under thirty seconds. Tagah files that away. Catalogues it. The kids brattiness is adorable.
Genuinely, unexpectedly adorable. Tagah hasn’t been amused by someone in longer than he can remember .
“Call me sometime.”
Tagah reaches into his inner jacket pocket and pulls out a business card—heavy stock, embossed, the Sonam Corp logo catching the light—and holds it between two fingers.
Aang’s scowl deepens. “Why would I—”
“Because you’ve convinced me.” Tagah tilts the card, letting the sun hit the gold lettering. “About the wetlands. I want to know more about your cause.”
It’s not entirely a lie. The kid is convincing. But Tagah isn’t thinking about marshland drainage or migratory herons. He’s thinking about the way Aang’s scent spiked when their fingers touched, the way his pupils blew wide, the way his body swayed forward.
He wants to see that again. Wants to study it. Wants to peel back every layer of bratty indignation until he finds the soft submissive Pet underneath.
Preferably not in a courtyard surrounded by two hundred people and a woman with a megaphone.
Aang stares at the card like it might bite him. His gray eyes flick from the embossed logo to Tagah’s face and back again.
“Fine.” The word comes out clipped, almost petulant.
Aang snatches the card with more force than necessary, his fingers brushing Tagah’s again, and the contact—even that brief, aggressive graze—sends another pulse of slick-sweet warmth through the air between them.
Tagah’s cock stirs against his thigh, and he shifts his weight, adjusting.
Aang pulls out his phone—an older model, cracked screen, a sticker of a flying bison on the case—and jabs at it with his thumb, aggressively typing in the number from the card. His tongue pokes out between his teeth as he concentrates, and the gesture is so unconsciously endearing that Tagah has to look away for a moment, gaze drifting to the fountain across the courtyard.
Aang shoves the phone back into his pocket and recrosses his arms.
“Thank you, Aang.”
Tagah’s voice drops to that low Alpha timbre, bypassing rational thought to speak directly to the hindbrain. He watches it land.
Aang opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. Whatever sharp retort he’d been assembling dissolves on his tongue.
It starts at the base of his throat—that hollow where his pulse had been hammering—and climbs. Up the column of his neck, across the sharp line of his jaw, flooding his cheeks with a pink that turns the light tan of his skin luminous. The Omega’s gray eyes go glassy again, just for a heartbeat, and his lips part around something that might have been a word but never makes it out.
Tagah steps back. One step. Two. Enough to give the kid air, enough to let the space between them cool.
“I’ll be seeing you, little Pet .”
𓂃 ོ☼𓂃