Chapter Text
Naruto was grateful for her biweekly appointments at the omega clinic—really, she was—but she hated going.
Alphas weren’t allowed inside, at least, but it was hard to see the other omegas. Most of them pregnant or trying, all of them glowing with health, their arms wrapped around their middles as they sat in the waiting room boasting signs of being spoiled—expensive coffees in their hands, fine clothes on their bodies, manicured nails. And then there was her, sitting in the corner with her head down in her ratty hoodie over her worn work scrubs, her nails bitten short and her foot tapping anxiously against the carpet. Getting looks of pity and empathy from every omega close enough to realize she smelled like a beta, because everyone knew what had happened if she was at the omega clinic smelling like a beta.
Battered. It even said it on her ID. The injection she was waiting to get was heavily restricted by the government, almost impossible to get black market even if you had the money to blow. Suppressants were only an option for omegas who’d substantiated a domestic abuse or sexual assault case against an alpha as determined by a district court judge, with a medical doctor’s supporting testimony that the abuse had occurred and a psychologist’s opinion that significant trauma had been incurred. It was a high bar to clear, and it was so rare for an alpha to abuse an omega in the first place that she’d never encountered or heard of any others in her shoes.
She’d wanted to be an omega. Grown up daydreaming about it, about a pair or even a pack of gorgeous alphas at her beck and call, spoiling her rotten. She’d wanted family, unconditional love, and omegas were so special. Everyone loved omegas. That two percent of the population were even considered lucky to have patronize your business by some cultures; she remembered the first time after she’d presented (fuck, how lucky she’d felt, how special) that she went into a certain family-owned restaurant, she’d met every employee who worked there, shaken hands, been brought a taste of all the dishes they were most proud of. She’d felt for the first time in her life like everything was coming up Naruto, like she had a future, like she was important and beautiful and worthy of love, like all omegas were.
Like almost all omegas were.
Not her. Everyone in the clinic who could smell her knew she was the exception.
She’d been afraid of needles before all this began, but she’d gotten so many injections that it didn’t even disturb her from her quasi-dissociative state. She barely noticed herself sleepwalking through it, and before she knew it, was facing the only thing worse than omegas that knew.
Alphas hung around outside the clinic almost ubiquitously. Most were waiting on an omega inside, but some simply knew it was the highest concentration of them in the city most days and were sniffing around for something unclaimed. Universally, though, when she walked by them with her hood up and her head down, hugging herself and trying not to breathe, their scents twisted through with comforting pheromones, and if she looked up, she’d see their faces aghast and pitying, horrified that one of their own had…
“Oh, omega,” one of them breathed as she passed by. “I’m so sorry.”
That’s all she was to them now. An idol to the failure of alphas as a culture to take care of the precious gift of the omegas. Something broken to mourn and feel penitent towards. Like a murdered unicorn. No longer special, only broken.
…
But when she wasn’t at the clinic, those injections were a gift, one that had given Naruto her life back: it let her, more or less, live her life as a beta.
It was temporary, yes, just like the disability check that had allowed her alpha-aversion-driven agoraphobia to keep her home for two years without starving had expired two months prior, but for the moment, she could move through the world without anyone knowing what she was except those with access to her medical records and bartenders who checked her ID. Alpha pheromones still affected her, of course, and she avoided them as much as humanly possible, but her scent attracted no attention, did not reveal her designation or the way that alphas could made her stomach quake with awful, agonizing fear. And like her social worker had said, being in public and in casual contact with alphas was getting easier by degrees.
She liked her job. It was on the eighteenth floor of the H&H Law building downtown, an easy subway ride away, and it wasn’t veterinary school like she’d always planned, but it was around animals all day. She worked second shift at the owners’ of the building’s pet project, an animal shelter that focused on rehabilitation and adoption for sick, injured, disabled, and otherwise-in-need-of-extra-care pets, mostly cats and dogs. She went in at two, when things weren’t unbearably crowded either on the subway or in the lobby, and went home at ten, when the building was quiet and dark and the subway relatively sparsely populated. Her work was a combination of satisfying manual labor (cleaning, organizing), basic pet care that made her popular with their ‘guests’ (feedings, taking the dogs out onto the peaceful terrace to go potty, socializing the cats), and medical care (tending wounds, administering medications, and, when she was lucky, bottle feeding). Kitten season had been hectic and exhausting, but as a late autumn chill settled in the air, things had gotten quieter.
She didn’t have to interact with any alphas at all, or anybody else, really. Mostly just Ino and Tenten, who both got off at five, their shifts a bit different from hers as their job titles focused on adoption, social media, and administration. They harassed her frequently to come dancing, but since they weren’t around for the end of her shift, it was hard for them to really strong arm her into it. She could spend the day focused on the animals, listening to music or a podcast, and it felt safe, warm, welcoming.
Animals on the whole liked omegas, and her suppressants didn’t seem to fool them; the large dogs especially were protective of her. The night things changed, she’d spent the last hour of her shift on the floor of a Rottweiler named Arlo’s enclosure with his heavy head rested in her lap, and when the janitor came by—a kind older man named Harv—the dog had growled low in his throat as he passed with his push mop and a friendly wave. Whenever she got scared late at night alone in the shelter, she told herself she’d let the dogs out if anyone broke in. It comforted her immensely.
It was tolerable, was even becoming comfortable. Even if the walk to and from could be a bit harrowing, and she sometimes caught a whiffs of alpha as she walked past the meet and greet rooms. She liked her coworkers—even Shikamaru, who she didn’t know well but whom she saw every day as the second shift ended and the third shift began—and the mission was something she believed in. Her boss, a woman named Tsunade who had known her late godfather and offered her the job as a standing opportunity over a year before she’d accepted it, was a bit brusque but patient and motherly in a way that made Naruto’s chest ache. Her world was small albeit expanding at a snail’s pace, familiar, and safe. It was what she needed.
And then she ran into one of the owners. Literally.
It was on her way out, having exchanged pleasantries with Shikamaru while carefully extricating herself out from under Arlo and reminded him that the dog in question would need another dose of his antibiotic towards the end of third shift. She was tired, sore and cold from sitting on the floor for so long, and she didn’t look before exiting the elevator into the lobby, long used to it being empty so late into the evening; she ran straight into an immaculately dressed woman talking into a cell phone, her heavy briefcase clattering to the floor and bursting open with a flutter of papers everywhere as they both stumbled from the collision.
“Oh my god,” Naruto gasped, dropping to her knees immediately as apologies poured from her lips. “I didn’t see you, I’m so sorry—” She was scrambling to pick everything back up and put the papers in piles. “I have no idea what order these need to go in, ma’am,” she worried, arranging them neatly but meaninglessly into the fine silk-lined leather case.
“Somebody almost knocked me over,” the woman hissed into the phone. “Someone’s off-leash intern, I’m sure—”
She was dressed like she probably worked in the law firm, and not as a nobody, Naruto noticed distractedly. Her pumps were sexy and expensive, her blazer and skirt sharply tailored, all the materials on her body fine. Fuck, this might have cost her her job. She felt her shoulders creep up around her ears, inhaling deep to try to steady herself only to go rigid and fall still as the heady scent of an upset alpha rolled over her, freezing her in place as her lungs forgot how to breathe and her heart lost its rhythm like it had never had one to begin with.
Come on, omega, you can take it.
Her vision blurred, and that was when she looked up, blinking away tears and suddenly dizzy, to realize she was looking at the second H in H&H. Sakura Haruno, a tall, stunningly beautiful woman built like a model who had graced the covers of a dozen magazines celebrating the glass ceilings she’d been shattering her entire career. Her green eyes were sharp and severe like the elegant bun her pink hair was pulled back into, her red-painted lips scowling; then they made eye contact, and her expression shifted.
“… I’ll call you back, K,” she murmured, scanning Naruto up and down. She ended the call, slid her phone into her pocket, and murmured in a voice like a purr, “Where on earth have they been hiding you, gorgeous?”
For a heart-stopping, stomach-curdling moment, Naruto thought that her suppressants had somehow failed her; there was no other explanation for why a high-powered, intensely beautiful CEO would be looking at her like she was a treat or calling her pet names, especially since she was in scrubs with her hair braided into practical pigtails and covered in dog hair. But while her scent had shifted into something cloying and seductive, it lacked the sharpness of an alpha’s response to an omega, and she remembered the gossip that Ino had gleefully filled her in about on the first day: the owners—alphas Kakashi Hatake and Sakura Haruno—were a pack along with a lower-profile beta; they had been hunting for an omega for a while but took betas as conquests in the meantime, typically whisking them away for a weekend of passion and then never returning any calls.
The H&H building was their favorite hunting ground, it was Friday night, and everyone else had gone home. Naruto wasn’t much to look at, but she was certainly a warm body, and maybe that’s all Ms. Haruno was looking for just then.
“E-eighteenth floor,” she managed to stutter out, and those dangerous green eyes lit up.
“The shelter,” she crooned. “No wonder you seem so sweet. Don’t worry about putting things in order, darling, that’s what interns are for.” She knelt, somehow making both the movement and the pose look endlessly elegant, and made quick work of taking the papers out of Naruto’s trembling hands and stuffing everything into the briefcase, which she set aside with the handle up. Then she stood, bent over Naruto, and eased her to her feet like she was made of tissue paper.
“Oh, god, I’ll get dog hair all over you,” she whimpered, barely able to think as the cloying scent of alpha flooded her nervous system. It wasn’t so bad when it was a woman, but her skin still crawled, her stomach lurching and her knees trembling.
“Do you think we’d have opened the shelter if we didn’t like animals?” Ms. Haruno wondered, sounding amused as she proprietarily took Naruto by the chin in a finely manicured hand, tilting her face up and to each side to examine her more closely.
Naruto was so busy trying not to run, cry, or vomit that she forgot to think before she spoke. “Maybe for tax purposes, yeah.”
There was an unreadable pause, and then those shiny red lips curled into a wide, pleased smile that made her stomach flutter nauseatingly. “You’re too cute for words. I want you on the cover of our November newsletter, and in front of the photographer when the Leaf Gazette comes in next week to highlight our charitable works. How does that sound, hm? What’s your name, gorgeous?”
Fear struck through her light lightning; she jerked back, suddenly unable to breathe, and shook her head, insisting in a winded voice, “That’s—that’s a terrible idea, Ms. Haruno. I—have to go.”
Then, fully panicking, she turned and fled.
…
Sakura stood there a moment, not quite stunned—she was far too unflappable to be truly stunned by much of anything—but certainly needing a moment to process and reprioritize. It wasn’t often that anyone told her that an idea she’d had was terrible, even when it was a lie. And it wasn’t often she encountered something so delectably sweet and cute that wasn’t some other lucky bastard’s omega already. Betas were hard to come by in that model—slight, delicate, blushing, shy, and absolutely, heartbreakingly beautiful in precisely the way her inner alpha craved—and it had been a while since she’d caught a glimpse of anything amusing for more than a few days of sex on some private beach or another in the tropics.
This had real potential. She knew that her taste in women overlapped with her partners’, knew that they all felt the absence of cunt that wasn’t hers keenly. She almost never bottomed for her beta, Sasuke, or their other alpha, Kakashi; she wasn’t built for it, and it was only worth the associated pain when she was both drunk and wanted something. Sasuke—not being built for it either, though more able than she was by a fair bit—wasn’t up for it often enough to satisfy either of them, let alone both of them, and Kakashi had baggage that didn’t allow him to bottom at all without looking like they were holding him at knife point, which was decidedly unsexy. They enjoyed each other while they waited for a chance at an omega from the Center, had sex in other ways frequently, but they all wanted to fuck something wet, willing, and not wincing in pain, so they’d been discussing bringing in a beta woman for over a year. There had been trial runs, but nothing that had stirred her like that shy little blonde had just then. She’d even smelled good, sweet in that comfortably bland way compatible betas usually did.
Yes, she decided. They’d get the girl in their bed for a taste, see if she was the missing piece their pack needed while they waited on a call from the Omega Center.
Sakura pulled out her phone, shooting off a text to her secretary asking for a list of employees for the eighteenth floor without any mind for how late it was; that was why she paid Hikaru the big bucks, after all. She began walking towards the elevator to the underground parking garage, humming contentedly to herself and pleased when the response came quickly.
She opened the document, scrolling through it, her almond tip manicure clicking against the screen. I’ll need to get my nails trimmed, she noted distractedly, only for the thought to flee her entirely as she set eyes on the name and employee photo of the girl who’d just nearly knocked her over.
Naruto Uzumaki, twenty-one, employee for six weeks. Her ID picture showed her nervous and wide-eyed, but her golden hair was down, framing her heart-shaped face with soft, lovely waves. God, those lips…
She took a screenshot and sent it to the pack group chat, which was currently named ‘3 for 1 Special.’
.jpeg
I want one
Sasuke: what department?
She’s with the shelter
Sasuke: definitely your type
We all know that means she’s your type, too
Kakashi: We said we were done shitting where we eat, Sakura. No more hitting on employees in the building.
But LOOK AT HER
Kakashi: Point taken.
She was so cute when she knocked my briefcase out of my hands
Stuttering, blushing mess on her hands and knees
@Sasuke you home tonight? I’m feeling revved up
Sasuke: i’m down but not in the mood to bottom
Sasuke: might be able to be convinced but don’t count on it
Sold
Kakashi: Without me? :-(
You and your old man emojis
Kakashi: They’re called emoticons. This is an emoji. 🖕