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For someone who was not a name, but the name, not so long ago, all of Taehyung’s intel informs him he will live in one of the poorest areas of the city, in a building probably meant for demolition if a bank were ever to visit. Of course, maybe a bank has visited. Maybe many people have visited, and yet, this place still exists. A castle of sorts, but not one Taehyung ever imagined he would think of as safety.
There are plenty of people milling about, both inside and out, so Taehyung does his best to walk the way that saves him most of the time. Head down, but not too low, not low enough to kick, quick but not too quick. He turns his ears to and fro to track where others are, but he doesn’t look at them. Tries to look like he’s been there before and knows exactly where he’s headed, which is nothing but a spectacular lie.
“Pretty ring,” a man leers with a jabbing grab for his hand. He misses the first time, but not the second.
The jade ring was something he did not remove with his normal clothing in proper fear of what may happen if he was found without it. The clothing he might explain - poorly - but not the ring. The ring is not ever removed once presented.
“Where’d ya get it?” the guy asks, pulling harder on his arm than Taehyung would assume possible from his scrawny physique under his stacked tops of sweater, sweater, jacket, and sweater.
“Let go, please,” Taehyung mumbles, because he can’t and won’t answer.
“I’ll take it off your hands if you want. Heh.” The guy laughs to himself, yanking down sharply enough Taehyung yelps, making him laugh even more. “I’ll take it right off your hand… Or I’ll take this hand.” His back bowls over, rounding, hunching, and for all of the violence Taehyung’s witnessed, it’s too late for him to understand what’s happening.
The guy lodges his teeth right into the top of Taehyung’s hand - he screams, jerking, thrashing, heaving back against his hold on him in both dentures and hand, until one firm grip on his neck renders him entirely useless. He freezes up, caught, cornered in broad daylight, as useless as he was told.
He’s finished.
He walked right out of one den only to be instantly killed in another, he thinks.
Sounds about right.
“Let go, old man,” a voice swimming above his head commands, and miraculously, Taehyung’s assailant spits his hand out like cud. He growls as he steps backwards slowly, and from the shadows, Taehyung notices a few others slowly backing away as well from the scene. “What’s a Changmin bitch doing here, hm?”
The scruff on his neck keeps him frozen as his feet drag along the floor as this man - certainly an alpha, his nose easily picks up this time - walks slowly down the hall and into a stairwell. An extremely poorly lit stairwell. This is where he’s about to die. It looks like something already died in here. Thump, thump, thump go his feet on each and every step, a distant echo in this chamber.
The thing about a scruff is that not only does the body become useless, but thoughts, too. Taehyung understands he has fear, but he doesn’t fully feel it either. Their journey into hell continues, and then he realizes he’s alone with this alpha in an enclosed space, one of the actual apartment units of the building. He sees the front door behind the shoulder of the alpha close, and then he takes in the alpha.
“Are you - are you Kim Namjoon?” Taehyung’s voice wobbles more than he can afford, but there’s nothing for it. His hand throbs - no doubt, an infection setting in. He holds it to his chest, still on his knees because it’s best not to stand before an alpha.
The man laughs, big, booming. In these thin walls, everything shakes. Around them, there is decidedly very little. Very little to tell tale of the alpha larger than life that everyone used to cower before only a few years ago, even Changmin. Half of the floor is covered in old newspaper fluttering about - half of it speckled in what might be blood - and where the floor is visible it decidedly looks decorated in similar substance.
“I didn’t know the so called four holy sank low enough to send a hapless omega out to do their bidding. How delightful,” the alpha says, with enough conviction and correct identification of where he came from that Taehyung believes this has to be him. Kim Namjoon. “You aren’t the first omega sent to my doorstep, but you are the first to arrive - ill prepared.”
He plucks at the side of his shirt, eyebrows raised. “Does your master appreciate the waif look?” The fingers reach in to pinch this time. “Skinny. Too skinny. Did you tell Changmin you’d come to seduce me even though you can’t bleed, hm? Omegas are sent to my doorstep, but rarely do they arrive without the haze of heat. For them. For me,” he aggressively leans into Taehyung’s space, so suddenly, that Taehyung slaps the cheek closest to his dominant hand.
Namjoon leans back laughing.
Taehyung now cradles his good hand, prepared to lose it.
“I-” But what can Taehyung say? In essence, isn’t that exactly what he’s there for?
“No matter the cost, you were right to keep that ring on. You wouldn’t have made it out of their territory without it.” Namjoon turns his back to him, lumbering into a small kitchen area that has a lot of knives lying about, none of them intended for a kitchen. “They think it’s fun to let marked messages arrive to my doorstep. They like to hedge bets on what happens to them.”
Taehyung shivers. Heavy was the feeling of eyes on him on the street. He isn’t stupid enough to think he evaded suspicion.
Changmin surely knows by now.
“That isn’t why I took it off,” Taehyung whispers. Across the room, he thinks the alpha tenses for a moment, one ear barely turned back over his shoulder to listen. Taehyung sees every breath rise and fall in his broad shoulders, then Namjoon turns suddenly.
“Ah, so you’re one of them.” Namjoon opens a fridge that may or may not be working - there is no interior light to come on. “You’re not the first of that kind, either.”
“Please.” Taehyung cries, now crumpled on the floor, hand throbbing. He has nowhere to go, no real chance of anything. “Please.”
Namjoon steps right over him to look out a window. “I won’t save you,” he says. “I don’t get involved in any of that anymore. If you think I care about sparing a life, if you think I might help you just to fuck with them for fun, you are about to be gravely mistaken. I don’t fucking care.”
He walks off down a hallway to their left, darker than the rest of the dingy unit, leaving Taehyung alone. It’s quiet, but not quiet enough that he can’t hear the shuffling on the other side of the front door. It could be anyone - another man like the one who bit him, or it could be someone far worse.
How long until one of Changmin’s lackeys breaks down the door?
What does Taehyung have to arm himself with? Not the knives. He won’t last a minute armed with knives. Maybe if he can get a proper alpha mark? If he can roll around in most of the blood on the floor, as dried as it is, and hope it’s enough to carry some of Namjoon’s scent. Maybe he can -
Taehyung shuffles about on hands and knees.
Alphas mark territory.
There should be more than butcher’s blood here.
Even an alpha like Namjoon, someone supposedly out of the game who doesn’t care, would mark territory. That’s just instincts. Salary alphas with nice jobs still mark territory in their studio apartment that house nothing but a rice cooker and a bot companion. Taehyung roots around like a hound, nose to floor, to find the concentrated patches. He finds one that he guesses is just sweat and gland and nothing more, but close to the front door, maybe he finds salty splotches. Taehyung has his nose buried there before a second scruff at his neck lifts him bodily off the floor, feet dangling in the air as Kim Namjoon lifts him up as far as his arm will reach.
He growls. “What are you doing?”
“Please.” It’s hard to speak through a scruff. Maybe he doesn’t speak at all. “I know you - hate him.” Taehyung gasps at the excessive squeeze on his neck, eyes fluttering closed, neck rolling.
Namjoon laughs. “And what do you want me to do? If I wanted him dead, I would have killed him myself years ago. I don’t care what the bastard does. I don’t care if he has ten more of you locked away in a dungeon.”
“I don’t -” Taehyung whines, the pressure both painful but blissful. His feet twitch. “Care either. If dead. I just - need -”
He thinks he feels a little slick.
Good. That’s good.
“Pup. Please.”
Namjoon inhales sharply, growl dying out. It’s so quiet in the room, not even Taehyung’s heartbeat audible in the scruff. “Bitch me,” he garbles out.
Silence, then booming laughter. Namjoon drops him into a crumpled heap at the door, holding his stomach while he stumbles backwards. “I don’t know,” more laughter, “if you’re exactly like all the others, or if you’re stupid enough to be clever.” Namjoon’s laughter fades.
Taehyung struggles to get possession of his limbs. “He won’t - touch me. If I carry yours.”
Chuckling, Namjoon barely has to reach to snag a knife close to him from a counter. He flicks it under a fingernail, digging out dirt. “Sure. He wouldn’t touch you because I bitched you. He’d find you too repulsive to touch. And you think he won’t kill you because he’d fear repercussion of killing a pup of mine.”
Taehyung pulls his knees to his chest against the door.
“But I don’t give a shit about helping you, and I certainly wouldn’t give a shit about a pup.” Namjoon’s last chuckle dies out. He has a nice voice, Taehyung thinks through the haze of disappointment and what’s more - arousal. His nose may be stuffed up, but it’s still invaded by the flood of unsuppressed alpha scent, some of the strongest he’s ever smelled. Even through the murk of all the other scents in this building, Kim Namjoon smells good to him.
He walks off, leaving Taehyung well and truly alone, for he doesn’t come back, even as he shuffles around in the kitchen and front living room area, a term too generous for anything inside the dwelling.
If Taehyung crawled out of the gutter only for this to be his last resting place, then he’ll make a nest out of dirty newspaper and be done with it. He finds enough to weave together a thicker braid for a perimeter, then stuff the rest in the center of it.
There is nothing else in the living room now save him and his nest of kindling. Changmin may come along and set it aflame whenever he likes. Maybe Taehyung will take the whole building down with him. Maybe, if he has nothing else, he will have a grand pyre like he was ever worth something.
Back to the door to welcome death, Taehyung sleeps with his injured hand clasped to his chest. There is nothing comfortable in the moment - not the ache in his hand nor the hard floor to rest his head - but the perimeter of alpha scent does more for him than any opulent surrounding could. So fast does he sleep, so deeply and warmly, that Taehyung wakes up in a fog, hands too numb to realize one is bandaged.
“If you thought that just because you bleed from the hand that you might absorb some of my own bodily fluids, you’d be sorely mistaken,” Namjoon says quietly in the full dark of the room, sun set outside the windows.
“And that’s why you bandaged it?” Taehyung pushes himself up to notice that he lies within the crude circle of his nest, and just outside of it, tucked into the corner, sits the alpha breathing heavily, crouched and poised on the balls of his feet. “I thought you were happy to let me die. You should have let it fester and rot.”
With a hum he rolls to a stand and leaves, but only for a time. Taehyung remains awake and mostly alert through the night, the alpha pacing in and out of the small space. He remains still in his place. He won’t leave. He won’t move.
His stomach and bladder protest.
“I eat at this time of night,” Namjoon says impatiently, as if Taehyung is stopping him. He shrugs. Growling, the alpha barks out, “So go fucking clean yourself before we eat!”
Taehyung stumbles blindly down the hall, no lights on, his feet asleep even if he is not. He finds the bathroom easily enough - it’s the next door, and there are only a few doors in the hallway.
The bathroom looks much the same as where he came; dirty, dingy, and lacking even real necessities. There is at least a bar of soap in the shower, and the water, despite how long it takes, gets hot.
Taehyung ends up taking a cold shower regardless.
“What, you can’t do anything for yourself?” the alpha growls when he sees him, shivering in the hall with a damp towel on his head and the same threadbare clothing he arrived in. Taehyung flinches when Namjoon reaches for him, the fingers hesitating only momentarily before yanking him forward regardless. He rips the towel from his head to toss it away, but at least it lands close to Taehyung’s makeshift nest.
“Stand next to the stove if you’re cold.” Namjoon pushes him into the kitchen, a tiny corner of a kitchen. Taehyung catches himself before he lands hand first on the lit stove, a simmering pot of something on the back burner. It’s too dark to see well, just the orange glow of the stovetop burner close to his skin, but he smells something creamy.
Behind him, Namjoon paces. In his current position, Taehyung is locked in between the counter, appliances, and the alpha.
He put him somewhere to patrol.
Taehyung sinks to the ground in front of the stove. “Get up!” Namjoon yells, but he shakes his head and continues to lie flat to the ground until his head rests on the floor. The alpha steps closer, then back, then closer. With an angry click, he flicks off the stove over his body then all but drops the pan of stew in front of him, half of it sloshing out, then drops a large serving spoon to the floor next to it.
“Eat,” he says, then departs.
It’s quiet inside the unit and outside of it. Taehyung knows it’s only a matter of time before Namjoon’s instincts and irritation get the best of him, so best to take what’s offered now.
Even if it might be dubious.
He tests the stew with a tiny mouthful, but it does nothing to harm his stomach, so by the time he eats, it is well cold. It tastes - fine. Store bought, heated up just for him though. Taehyung opens the fridge to take in all of its bare contents then closes it. Where did the soup come from? Does the alpha keep food in his personal room rather than the kitchen?
Nothing to do, Taehyung crawls back to his nest in the living space. He’d like to look out the window but can’t. Rather, he curls up on himself and dreams of warmth. He had a warm bed until this night, but it wasn’t full of warmth.
There is a blanket.
Hurled at him, bundled up into a small torpedo. It makes contact with Taehyung’s back, and as soon as he feels it, he smiles. He couldn’t hear it coming. He reaches around to pull it tight over his body and head.
He then closes his eyes. If Changmin comes, it won’t be this night.
In the morning, Taehyung tiptoes through the rest of the apartment, not a single light on, but just enough daylight through just enough windows. There are two bedrooms and the bathroom, all of which stand mostly empty, including of any alpha inhabitant. Taehyung’s stomach drops when he realizes he left him alone, defenseless, knives on kitchen display notwithstanding.
Every creak outside the front door becomes louder, ten times more ominous. Taehyung wants to stay in the nest he made - if Namjoon gifted him a blanket, then surely he has his blessing to be there, but he also wants to be in the furthest back room, a room not gifted or presented to him. His need to hide, to look for protection, wins out. He takes the blanket and an armful of newspaper and retreats to the back bedroom, the master, if the size is to be believed.
It’s quieter in this room, especially when Taehyung shuts the door. There’s hardly anything more belonging to this room than the measly possessions he trailed in with, not even a bed or rolled mattress, but Taehyung suspects it’s where the alpha sleeps based purely on the strength of scent.
The happiest he’s been since arrival, perhaps the happiest he’s been in weeks or months, Taehyung lies on the floor face down.
When the alpha wakes him with a ferocious growl, he even accuses him of such. “You think you can roll around in here and trick me into mistaking you for my omega?” Namjoon picks Taehyung up like he’s nothing and shakes him a little, feet flailing, blanket and newspaper falling from his lap where he curled up around them.
He tosses him out of the room, and Taehyung, stumbling, cowers along the walls in the dark until he reaches the far corner of the living room where he slept the night before. The alpha follows, stalking, nose raised high and flaring fiercely. Is it too much for him already? Does Taehyung carry enough of his scent?
Taehyung knows how to make his body small but eyes big, curled up defensively in a way that still showcases just a peek of neck. He likes to think it’s saved him before.
Namjoon spits as he growls and prowls. By the end of the night, there will be a worn path in the shape of a semicircle around this corner of the unit. “What did you do?”
Taehyung flinches at the tone of voice. “Nothing.”
“Who are you then?”
“No one.” Taehyung used to swallow down bitterness about it; now, there is easy acceptance or morose acceptance that he can be no one and someone else’s at the same time.
“I saw Changmin’s dog prowling outside. What’s his name -”
“Minho.”
“You’re someone to him.” Namjoon pauses pacing, jaw clenched.
“No one,” Taehyung repeats. “I’m no one to him.”
Namjoon grinds his teeth, tensed above him, barely an arm’s width for an alpha. Taehyung understands any moment he may be thrown out the door to Minho’s mercy - did he track him to this precise location? Or was he merely making rounds? How close is Taehyung to death?
“I can’t give you what you want,” Namjoon says.
“You can protect me,” Taehyung immediately protests. “All you have to do is pup me. If it’s your pup, he won’t touch me. I could walk out the door as soon as it's done, we never have to see each other again, but even Song Changmin would never touch me if it was your pup.”
Namjoon chuckles darkly, shaking his head. From his pocket, he rolls and flicks a lighter, on and off, on and off. Taehyung would not expect such a mundane habit from an alpha as notorious as him. It feels a little too - benign. Expected.
“Stay out of my way,” he says, “and I’ll let you lay low here for now. I won’t touch you though.” He turns to walk away, as he does, but Taehyung yells after him:
“My heat is in two weeks!”
Namjoon freezes, but with his back to him, Taehyung can’t make out any expression on his face. Only the shifting muscle under his top give him anger and irritation.
“If I’m here in two weeks, you’ll bitch me,” Taehyung says with a finality that he cannot successfully execute.
Namjoon listens; he listens because he remains standing there too long before leaving.
He does not say anything; doesn’t even disagree. Smiling, Taehyung hunkers down in his newspaper like a dog that isn’t housebroken, but if he remains bodily in the apartment the next morning, he feels prepared for the next phase of planning.
Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, Taehyung cautiously makes his way through the dwelling, rubbing his wrist along the walls, although he stays on all fours to keep the scent mark low. He takes his time in the bathroom in a long bath since the alpha does not show his face or open the door to the back bedroom, although Taehyung hears the creaking floorboards of pacing occasionally. He may not have all of his favorite toiletries, but he has scalding hot water, and if he sits long enough in it, he figures it’s as clean as he can get.
Changmin thought places like this appalled Taehyung, but Changmin wasn’t the one to pull him out of his father’s den.
He understands how to make a meal from nothing, or how to ration it for days. Unused to rationing for two, Taehyung shifts weight between his two feet outside the alpha’s door, tempted with both thoughts to gently knock with a plate of food in his hands or leave it outside the door. Temperature in this case is the best seasoning, and once it’s cold, the dish itself can’t make up for its own shortcomings.
He leaves it all the same, and later, finds the bowl empty. Smiling, Taehyung cleans it and puts the bowl in the new location he chose in his new favorite cabinet. When he leaves the apartment, he finds first a general store jutting out of an old hotel lobby, long closed, but its tiny attached storefront operating with newspapers for him to check the date, count down the days to his heat, and purchase a couple of cheap shopping bags for his next trip.
“New ‘round here?” the guy asks. He doesn’t count the coins, merely seems to weigh them in his hand.
Taehyung nods. “Will you share where I can get the best deal for groceries?” The cash he absconded with is limited, and hopefully, if his lackluster curls and pale color help, this man might be willing to share where a decent market is, most likely pushed in the back of some unsuspecting front Taehyung won’t be able to identify himself.
With luck, Taehyung makes out with a decent haul of foodstuffs, almost more than he can carry back after the man mumbles and waves with a clawed hand in one direction. The door to Namjoon’s dwelling remains unlocked, although as soon as he pushes it open, a swift and looming presence tears the bags from his hand. “Where were you?” the alpha growls, but Taehyung protests at the green onions mangled in his fist.
“Take a guess!” Taehyung pinches and pulls at Namjoon’s fingers until he lets go, and hugging the one bag to his chest, he scurries to the right into the kitchen.
“Walk out that door again, and don’t bother trying to come back!”
“You didn’t lock the door.” Taehyung begins unpacking and cleaning his produce, and Namjoon, perhaps legitimately surprised by his gall, gapes at him.
“Who do you think you are?” Namjoon roars, one hand smack down on the counter right next to Taehyung’s hands. He flinches. Just the reverberation from impact jostles his bandaged hand enough to sting. “You act as if you know who I am, yet carelessly waltz into my den! Do you know what I could do to you? What I’ve done to others, prettier, smarter, than you?”
Taehyung leaves his hunched up shoulders next to his ears, but he refuses to move or look. If he looks, if he sees the thunder in the alpha’s face, he might bolt for it, and he can’t. His legs remain locked in place, and perhaps, his hormones do the trick. A sharp whistling noise of air being sucked down punctuates the tension between them. Growling continues, but the thing about alpha growling is, once used to it, it can become something of comfort.
Growling in the background functions as white noise for Taehyung. Means he’s alive. He’s still moving.
He’s rolled around in his marked territory enough that his body adjusts to the company of this scent immediately, and combined with the corresponding growl, his body responds to Namjoon.
“Treacherous leech!” Namjoon yells. “I won’t save you if someone comes knocking!” But Taehyung smiles to himself, because his hand is bandaged by none other.
He washes and cuts his fruit and vegetables first, then fills jars for pickling. He spies Namjoon finding the jars later, from his perch, in his corner. He stifles laughter at the alpha’s furious face. “You really think you’ll be here so long?” Faced with Taehyung’s suppressed mirth, the alpha smashes one of the jars on the floor.
Glass shards slide across the floor. Wilted, Taehyung wonders where he will find something to clean them safely.
The alpha walks across glass towards him. Taehyung gasps at the audible crunch underfoot, the distinct tang of blood in the air.
There are bloody footprints, only half formed.
Everything in this apartment is bloodied and soiled; how does Taehyung expect not to become the same?
“You expect mercy, and why? Because you’re the fairer sex?” Namjoon kicks at the glass on the floor - but he kicks it behind him and away from Taehyung. The omega remains frozen, more frightened now than he was when he arrived, or when Namjoon found him in his bedroom, but he remains steadfast in this, his plan, his chosen alpha. He didn’t choose Changmin - no, instead he chose one supposedly worse than him.
If you were going to kick me out - you would have, Taehyung wishes he could say. Instead, he remains silent, a careful watch on the alpha. Slowly, so there is no mistaking it, Taehyung reaches for one of his feet. When he does not protest the barest brush of fingerpad to the top of said foot, Taehyung more securely wraps a hand around Namjoon’s bare ankle.
“I’ll bandage you this time,” he says quietly. Namjoon, still huffing, chest heaving above him, tears himself away, stomping down the hall with wet footsteps.
“Don’t fucking move!” he yells behind him. Taehyung could nearly laugh.
He waits until he thinks Taehyung might be asleep, but Namjoon very quietly cleans the glass later that night, in the dark, hunched over on his knees this time. Taehyung rolls onto his side, soft eyes in soft darkness, and he’s sure Namjoon feels him looking. The glass makes a twinkling noise as he sweeps it up - in his hands.
An alpha who will clean glass with his bare hands as easily as he breaks it. Some of Namjoon’s reputation must be true.
It requires finesse to pick up each and every shard from the floor with your bare hands in the dark. It also requires care.
Taehyung rolls out of his nest into the rest of the living room with no fear as soon as Namjoon leaves.
“Alpha.” Taehyung pushes the simmering meat across the skillet with chopsticks later. “Dinner is ready.”
“Don’t call me that!” Namjoon grouses, but he lingers, nose high as he sucks down air. “...Where did you get that?”
Smiling, Taehyung pushes back one of the baggy sleeves on his arms. “I needed something else to wear.” To say nothing of one of the old tees he tore up to fashion a headband.
“Imp.” Namjoon hovers closer to look over his shoulder at what must smell like a feast to someone who does not seem to cook. “You couldn’t be more apparent in your wiles.”
“And yet I’m still here.” Taehyung plucks out of the sticky sauce the largest and fattiest pieces of pork to delicately arrange over rice. He even draws a smiley face in the rice for him with the sauce, delivering it with an identical cheesy grin.
The alpha does not accept it from his hands, but later, Namjoon picks it up from where Taehyung put it down on the far side of the counter. “Who taught you to cook?”
Taehyung delights in the feeling of stuffed cheeks. “My dam, of course. Did you have a mother?”
Namjoon scowls. “Everyone has a dam.”
“Well, sure. Everyone has a dam, but I suppose not everyone has a mother.”
“You’re wearing her clothes,” Namjoon says, with the least amount of emotion possible, especially for someone Taehyung has only heard vitriol from. No emotion equates to the most emotive in this situation.
He jolts. “I’m sorry-” Biting his lip, Taehyung curls up in shame. He found the clothes stuffed in a bag in the back of a closet. He didn’t exactly think they looked like they belonged to the alpha, but they smelled like him, and -
“It’s done now. She doesn’t need them. I guess - you do.” Namjoon leaves behind an empty plate, and this time, an open door when he showers, steam rolling out of the room.
Taehyung stands in the corridor and looks through the shitty lighting and thick steam, listening to the water. It only takes startlingly few minutes for him to recklessly strip right there and then, only to step into the bathroom, and finally, the shower.
This time, Namjoon doesn’t look surprised to see him.
He turns. He lets Taehyung look.
Raking his eyes down his body, from his neck to his chest and swollen arm muscles, to his defined pecs and trail of hair that starts below his belly button to travel south. Taehyung swallows.
“You like what you see,” he says.
“It’s an alpha cock,” Taehyung rolls his eyes. “I’m designed to get wet at far less than the sight of good dick.”
Namjoon laughs heartily, but his cock twitches. Saliva floods his mouth and Taehyung’s fingers itch. He wants to touch, to taste. Namjoon is a little too pretty given his line of work, although there are marks. Scars. Burns. Old wounds and even a lopsided birthmark along a thigh.
Honestly, all of that is secondary to his massive cock. It is - certainly eye catching, to say the least, even when it’s soft, and it could only be defined as his main characteristic, maybe followed by dimples. Dimples and his fine cock. “Fuck, this is all you want, huh?” Namjoon reaches out and touches him - actually, willingly, touches him, and it is not born of violence. It shocks Taehyung, for some reason. He jolts, and Namjoon, perhaps mistaking it for a flinch, takes his hand away from his neck until Taehyung leans back into it.
This time, Namjoon grips firmer.
“This what you want?” he asks again, eyes dilated, chin tilted back above Taehyung’s head. He blinks, water spraying off the alpha’s back and clinging to his eyelashes. Taehyung probably looks like he’s crying already.
Swallowing down salvia, Taehyung nods. “I do. I want your alpha co-” No other preamble, Namjoon cuts him off by shoving him down onto his knees, sliding about in the tub with little purchase, but all he can do is moan when Namjoon’s dick twitches directly into his face. Christ, he smells him already - salty, even in the water. Fuck, he wishes he could get knocked up now. He throbs between the legs, lighting want to his very core.
He has to reach down and sit on his own fingers for a moment to fill himself.
Namjoon laughs.
“I can smell you know,” he says lowly, taking himself in hand and pressing the head against Taehyung’s cheek, rubbing it back and forth across his face, and desperate, wanton, wanting, Taehyung parts his lips and chases it. The alpha laughs every time he fails to capture it with his mouth.
Whining, he sits down harder on his fingers and falls face first between Namjoon’s legs, aiming this time for the base, the knot, the true source of his freedom and the damnation of every omega. It’s only half inflated, more than Taehyung would expect for mere arousal, but this target is easier for him to get his mouth on, and when he does, so gently, he bears his tiny omega fangs down around it.
“You wouldn’t dare,” Namjoon says, sounding completely unbothered and unworried about the safety of his alphahood.
Taehyung applies the tiniest amount more of pressure, enough he feels some give in the skin, but then presses the flat bottom of his tongue up under the knot.
“Fuck,” Namjoon grunts, then slides both hands into Taehyung’s hair. It doesn’t even hurt.
He closes his eyes, and from there, it is a familiar story. The bob up and down, as much as he can take, pausing to work the head and give his jaw a break. At least there is already glide from the moisture of the shower and he runs a hand up and down everything else he can’t take - Taehyung is pretty sure there is no such thing as a person who can deepthroat all of an alpha cock. Those are just rumors and tall tales, told by no one more than alphas.
“Alpha,” he rasps, in between sucks and swallows. “Alpha, are you gonna come down my throat?”
Namjoon groans, one hand braced against the shower wall. “You’d like that, yeah. You want my cum that badly.”
Yes, he does. “Preferably in my cunt.”
Namjoon laughs at that, and even as a stranger, Taehyung recognizes it as a genuine laugh, like he is amused or even fond. “Too bad,” he chuckles, and the hand that brushes through his hair is a little softer this time. Taehyung flutters his eyelids close. If only.
He slurps down his cock until he comes down it, and then, like a cat with a canary, he can sit back with a dazed smile on his lips. “Don’t get too comfortable down there.” The alpha hauls him up from the shower floor. With a frown, he looks him over. Doesn’t he like what he sees? Taehyung curls his hands to his chest to hide.
“He branded you,” he says, fingers tracing the raised lines on Taehyung’s lower stomach. He laughs, cold, humorless. He works so hard to forget it’s there.
“Yeah.” Taehyung can’t stop laughing. “He branded me over my womb but when the time came to really put something there, he flipped out. Slipped me something to miscarry.”
Both of Namjoon’s hands tighten around him.
“He knew before I knew,” Taehyung whispers in a daze. “I didn’t even know yet… If I had…”
Behind them, the shower continues, just the quiet sound of water hitting Namjoon’s shoulders and the sides of the tub, and Taehyung is long past expecting any real source of comfort, his last known comforts of friendship with Park Jimin in high school before he was forced to drop out, but even with the tactile replication of a hug, or even the softness of a fond gaze, something in a steadfast way Namjoon continues to hold him feels the same.
“Anyway.” Taehyung clears his throat. “The best revenge, right?”
Namjoon silently turns them, rotating Taehyung under the warm water. He closes his eyes; the side of his head rests against something, and it’s something that moves. Breathes.
“Not only would he be forced to forfeit any claim on you, but it would be through the one thing he refused to give you.” The hand at his back moves - Taehyung realizes that he’s being washed. He hums in agreement.
“You’re clever for an alpha.”
“And you’re spiteful for an omega.”
Taehyung smiles. “Hell hath no fury.” He turns his head to more fully rest it against his pec. “Don’t worry. I’ll be far more nurturing when I’m a mother.”
“I’m sure you will,” he thinks he hears in response, but Taehyung is too foggy to focus, and a little too fanciful to trust his own hearing sometimes. He drifts, and when he regains full consciousness, he’s not only made his way back to the master bedroom, but he lies in a bed.
Where there was no bed before.
Taehyung curls up into a ball when Namjoon arrives, but he doesn’t move him, nor address him. Instead, he dumps a load of what looks like clothing to be folded on top of him, but rather - “Oh.” Taehyung sits up so quickly he feels dizzy.
“Clothing for you,” Namjoon comments. Taehyung holds up a very large, very baggy t-shirt that would function more as a dress on him. “Or… To nest with. Whatever.”
It clearly belongs to the alpha.
Not that Taehyung is opposed to wearing it.
And Taehyung does. Around their apartment, with nothing beneath it. The first night after the shower, Taehyung tossed and turned fitfully in bed, unsure of whether or not to easily accept this olive branch, but Namjoon eventually turns up, early morning hours, light already peeking through the window, to sit in a corner and turn his back to him, either sleeping or pretending.
His presence in the room immediately soothes him. He won’t be throwing Taehyung out of the bedroom then, and he has to wonder if Namjoon heard him not sleeping and decided to take pity on him after all, give him his presence to feel safe, or whatever it is that alphas think. The only fear Taehyung has of Namjoon is that he will make good on his threat to throw him out and lock up, and at this point, he’s been gone far too long for it to be anything but a death sentence if he shows back up on Changmin’s doorstep one way or another. Maybe had he turned back in the first twenty-four hours he could have lied well enough to save himself minus a new scar, but not now.
He’s been gone far too long.
And his heat approaches.
Changmin would know the date of it.
“I saw him nearby today,” Namjoon growls. He’s growling because Taehyung slowly reaches up for something (nothing) on the highest shelf in the kitchen cabinet, and as long as the shirt he’s wearing is, it ends right at his ass when he reaches up, all leg on display.
The alpha’s hand lashes out, thick thumb pushing into the meat of leg right under his ass, and Taehyung moans.
Namjoon’s grip around his leg tightens.
“You can wrap your fingers around my leg almost,” Taehyung wobbles, smiling, face tucked into the crook of his arm where the alpha won’t see.
When he lowers his arms, the shirt comes down around Namjoon’s hand, still tucked up under the clothing. He does not let go.
“You’re not special.”
Taehyung smiles. “Keep telling yourself that.”
Violently, urgently, loudly, Namjoon tears him away from the counter and throws him by the arm into the empty living room. He falls onto all fours, and immediately, Namjoon mounts him, throwing himself atop him and pressing Taehyung down with his chest. “We’re meant to be nude for this part,” he chokes out, squeezed fresh of his breath.
“But you are,” Namjoon replies, both hands skimming up his chest under the top and pulling his shirt up with it. He cups his hands around Taehyung’s breasts and growls, one tooth briefly snagging an earlobe. Taehyung freezes.
Then Namjoon rips the shirt clean off him in two.
He yelps as the alpha flips him over onto his back, a hard thud that he knows anyone around will hear. No preamble, Namjoon sticks a thumb down to his entrance, not entering, just resting there, as if gauging the size of his womb.
“Your heat,” he says, but then says nothing more. Taehyung wets around the finger, of course he does, impossible not to, but Namjoon sits back, thumb faintly glistening even in the low light, and retreats.
Taehyung pants on the floor.
What the fuck?
His chest pebbles with goosebumps and reddens in shame and embarrassment. Anger too.
If Namjoon won’t, then he will.
Taehyung fingers himself on the living room floor of a strange and estranged alpha, preheat pheromones all over the place, making only the most exaggerated and lewd noises he can, until he comes. Which - doesn’t take that long. It’s an open loop of feedback at this point, his hormones and Namjoon’s. His body is strung tight and poised for nothing but sexual gratification now.
Then he wipes his hand on the floor.
Sadly, Taehyung takes the ripped up shirt and adds it to the nest in bed. Namjoon moodily enters the apartment later the next day, nose flaring, but he says nothing of the size of the nest taking over the master bedroom.
He shuffles from the door into the spare bit of corner Taehyung left him and squats there overnight looking very much like a vengeful gargoyle, and the omega isn’t sure if he means to avenge his sacred space or avenge his alphahood by properly mounting him finally.
His insides hurt.
All Taehyung can do is crawl around on all four, naked as the day he was born, leaving slug trails of slick behind. Occasionally, even when he’s all alone, he stops to press down into a proper presentation, ass in the air, and it helps something, but not the pain deep in his womb. He crawls through rooms into the bathtub, only to feel the need to be somewhere smaller.
He hides under the kitchen sink in the empty bowels of a cabinet.
“Have you been driven mad already?” Namjoon asks, knocking on the door. “How do you fit?”
Taehyung growls, but just as suddenly as the door is pried clean off the hinges and thrown across the room. Namjoon drags him out by the ankle to redistribute him into his nest.
“Stay,” he says, arms crossed, body effectively blocking the doorway. Taehyung wilts down. Well. At least no one would get around him, or even see Taehyung around the alpha’s stupidly large body.
Taehyung drops down to present.
Namjoon huffs a laugh, turning to face the other direction and keep his back to such display.
Taehyung runs and lunges onto his back, and the two of them topple into the hall with a yelp. He can’t help himself, he has to placate the longing somewhere - Taehyung bites into the juncture of where neck meets back, well and away from where a proper mating bite would go, and nowhere near hard enough to scar, but Namjoon grunts, heavy stomached, a noise that Taehyung knows originates from his dick.
Sure enough, when he unceremoniously rips him down, Taehyung smirks at the front of his loose pants. Why does the alpha bother to wear such bottoms around him? He could either wear something more restricting and accurately deny the attraction, or he could comfortably wear nothing at all.
Taehyung knows which he would prefer.
The itch becomes too powerful to ignore, and with Namjoon no closer to mounting him, Taehyung decides desperate times call for desperate measures. He waits until Namjoon sits on the fire escape outside the window, smoking, to silently exit the front door and tiptoe down the hall. He doesn’t think he’ll make it far, but he doesn’t need to either. All he has to do is find an alpha - well, maybe not any alpha. The bigger, more salacious the alpha, the better, and Taehyung spied one who worked at the takeaway spot down the block, one who likes to hang out the back door in the alleyway when he isn’t busy and having sweat through any effect of blocking or monitoring his scent.
He looks like the kind of stereotypical stud, even if he’s never once wolf whistled or anything more like some of the others on the block, including betas and omegas. Taehyung approaches the door and knocks until he opens it, apron dirtied with what might be blood or sauce or anything, but he looks down at Taehyung and squints until the scent of preheat hits him hard, knees bowing and head rearing back. On instinct, he grabs one of Taehyung’s hands, because alphas aren’t meant to let omegas get away, but Taehyung only chose the most stubborn alpha in all of Seoul.
“Why are you here?” he growls, this nameless alpha. “Why are you out during your heat?”
“Preheat,” Taehyung grunts, because the wild scent of a new highly virile alpha at such close proximity makes him nauseous for a brief moment before his racing heartbeat reverses back into molasses, slower and slower, thud, thud, thud, each one heavier than the last. Hypnotizing, and it hypnotizes him to relax, unfurl his shoulders and offer up his neck for a peek of unmarked neck.
A raspy voice from within the kitchen screams, “Leave him! Drop him now, cut off your own hand if need be!” they warn. This alpha startles, a hard blink dissolving his tunneling vision on him, but he doesn’t let go. A furrow between his brows, then:
“He’s Kim Namjoon’s bitch! Let him go!” the faceless voice yells.
Despite that he was never holding him up, as soon as the alpha lets go, Taehyung drops to the dirty ground. He laughs in disbelief.
These men call him Kim Namjoon’s.
They know nothing of Changmin.
Taehyung has to touch the smile on his face. It feels like victory.
The arms that pick him up are steady, calm, not to mention silent. For all of the growling Namjoon does at him, he is silent in the face of another alpha, Taehyung’s limp and willing body between them hanging like a ragdoll in his arms, because Namjoon doesn’t need to growl. There is no threat to him here. The people here all know him, and apparently, know Taehyung by association.
“Promise me,” Taehyung pants. “Promise me! You’ll bitch me, or you’ll leave me here with someone who might!”
Namjoon chuckles darkly. He uses one hand to support his body and the other to scruff him. “You’ll get what you deserve.”
The door to the back kitchen closes. Namjoon smirks at him, squeezing his nape until he hangs completely limp. “You’ll spend your entire life running from one alpha to another,” he says, turning, walking leisurely back. “Alphas will try to make you stay.”
Taehyung gasps in his grip, eyes watering and throat clogged up in alpha stink; the first thing the alpha does when they’re back in the apartment is put Taehyung down in the nest then jam as much of his wrist gland under Taehyung’s nose and into his mouth. He chokes on it, teeth as numb and dumb as a newborn as he chews limply around the skin under his teeth.
The world rights itself when the alpha suddenly heaves him up onto his shoulder, face forced down into the scent gland there, as Namjoon relieves him of his little clothing. The way both of his hands can cover most of his body…
“Do you think you could fit the entirety of our pup in your hand?” he asks, delirious, heat shakes already gripping him.
“Our pup?” Namjoon growls, hand on his hip flexing. “You don’t want a pup with me.”
“I do!” he cries.
“You want a pup made up of my scent and name, nothing else.”
Taehyung won’t quibble; Namjoon is technically right. That’s why he came here, to him, but also - is it so wrong to let his thoughts run away from him? “You’ll do it though. You’ll do it now.” He means to sound confident. He knows at best it is whiny.
“I won’t leave you hurting,” he replies, so softly Taehyung strains his ears to catch it and can’t be sure they were ever real to begin with.
Taehyung slaps weakly at his chest. “Don’t be like that. You like me,” he says as petulantly as possible. “You would have left me out there with any alpha to take care of me if you didn’t.”
“No one else can give you what you need.” Namjoon removes his shirt, and Taehyung, who has seen all of Namjoon before, still nearly falls out of his lap at the sight, so happy and hormone addled that he hums dopily.
The thing about this heat with Namjoon is -
It shouldn’t last the way it does.
The purpose of heats is to conceive; if Taehyung had to speculate when looking back, they would have been successful within the first night. Ordinarily, heats break early if successful, but this heat lasts almost a full week.
There is simply no way it took that long for the seed to take.
Taehyung’s body simply didn’t want it to be over.
They brutalize the nest until it falls apart around them - literally. The simple bed lands on the floor after the first rough mounting, and continues to disintegrate into pieces of clothing and bedding strewn about with equal amounts of bodily fluids as they claw and tear at each other. One wall finally becomes decorated.
From there Taehyung tries to crawl places in the same way as before; for every few paces he makes it, he stops to present. By now he knows this is not Namjoon’s preferred position - the easiest way to rile him up is to face him, lean backwards, and stick out his belly a little. He’s an alpha like that. Not a presentation alpha, but a bare belly alpha. Did he know already, every time Taehyung stuck out his belly? Alpha instincts are near superstition level. Perhaps he did.
“You could bite me,” Taehyung pants, feverish, feet kicking behind him, squirming under the bulk of his body. “You could do it.”
“What happened to walking out of here with nothing but a tiny part of me, hm?” Namjoon bites plenty, just none so meaningful.
“You like me. You like me!” he chants, so sure of it. Namjoon would have broken his neck one of the times he scruffed him otherwise. One sure shake would have done it.
“I’ll eat you up, so sweet,” he says, thumb rubbing over his clit before he slides down to replace it with his mouth. He’s had his mouth everywhere, not just on Taehyung’s sex, but also in his ears and eyes and on his toes. He suckles on Taehyung’s fingers while they rest, knotted together. He spits in his hand to push away the hair on his face, and never so beautiful before in his life, Taehyung preens happily.
They fuck their way into the kitchen where Taehyung tries to root around for his pickled vegetables and homemade jams that alpha attempted to destroy, but this time, Namjoon swipes them angrily from his hand only to huff and handfeed him, dipping two thick fingers down into the jam in lewd imitation only to thrust them between the omega’s lips.
Taehyung sucks greedily.
Namjoon watches just as intently.
The heat lasts until the front door breaks in two; Taehyung cries out, immediately sheltered by the bulk of Namjoon’s back where he pushes him into the back corner of the living room, before roaring, striding on all four just a few paces across the space to launch himself at Jisung. Growling, the two tussle, rolling back and forth over the groaning floorboards while Taehyung darts out of the way.
If his opponent thinks full nudity will somehow slow or impede Namjoon, then Jisung is gravely mistaken. He swipes his switchblade at Namjoon’s dangling cock but it's a target proven difficult to acquire. Namjoon prefers less finesse to fighting, as also witnessed firsthand by Taehyung - rather than ever trying to take the weapon from Jisung, he prefers to ram face first into a now dazed opponent, then drop all his weight behind his knee on top of the other alpha’s clothed crotch. His fancy designer suit surely wasn’t made to protect him from that.
Once Jisung screams, incapacitated, Namjoon easily takes both of the alpha’s hands in his and heaves his arms backwards until they pop out of his shoulder.
It’s almost amusing the way Namjoon sits back, in all of his glory, while Jisung dangles around like a puppet with limp, lifeless arms only technically attached. They wave uselessly like white flags as he retreats.
“Changmin knew I would be in heat,” Taehyung murmurs. They were seen together only days ago.
Changmin knows for sure now exactly where and with whom Taehyung is if he didn’t before.
He sent Jisung because he didn’t want to deal with it. Will he come himself when his henchman returns in his present state? Or will the threat of violence be enough to stave him off for now?
His alpha stands, rumbling and growling, the front door entirely gone from the hinges and in two pieces on the ground. He paces back and forth angrily, enough that Taehyung’s heat just as suddenly and definitely breaks. He isn’t scared of Namjoon ordinarily, not even upon acquaintance, but another alpha just challenged him in the throes of a knot in the middle of a heat, their first heat together at that, and that does not put any alpha in the right mind.
“Alpha,” he says quietly, hands demurely raised in front of him. The way Namjoon’s face whips towards him, eyes steeled and shoulders bristled, Taehyung fights to remain in a neutral posture, just as exposed, and perhaps more defenseless than ever.
He very slowly and just as intentionally puts his hand on his belly. Namjoon’s eyes track the slow wave of motion downwards, growls never quieting, only intensifying.
He lunges, and Taehyung cries out of fear finally, falling back into the wall curled up tight in a ball, but all Namjoon does is pick him up like that, balled up in his two giant hands from where Taehyung refuses to unfurl. Clutched against his chest, Namjoon ushers him back to the bedroom, utterly destroyed to the same extent as the living room.
Dropping into a crouch, Namjoon sits Taehyung on top of a disgusting blanket that he insists on wrapping him in before leaving, and from the audible protests of the floor, Taehyung knows he paces in front of the open doorway.
Now he isn’t sure what to do; it seems unlikely Namjoon will come out of his rut-like mental phase until something snaps him out of it. Heats trigger it, regardless of rut status, and when a partner comes out of rut, so does the alpha.
Normally.
Namjoon does not appear to be coming down.
When Taehyung tries to peek out the bedroom, the resounding growl is so loud that it shakes the walls. “Alpha. Alpha, please.” Taehyung calls to him softly from the safety of the room. “I’m hungry. Alpha.”
Namjoon brings food and water - in fact, the food in his arms looks suspiciously new, but he knows the alpha has not left the front. Did someone bring them something? A neighbor in hopes of quelling the local angry god, perhaps, left food as an offering on their doorstep.
“Namjoon. Alpha. Come eat.” Taehyung saves a large part of the offering for him. Namjoon prowls. “How will you defend yourself or me if you don’t eat to keep your strength?”
Alphas do the hand feeding under normal circumstances, but like this, Namjoon eats from Taehyung’s hand. Gently, even with his alpha fangs fully extended. They graze his open palm where Taehyung cups a handful of rice.
His tongue laves.
It makes Taehyung uncomfortably wet again. Sighing, he enjoys the alpha shuffling on his knees to mount him right there and then. It’s still heat for one of them.
They fall asleep knotted together, and when Taehyung wakes, he feels it before he opens his eyes that Namjoon’s rut brain is done and gone. He feels it in the very air around them, but when he opens his eyes and looks at the alpha posturing in the corner like bygone days, he realizes all the anger from the day before remains.
And remains.
He barely speaks to Taehyung - which forces him to recognize that he felt borderline friendly before in the days of preheat. “Alpha.”
“Don’t fucking call me that!” he roars, throwing a hand into the wall to pry down a strip of it.
This home is ruined.
This is no place for Taehyung. Was it ever?
It is certainly no place for a child.
He waits, biding time the hardest pastime imaginable. He hides from the silent fury of Namjoon in the bathroom, never bothering to lock the door, but he hears the pacing in front of it. The pacing sounds less frantic or frenetic when Taehyung is out of his eyesight. If he’s close by, Namjoon becomes thunder.
Static hangs in the air between them. While he remains confident that Namjoon will not hurt him, he begins to doubt the alpha ever felt a morsel of interest in him. “Why are you so upset?” Taehyung asks aloud to an empty room. Did he always hate him? From the very beginning? Did Taehyung imagine all the times he felt the alpha holding himself back, even in a hard scruff, even when he ripped him away from himself?
Two weeks after his heat, Taehyung feels confident, but he knows he must be sure. It takes another long day of waiting to hear the telltale thud of a heavy body careening to the floor, paced to the point of exhaustion and passing out, before Taehyung tiptoes his way past the front door, still wide open, to find a ghost town of an building. Scarcely occupied, Taehyung encounters no one until he shuffles outside to the nearest corner store to buy chips and an early detection test. He uses the bathroom in the back for employees only, but the beta working the front looks between him and the test in his hand and shrugs when Taehyung asks for it.
Taehyung leaves it, positive test result plus side up, on Namjoon’s doorstep.
He walks away.
This part, Taehyung halfway planned for, as much as he could plan for anything, which was a lot, but a lot of thinking and dwelling did not ensure success. The funds that Taehyung put away are not exactly from clean sources, some of which he runs himself out of staches when he removes them from the lockers across the city. Drugs were always easier to come by than cash, or anything else of use to him.
Taehyung doesn’t have to like it. He just has to survive.
For him, and the pup.
It doesn’t take long to liquidate, just a few weeks of checking in and out of nameless love hotels listening to his neighbors cycle out or behave like they’re cycling out while Taehyung sleeps on top of his lifeline - a duffel bag with all of his worldly possessions. He’s only two months along when one of the front desk workers gives him a long look while he silently thrusts cash at him.
“You stink like milk.” He shakes his head. “Not good for the clientele. Sorry. Try the omega shelter three blocks down.”
More than taken aback, Taehyung doesn’t think straight when he does exactly what the man suggests. No words are necessary at the place - they take one look at him, unmated, unmarked, but apparently stinking of milk, and usher him through the doors to a room shared with two other omegas, one with two children of her own.
Taehyung falls asleep and wakes up with one of them curled around his back, the dam smiling at him with water in her eyes. When the pup nestles up to his flat teet to find it dry, he hands him over to the dam, breast pulled out and ready.
He finds Changmin waiting for him outside the shelter. “No alphas allowed,” Taehyung says woodenly, pointing at the sign above his head. His former lover, boss, most of all, captor, looks markedly older than he did a few months ago.
“You always were desperate to get bitched,” he sneers, lit cigarette in his hands falling to ashes. His eyes, sullen and darkly lined, bug out when they see him though.
“All it took was one try from him!” Taehyung hisses, one hand braced on the wall. There isn’t an alarm out here, he wishes there were, but there are surely security cameras.
Changmin laughs. “And where is he now? You’re standing on the doorstep of a fucking shelter, Taehyungie.”
“Don’t come any closer!” he shrieks, instinctively curling around his stomach. “I’m marked as his. You wouldn’t dare! Do you want to personally invite Kim Namjoon to your doorstep?”
Changmin freezes, mid stride, hand midair, as if scruffed.
“He’ll rip your goddamn arms off if you touch a hair on my head! Jisung at least kept his - you won’t be so lucky!” Taehyung slides his way down the exterior wall away from him.
“He doesn’t want you!” Changmin bellows; Taehyung winces. “If he did, he would have claimed you, or at the very least, kept you in a den!”
“I carry his pup, and that is more than any other mark, and you know it,” Taehyung hisses. “You think you’re the only alpha looking for me? Try it, I dare you! You’ll finally get to sit at the same table as all the legends - Choi Juyeon and Lee Jay and Kang Sunwoo. You’ll finally be just as good as them, buried wherever Kim Namjoon buried all the rest of them!”
Changmin growls, snapping his teeth at him, but Taehyung snaps right back, as frantic as his heart is, but for as nasty as he can be, bravery was never Changmin. His former alpha falters, actually flinches backwards when Taehyung gets close.
“Smell him! Do you smell him? I wear his fucking scent and I’ll aways wear a part of his scent! You’ll never have me again, so get fucking lost before he finds you loitering close to us!” Taehyung yells, loud enough his throat feels hoarse already, bile in the back of his throat and full of worry too for the innocent babe in his belly.
It’s all a lie, of course.
He left Kim Namjoon because Namjoon was never interested in him. He made that clear, made it abundantly clear in the anger and disdain radiating off his shoulders in the time post heat, like it was a repulsive fever dream to share a heat with him. Taehyung never feels the sting ease from his chest when he thinks of it; it looked like pure malice in his eyes and sounded like pure hatred in his footsteps as he paced the halls.
Changmin does not leave him, but he lets Taehyung walk away from him. For the first time ever, Taehyung is the one left standing and walking on his own two feet. He makes it down the block and around the corner before he sobs, thinking of how close he came to being claimed by Changmin and how badly he wanted to be claimed by someone he knew for a scant few weeks.
It’s not a lie to think of himself as claimed now though. It’s what he tells himself. Alpha paternity rights are near ironclad in most countries. If he ever falls in love and mates with another, Namjoon will always hold superiority over not just the pup, but Taehyung too, because he is the sire of Taehyung’s only pup. Even if he had a second with someone else, Namjoon would be first in rights to claim him and all he has.
Everything has a price.
Taehyung doesn’t have to like it or agree with it, but he has to use the world’s abysmal view of omegas to his advantage somehow.
At four months, Taehyung leaves the city to settle into the country, not far from where his sire grew up. His sire passed when he was still a toddler, and perhaps they are only tall tales that his sire was a gentle alpha, but Taehyung hopes the people there will be gentle enough with him. He isn’t quite showing when he rents out a room above an elderly couple’s seaside souvenir and corner store, but they feed him one meal most days, and on the others, Taehyung tries to feed them too.
He is decidedly showing when he sees him again.
“You look good with a tan,” Taehyung comments dryly. “Different, but good.”
Namjoon huffs, air moving through his broad shoulders and down his slack arms, hands tucked into the pockets of his baggy casual style pants. His hair hangs in his eyes, lank and in need of a wash. His entire self is in need of a wash - he smells too much like himself, or perhaps that is the nose of an expectant mother, especially an expectant mother mourning the loss of the alpha who pupped them.
But, he’s here.
“I didn’t expect to see you again,” he whispers. It’s strange, the two of them, standing out in the open. Even the few times they ventured outside Namjoon’s den in the city, it all felt so stifled. Claustrophobic. The sky was still a roof Taehyung lived under, and it somehow belonged to Namjoon.
Here, they stand under ocean water raining softly on the alpha’s frowning face. “Do you want to know, or do you want to always guess?” he asks.
Taehyung looks down at where his feet should be. “Imagination is a gift.”
Namjoon nods. “I won’t tell you then.” He eyes him, dare Taehyung say, eagerly. Or at the very least, he eyes his belly so.
He circles him, like one of the gulls on the beach looking for their next meal. Kim Namjoon was always a sight to behold, but out here, in the real world, one far from the city life they both came from, he is beautiful, scar tissue and beastly gait.
He is a sight for sore eyes, somehow.
“You came for me.”
“You’re mine.” The snarl sounds familiar, at least. Taehyung laughs. “That pup is mine. That makes you mine.”
“You could have just asked me to stay.” Taehyung crosses his arms over his bump, swollen enough to rest bowls of jajangmyeon on.
Namjoon stands to rest in moody silence. “You left.”
“You acted like you couldn’t stand my presence.”
Namjoon sneers, lip caught over one fang, riled enough they protrude. “You told me I was nothing but a sperm donor.”
“What?” Taehyung raises an eyebrow. The maternity dress he dons for the day is older than him, handed down and gifted to him from the ajumeoni. The rain comes with little gusts, enough to ruffle the hem.
He didn’t feel particularly beautiful in it until now.
“Are you ready to confess your interest in me now?”
“There is nothing to confess!” Namjoon roars. “You’re mine!”
Taehyung laughs harder this time. It comes from the pit of his stomach, from everything from amusement to disdain to wonderful realization.
Namjoon will never be more than the alpha he wandered into the slums to meet, but neither will Taehyung ever be more than the omega who laid himself out prostrate and defenseless long enough for the brutality of alpha to claim him, in the only real way that matters. This is not an alpha who will tuck him into bed with their pup next to him and kiss them gently goodnight. He will not tell Taehyung he loves him.
But he will provide.
“I want a safe place to raise the pup. Our pup,” Taehyung amends, rubbing his bump while Namjoon growls. The omega seizes one of the alpha’s hands to press to the thickest part of him now. If they’re lucky, they’ll get a little kick sometime soon. “I want a place that is entirely my own to call home.” He’s never had that before.
Namjoon looks for a long time at their hands, and when he finally looks up, he asks: “Where?”
So Taehyung lives in his alpha’s den. It’s a little cottage not far from the sea, much more open and light than the one they met in. It is far from the city, closer to where he was born, but somewhere in between everything they knew or had before. For all the years he spent in fear of harm and anger from one alpha, he finds himself linked to an eerily frightening titan of an alpha.
But Taehyung knows no fear.
Well.
Not like that.
He knows only trepidation after childish giggles, a mischievous threat from their toddling babe, and a low answering growl from a father stalking close by behind them. Namjoon pretends to use his growls as a warning, but his hands stay open to catch their son before he can ever harm himself.
Taehyung could ask for no more.
Taehyung asks for more.