Chapter Text
“Did you and Dad fight again?” asks Saifha, coming into Phayu's room without knocking.
“Knock next time, asshole,” growls Phayu, looking up from his homework,
“I’ll think about it if you answer my question,” retorts Saifha.
“We haven’t today,” replies Phayu, putting his pencil down and focusing on his brother.
“Are you sure?” asks Saifha, closing the door as he moves further into Phayu’s room.
“I think I’d remember.” When he and his alpha father fight it’s not easy to forget. There is screaming and shouting, sometimes one or both of them throws something at the other, which results in his omega father stepping in to tell them to both calm down.
“Then why is he snapping at everyone, including Pa?”
“No idea, go ask him.”
“I don’t have a death wish, and he only gets this grumpy when his favorite protégé and him fight.”
“He gets snappy whenever things don’t go his way, and I’m not his favorite. If I was his favorite, he wouldn’t be such an asshole about me wanting to dual major,” Phayu sighs, thinking of how he made the mistake of telling his alpha father that not only was he not going to pursue business like he had and that instead Phayu is going to load his plate by majoring in both mechanics and architecture. His dad had said some choice words and Phayu had certainly said them back, but the argument hadn’t gone beyond words this time.
“Pa said that he came home to find dad like that, so…”
“I didn’t say anything to the man, we haven’t spoken since I told him.”
“Maybe that's the issue, he wants you to talk to him?”
“You can go talk to him,” suggests Phayu, picking up his pencil to finish up the math he had been doing when Sahifa came in.
“I spoke with him this morning, it’s your turn.”
“No.”
“I’ll tell Pa about you sneaking out to go to Leon’s party.”
“If memory serves me correctly, you snuck out with me.”
“Then I’ll tell Pa about you beating the shit out of Tor.”
“I think Pa will be proud to know I was defending you.”
“Him belittling me because I’m a beta does not mean you needed to wail on him until Prapai pulled you off.”
“He called you an alpha whore.”
“Yeah he was an ass with his words, you broke his nose.”
“He deserved it.”
“I agree, but we both know Pa will be oh so disappointed with you. Dad is the one who would be proud.”
Fuck, Saifha’s right. Their alpha father is the one who would smile at hearing Phayu protecting his brother, their omega father will lecture him about using words to resolve issues. Sometimes words fail and actions speak louder.
“Fine, I’ll go talk to Dad, but it’s your fault if we kill each other.”
“If you do then Pa and I will mourn you both dearly,” Sahifa sarcastically assures him. It’s moments like these that make Phayu wonder how anyone could see his brother interact with him, or even their friends, and think Saifha is using them.
Phayu finds their alpha father cooking, clearly angry about something if the way he’s cutting into the potatoes is any indication. Beyond that his normal scent of gunpowder and earth is replaced with a smell that makes Phayu think for a moment the house is burning down.
It’s very confusing considering whatever he’s making does smell appetizing.
“Did the potatoes insult you or something?” Phayu asks, approaching the kitchen counter. His alpha father looks up at him, his eyes sharper than normal and his lips pursed in anger. For a moment Phayu wonders if it really is him who’s the cause, but he sees his dad’s face soften just a hair.
“Oh, we’re talking now?” he asks.
“The house smells like it’s on fire and everyone else is afraid of you,” retorts Phayu, his dad chuckles in response.
“Is that why I haven’t seen Saifha all day?”
“Probably, I’d guess Pa has also been mostly avoiding you too.”
“Your Pa is used to me being angry,” says his dad with an eyebrow wiggle that makes Phayu gag. He and Saifha once accidentally went to their fathers’ hidden room and it left mental scars on both of them.
“Ew, don’t need to know that,” says Phayu, pushing away from the counter, “You can just continue to stew until you explode.”
His dad laughs, which surprises Phayu given the burning scent.
“Your Pa already thinks I’m emotionally stunted, me dying from not talking things out would vindicate him.”
“I can get you a therapist’s number if you’d like, or I can go fetch Pa for you to talk it out with.”
“Right now, I’m going to take some anger out on cutting food.” Phayu watches has his dad stabs into another potato.
“You do that, I’m going to go get Pa for you,” says Phayu, pushing off the counter and heading off to find his omega father. He finds him finishing up a work out in their home gym, “Dad needs you to listen to him vent.”
“I already tried that, he nearly suffocated me with his scent.”
“But he’s ready to talk now,” assures Phayu.
“Did he say that?”
“He said that you’d be vindicated if he died from bottled up emotions and he didn’t say no when I said I was going to go get you for him,” explains Phayu.
“I don’t know what’s more shocking, you and your dad talking again or your father agreeing to talk about his emotions,” says his Pa with a fake shock on his face.
“I only spoke with him because he was scaring Saifha,” says Phayu, a bit delighted to see the concern on his Pa’s face. Both his parents are protective of their kids, but he knows that his Pa worries about Saifha being the only beta in the home. Betas don’t have scent glands, but that doesn’t spare them from dealing with the scents of their family or from anyone with an unfiltered scent out in the world. Alpha’s in particular have strong scents, marking everything with it if they don’t have an omega mark or scent blockers. Both their parents are marked, but Phayu and Saifha are their kids, they still suffer with their scents. Suffer might be the wrong word, at least in the case of their Pa, his scent is lavender mixed with honey.
How their fathers found each other and thought their smells mixed well is beyond Phayu.
“Can you take over whatever he’s making?” asks his pa and he nods in agreement, “I’ll go pull him away, you air out the house and finish making dinner.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
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Rain frowns at the box his mom put on his bed, rereading her note hoping he’d misread it.
Raindrop,
I know you want to pretend that everything is fine, and I do understand my love, however your pheromones have become more pungent, which means your first heat will be here soon. This box will have all you need to get through this. I reached out to your school to let them know you’ll be out for a while. Starting tomorrow I’ll be off from my work as long as you need me.
I love you, Mom
He hadn’t misread, but he still hopes that his parents and the doctors are wrong. He’s not an omega, just a plain old beta. He doesn’t want to be an omega, it’ll just be too much work. He already forgets to take his ADHD medication all the time, so adding scent blockers, heat suppressants, and birth control will just be like a lot for him. Honestly he’d rather just be a beta and not have to deal with any of this.
He opens the box and his cheeks start to flush at the contents. His mom most likely just bought him a standard heat kit, but still it’s weird to get sex toys from your mom. Included in the box are a few blankets that smell like his parents and safety. There are extra pillows on his bed as well.
Rain looks around his room, assessing the best place to put the pillows and blankets. He’s too lazy to move his work table or anything else in his room, so he decides to make his bed work. He spends almost 20 minutes getting his bed just so and it’s once he’s done he realizes he’s nested. Which is just another tell tell sign he’s getting closer to heat, only omegas who feel safe and are getting close to their heat nest, at least that’s what his sex education instructions advised his class.
Rain takes a deep breath, trying to remember everything his instructors said omegas went through with their heat.
He mostly remembers the girl a few rows ahead of him had pigtails. It had made him think of Wednesday Adams. He then thought about Christina Richi, then he thought about how she was in Casper. Could ghosts really be friendly? Isn’t the house down the street haunted? Could he go there and talk to the ghosts? Could they tell him his future or would they kill him? What is death like? Would he become a ghost? If he was a ghost he wouldn’t hurt people, just scare shitty people when they deserve it.
Rain looks around his room, trying to remember what he is supposed to be doing.
He picks up his mother’s note and sighs. That’s right his heat is coming and he needs to finish getting prepared for it. He knows his mother is going to worry, that’s why she gave him the heat kit and the blankets that smell mostly like her, though he does smell his father faintly. Either way, their scents make him feel safe during a fairly scary time.
He reminds himself he just needs to get through this one and then he won’t ever have to go through another. After this first one his body will be set up to finish developing and he can go on the best suppressants on the market, his father will make sure of it.
His heat arrives early the next day and it’s awful. He didn’t know one’s skin could burn so hot that nothing he had access to could cool it. He hates every second of it. Once it’s over his parents take him to the doctor. The doctor delivers news that angers his father, who’s desperate for Rain to be ‘normal’.
Between Rain’s ADHD medicine and an imbalance in his hormones, Rain can’t go on the top tier suppressant that would halt his heats. If he uses the suppressants his father wants he’ll never have children and his ADHD would become harder to treat as well. His father tries to insist on him taking them, saying that he doesn’t want people to know his only son is an omega.
Rain’s mother, however, refused to let his father have his way. Rain has never seen his mother this angry, she screams about how it’s unfair for Rain’s choice to have children one day be ripped away from him. She screams at his father about how there is nothing wrong with Rain being an omega. She screams that if Rain’s father forces Rain to take the high tier suppressants she will divorce him and make sure that everyone would know how awful of a man he is.
Ultimately Rain went on a mid tier suppressant that made his heats more like a high fever and didn’t have any longer term side effects like the higher ones.
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He’s lost, so lost.
Rain is supposed to meet Sky outside the architecture building to ensure Rain doesn’t get lost. Yet here Rain is looking at what he thought was the architecture building, but now he’s seeing a sign indicating it might be the engineering building. Rain looks around, he’s positive he followed Sky’s directions.
He’d met Sky during the entrance exam and they’d just clicked as friends. Sky teases him, but he doesn’t talk down to Rain. Sky seems to already understand that Rain sometimes just needs more time to process information since his brain has already moved on or is stuck on something from before.
Rain takes another look around, hoping that the architecture building will have suddenly appeared, but alas it hasn’t. Rain sighs and heads back to his car, maybe if he starts over he’ll find the building before Sky calls him and teases him for getting lost. He did get here earlier then he needed to just in case he got lost. He can admit that directions are not his strong suit, especially if they’re of a new place or they’re not written out for him to see.
He pulls up his one once he’s at his car, reopening Sky’s messages and scrolling to the directions Sky kindly texted him.
SKY : From the parking lot go west
Rain pulls up the compass on his phone and heads west, so far he’s going the same way as before.
SKY : Once you are out of the parking lot, head northeast until you get to the dead looking tree
Rain switches back to his compass app to ensure he heads the right direction. He triple checks, every few steps, while still looking for a dead looking tree. Rain assumes it will be black and sickly looking, maybe it would have nothing but nakes branches. But he’s yet to see a tree that matches that description.
This is where Rain got confused last time too. Since he didn’t see any dead trees he kept walking until he got to the engineering building, so he shouldn’t just keep walking, but what else should he do? Rain looks at all the trees near his path, one of them has to be it, but they all look fine to him.
“Are you lost?” asks a female voice to his right. Rain turns to look at who he thinks is possibly the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. She’s got a concerned look on her face and Rain catches the faintest waft of strawberries. Rain loves strawberries.
“I am, I’m trying to find the architecture building,” he says.
“Then you’re in luck, I’m heading that way right now,” says the beauty, “We can walk together if you’re okay with that.”
“Yes!” says Rain, maybe a bit too excitedly. The beauty smiles at him, “I’m Rain.”
“It’s nice to meet you Rain, I’m Ple,” says Ple. They walk in silence for a bit and Rain can’t think of what to ask her, well he can think of thousands of things to ask Ple, but he doesn’t want to scare her off, “So are you in architecture or are you just meeting someone there?”
“Both, I’m meeting my friend, Sky, but we’re also both architecture students,” Rain says, excited that Ple initiated the conversation. She’s beautiful, smells good, and kind to him. Could she be more perfect? “What about you, why are you heading there?”
“I’m also in architecture,” she says. For a moment Rain thinks about how cool it would be to work at the same firm with your partner and how that would mean he would almost always have someone to eat with, to bounce ideas off of, and the commuting would be easy as well.
“That’s cool, you can like hang out with Sky and I if you want. Sky’s really cool,” Rain says, making a mental note to tell Sky about his new blossoming crush on Ple to avoid any crush overlap.
“What do you and Sky do for fun?” asks Ple.
“We talk, we play video games, we read manga, and we watch TV,” lists Rain, trying to think of anything he might have missed. Sky is easy to spend time with and he doesn’t get upset when Rain makes a mistake during multiplayer. In fact Rain hasn’t seen Sky too upset with him in the few months they’ve become best friends. There was maybe one time when Rain said something really dumb, what Rain doesn’t recall, that made Sky upset with him. Sometimes words fall out of Rain’s mouth before he puts them together correctly. Rain of course apologized to Sky and he had clarified whatever his intent had been, which made his friend less annoyed.
“I don’t know much about manga, but I like playing video games,” says Ple and Rain’s heart swoons. To him it sounds like Ple is agreeing to hang out with him, which means his foot might just be in the door. He can already see Ple winning games for him when he gets stuck, him showing her his favorite mangas, watching whatever she wants on TV.
“I was just about to call you,” says Sky as Rain approaches.
“Sorry, I couldn’t find the dead looking tree, but luckilly I found Ple and she got me here,” says Rain, motioning to Ple. Sky gives her greetings, before turning to look at Rain with a confused face.
“Dead looking tree?” asks Sky, his eyebrow raised.
“That’s what your text said,” says Rain, pulling his phone out again and showing to Sky, “Head northeast until you get to the dead looking tree.”
“Oh… sorry that was a typo, I meant the red looking tree,” says Sky.
“I didn’t see any red trees either,” says Rain, trying to think of if he’d just missed one like that. He hadn’t been looking for one and if it was just like a little red he probably wouldn’t have noticed.
“After class I can show you the tree,” sighs Sky, before turning to Ple with another polite smile, “Thank you for helping my friend, I’m Sky.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” says Ple with a bright smile that Rain thinks he could stare at forever.
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Phayu’s trained eyes can pick out the signs of a tire about to pop from a mile away. So he keeps an eye on black BMW not too far ahead of him. He’d noticed that it was leaning a bit concernedly when it pulled out ahead of him at the last stop light. He’s not following them, if their paths differ, then they differ, but he is going to keep an aware eye on them, ready to help if they cause an accident with a popped tire.
Luckily for them, their paths don’t differ and when their tire does pop he finds them safely on the side of the road.
The driver looks to be panicking and unsure of what to do when he pulls up to their window to help. He knocks on the window to get their attention and tries to motion to the tire, but with the rain beating down on his helmet and their window makes the communication nearly a lost cause. Phayu lifts the shield on his helmet to better see the driver and the younger boy rolls his window down.
Phayu smells sagebrush wafting from the car, it’s pleasant.
“Nong, turn on your hazard lights, I’ll check your tires for you,” Phayu offers, feeling bad that this younger boy might be stuck.
“Really, Phi?” asks the boy, his eyes wide and grateful. Something about the boy and his scent makes Phayu want to help him even more.
“Quickly,” he orders and he’s thankful for the helmet hiding his lips when he finds himself smiling at how quickly the boy follows his orders. He parks his bike, out of the way but still easily in both his and the boy’s line of sight. He then gets to work on the tire. It’s totally blown and he’ll need to put the boy’s spare on. He moves back to the boy's window, “Can you pop your trunk so I can get your spare tire out.”
The boy listens and he begins the process of changing the tire. He’s in the middle of loosening the bolts before he jacks the car when he stops feeling the rain on himself. He looks up and the boy is standing next to him, sopping wet with an open umbrella.
“Nong, go wait in the car, it’s pouring. I’ll take care of this myself,” he assures the boy standing over him.
“Although I can’t help you change the tire, I can hold the umbrella so you don’t get wet,” offers the boy with the cutest smile. He stares at the boy, surprised and touched with his actions. He’s never had anyone risk getting sick to prevent him from getting sick, “Phi, do you have anything else I can help you with?”
So cute. Phayu picks his helmet off the spare he’d placed next to him and holds it up to the boy.
“Here, hold this for me.” The boy takes his helmet and he continues the tire change.
“Thank you, Phi. Without your help, I don’t know what I would have done,” says the boy as he finishes up the tire change.
“If you’re driving, you have to know how to do this. Don’t just drive,” he lectures, moving to put the popped tire in the trunk. He’s a bit surprised when the boy follows him with the umbrella, but he’s appreciative, “So next time you have a problem, you can fix it yourself.”
The boy nods and Phayu takes in his face; he’s cute and looks so innocent. Between how polite the boy is and how cute his face is, he’s just Phayu’s type.
“Alright, it’s done,” Phayu says, closing the trunk. He’s not sure why he wants the boy to see and know his face, but he pulls his wind mask down. He’s pleased with the boy’s reaction, his mouth hangs open and his eyes roam over Phayu’s face. The boy nearly drops the umbrella and his shocked ‘oh’ reminds Phayu that he can’t stay here and stare at this cutie forever, “My helmet.”
The boy looks confused before he looks down at his hands and sees the helmet. The boy offers it back and Phayu makes a point of grazing his gloved hand on the boy’s, letting it linger. He needs to ask for this boy’s name and get his number. He can use the garage as an excuse, the boy’s spare tire needs to be replaced with a new tire. An easy in, for sure.
“You’re so damn handsome!” the boy declares, causing Phayu’s jaw to drop just a bit in surprise. This kid is bold and Phayu likes it, “No, I mean…”
Oh he’s embarrassed.
“Thank you for the compliment,” says Phayu, looking the boy up and down. He’s soaked and Phayu can make out his whole physique through his clothes. The boy is lean and a bit small, but still Phayu can see the faintest indication of muscles on the boy. He lifts his helmet up, “May I take this back?”
The boy feverishly nods in approval.
“Next time, don’t get your tire blown carelessly. Also, you should get going. It’s pouring, you’ll get sick,” he lectures. The boy nods in understanding, “Go on quickly, I’m leaving too.”
“Yes! Yes, thank you!” says the boy as he moves back to his car, waving excitedly, as Phayu watches him get into his car. He thinks about asking for his name and number, but he’s afraid if he keeps the boy here any longer he’ll get sick. The boy getting sick feels worse than missing out on being able to speak to him again. He doesn’t leave the side of the road until he sees the boy drive away. He does feel a bit regretful in not getting the boy’s information, but it’s probably for the best. The boy looked young and he might still be a minor for all Pahyu knows.
A few weeks later the incoming freshman’s photos are sent in the alumni group chat Phayu’s in. He looks through the photos until he sees a familiar face. He smiles looking at the boy’s laughing face, he’s still as cute as he had been on the side of the road. Phayu’s wheels start turning, thinking of how he can trap the boy, make him his. He almost feels bad for the boy.
Poor Rain has no idea of the storm heading his way.