Archive of Our Own

The stone, cave walls were adorned by red paints made of fruits and herbs, with figures that looked nowhere near humane. Creatures on four legs, with fur painted by the thinest of sewn brushes done rough around the edges from years of erosion. Generations down generations, the fingerprints of ancestors last on the walls of Seonghwa’s nesting haven. He stared at them sometimes, traced nimble and smooth fingers along the lines of spears, bow and arrows, ravaging beats feeding on prey.

A story always came to life when he did this, when his fingers brushed against the stilled surface of the cave before reaching the crevices of carvings, he could feel the tales told beneath the pads of his fingertips. It allowed him to wonder what war was like, although sometimes, those tales were too gruesome for his liking. His fingers would trail too far left, he would read more than he should have when the engraving of a headless wolf would sink into the prints and lines swirling on his skin, and he’d pull away like a yelping pup with a burn.

These carvings were beautiful ones, as much as they gave him nightmares as a young. The history of them rushed in his bloodstream down the line of his ancestry, and he found it funny, when he thought about it, how he used to go to rest beneath his furs and wools as a pup with a heavy heart, saddened at the thought of his pack ever going to battle like the ones told on the walls of his cave.

That was the first sign and symbolism, perhaps. Pups his age were always lively and brave, wrestling in the woods and playing predator and prey, chasing each other down and pretending to claw at one another with bared fangs. Seonghwa had cried when a young alpha bared his fangs at him moons ago; a year later, the heir was pronounced an omega.

The pack’s prophet admitted to having known before Seonghwa himself did, but the poor old lady had been afraid to tell his father, because full blood and bred pups were never omegas, heirs were never omegas, and Seonghwa was an the only pup his parents bred before his mother left. His mother was the first one to smell it on him, washing him up in their reserved river bounds when she had assured him that he did not need to steal berries from the courthouse, and that he could have just asked if he’d wanted them. Seonghwa was never a thief; and his mother had a furrow between her eyebrows when he told her that he had not taken any berries.

”I can smell them on you, my darling. Fresh raspberries and blackberry, it is far too sweet for any wolf to miss.” She had told him, but when even after his bathing he was scented of woodland berries, only had his mother understood the reason.

He was not scented of maple wood and dry oak, nor the outside breeze upon the rustling of evergreen. He was not treated the same by the young pups he hung around anymore, and his uncles were more aggressive when it came to keeping him under their protection. He was no longer told that he’d grow to defeat the most savage of wolves in battle, because never once was the young omega caught with a spear in his hand bloodied with that of his own. He had become someone to differ, a wolf worth protecting. And, Seonghwa could protect himself just fine; but his will to kill to do it was slim, and he would rather die with his head brought forth on a stick than bring back another’s.

He was a lot like his mother, his father told him. She lived on within him, the elders swore. And sometimes, Seonghwa could feel her howling deep down in his gut. He could hear her sing him to sleep on restless nights, and he could feel her rage when he was treated less of his worth. The pack had many faces, many wolves that would beat a threat bare to a pulse, but the most frightening of scowls were the ones of the nurturers with tender and molten hearts.

Under, over, left and through, twist. Under, over, left and through, twist. The pattern was embedded into the memory of Seonghwa’s fingers, yarn inches thick threaded through the beads wilder than bursting colors of a twisting kaleidoscope, with deep reds and oranges that would fade into a lively, blossoming green between browns and gingers. With the prettiest of shaven teeth, the smallest of tusks and horns from the gentle beasts who fought until their last bated breaths.

Kneeling on cloth of a wild leopard blanketed above the thick fur of a black bear, the fire crackling in the center of his safe haven casted a golden glow upon the paintings on the walls, and the steady movement of his hands that threaded together a neckpiece he had begun with months ago.

His skin, smooth and satin, was tan and honeyed within that cave, silence so easy and warm as he sat back on his calves in a thin shirt made of wool and dark brown pants that went too far past the ankles for many of his pack members. Yet they hiked up a few inches beneath his knees, and the joints above his feet were glowing with mustard yellow and forest green, the blood of deer and feathers of fierce eagles, traditional ankle pieces sown by his own hands, and gifted by the young girls he taught to thread pieces as gorgeous as his. Tough skin shaven from a hunted gazelle wrapped around the sore places of his bare feet, a guard against what his callouses couldn’t protect him from when he was not turned as his wolf.

Feathers and wooden beads clanked together from the braids of his black hair, never tangled or knotted. A fury of night ran down his neck until he tied it back in a loose bun, a few rogue strands tickling his skin as he furrowed when his hands would move faster than his mind, and he’d twisted the yarn too many times, or he’d gone through and right instead of left, west instead of east. He huffed through his nose, sharp nails picking at the tightly bound threading where he did not make place for the final tusk when he was supposed to. His revision was quick, and he was not slow when undoing the minor mistake. But, when he reached over, his fingers brushed against an empty bowl of smooth wood.

His eyes sharpened as they flickered down to his left, tattering the stone floors all around him. The haven was a nest, full of pretty vines and forever living flowers, with the warmest and fuzziest of cloths, snake skin attached across surfaces and skulls of defeated enemies that were gifted to him when his pack would return from battles; a sign of their devotion and loyalty. The furnace was nothing less of warm and fulfilling, his bed like a field of gentle moss and the lightest fog. His tables were carved of wood and nailed together, glazed and adorned with beautiful minerals and sapphires, rubies and emeralds, with crystals imbedded in the walls as a manifestation of prosperity to last him the whole of his lifetime.

And in that cozied, safe cave with burning incense, where he sat on the floor with his eyes trailing along the neckpiece he had sweat and stressed over, Seonghwa had remembered that he had no more tusks. He remembered with each one that he took from the bowl, telling himself to go get more after the one he had embedded, until the final one lie within his palm, and alas he had forgotten. It was like waking up and telling yourself just a moment longer of sleep, a few more instances of hiding away from the daylight in favor of staying in the wonder of your own head; a sleep that could not be replicated by any man made thing.

This was freedom, to Seonghwa. Sitting there on his floor, with the quietly crackling fireplace and the glow of fire reflecting in the lights of his glass pottery like an underwater sea of orange, he got lost in threads and beads and vibrant feathers of the most beautiful of birds. So lost that, he had forgotten to do something as simple as retrieve more tusks from the markets. He could have called for someone else to do the task for him, really, with a calm smile and genuine eyes, asking for a supply from the nearest salesman. But, he needed to get out of his hiding place every once in awhile anyway, this territory that he did not wish for just anyone to enter.

He tended to get too caught up, the faint shadows from behind his curtains fading away with the sun, with hours of another day gone by within the blink of an eye. Yet, it seemed that they were all going so slow simultaneously, molding and squashing together like the wet clay he would use to make pottery, getting his hands messy and his apron covered from him subconsciously wiping his palms on the fabric. Time was a warp when you were left waiting and staring out onto another day ahead. He cherished and made well of the ones he currently presented in, of course, but anyone could get impatient when it came to the pulsing anxiety of doubt.

He could get impatient when waiting for the hounds of his pack to return from battle, and he could get impatient when waiting for the alpha that was his to stand before him, safe and well. There was no way of telling where the pack was when they left the boundaries, and there was nothing to rely on but instinct and guttural awareness.

He could get stuck in that loop too easily, like a dumb trap set out by hunters: obvious and ineffective, though somehow, there was always a paw that would manage to be caught. Seonghwa was wise and calm in the soul, he was mature and someone that leading figures of his pack admired, whether that meant mothers with newborn pups, or war greedy wolves that he hardly wished to socialize with. But, still his peace was disturbed with worry when the estimated time of arrival announced by his father was pushing far too close, without a sight of the troops near.

So, he needed a check in with reality to numb that paranoia. When his inner wolf would mourn something that was only temporarily lost, and his senses would drive him over the edge while trying to find the one soothing feeling brought to him by the smell of smokey wood, burning and grilling fresh meat. It was a smell that was so distant, even when it was close. So for it to be far, was for it not to be at all.

But, that was difficult to push to the rural of his head when it lingered on the most unpredictable of clothes, or when he’d turn a certain direction and catch a moment of it, like a butterfly in the winter. So, when he did stand from that spot he’d been encircled in for the past various hours, his limbs ached some as he prepared to get more of his so sworn tusks. The warmth of the fire glazed over his back as he turned to retrieve his coat, black and stark with few white furs at the tips of noir, like his natural fur. And when he pulled the hood over his head, that wispy moment of smoke came over him, before it was gone to be returned when he would least expect it.

His shoulders fell and his eyes eased closed at the scent, lulling him to rest instantaneously, before he was pulled back out of that headspace it had thrown him into the midst of. Short, dark brown hair, cold hazelnut eyes and a cocky grin, and smokey firewood.

Seonghwa followed through, gathering a bag to sling over his shoulder, crocheted by his mother for collecting goods from the markets or the fruit trees they prospered. He breathed slow and moved calm, reaching up and brushing his fingers over the haven walls until he came in contact with the curtain hung at the entrance of his cave, beaded with beige cloth beneath that he pushed aside with a final glance over his shoulder.

The trail was an easy one, and as he made his way down the path of grey stone, he could look out onto the territory of his pack, a hurdle of wolves with caves to each small family within, and openings that led further into the forest for playful pups and blossoming markets where the wolves loved to grow and sell goods, and huts made for the elders’ morning meetings. As he moved further down, his soles meeting solid ground, a soccer ball made of leather rolled up to his feet. He tilted his head to the side, raising his eyebrows with a gentle smile when he looked up slowly; four little pups stared at him with saucer eyes full of stars.

One of the pups, a girl who loved to roughhouse and get twigs stuck in her hair jumped up and down, bouncing on the balls of her feet as she grinned, sharp canines on display that would make any premature pup jealous. “Make a goal, uncle!” She called out, pointing to the netted goal attached by two trees and strong sticks, the ones pups were supposed to keep for playing fetch. But Seonghwa was good at keeping secrets, and with a fond little smile, he hummed to himself and took a few steps backward.

The pups moved out of the way, holding their hands to their chests in anticipation. Seonghwa narrowed his eyes, with the target before him like the cherry on a fruitcake, and swung. With snapping heads wondering where the ball would go, the pups watched with those glowing eyes, and they howled and tackled each other when the goal made in. The girl raced toward him, her own balance hardly able to keep up with her as she latched onto Seonghwa’s leg, sharp nails seeking for grip. “See, I told you he’s the best at playing! He’s the one who taught me, right uncle?” She squealed with something so proud in her eyes, it made him melt with adoration.

”Of course, my dear Youngha.” His head lulled down to peer at her with the tenderest closed mouthed smile, his eyes chocolatey brown and his voice like warm brewed soup. Reaching down, his long arms outstretched to hook beneath the girls armpits. He winced momentarily at the sweat, and lifted her up in the air. He spun her around once, just to hear the beautiful laughter of the pup, before hooking her up on his hip.

The ball was flying around again, the other little wolves returning to their game after only a few minutes of their lasting attention span. Youngha hung onto Seonghwa like she was his own, though, and with a soft keen, the pup gave him a crooked smile, with two missing teeth and dirt smeared on her cheeks.

With a gentle hand, Seonghwa brought up his palm to cradle her face, brushing a soft thumb against her skin and wiping away the grime, although it was hard to tell whether that helped, or made more of a mess. Regardless, he hummed. “Your mother wouldn’t happen to be in the markets this morning, would she?” He reached out to smear some dirt from her nose too, and, it was definitely making more of a mess.

The pup squirmed in his arms with a frantic nod, patting his shoulder harder than intended, and Seonghwa knew she’d grow to be a strong wolf without doubt. “Yes! Yes! Mama left a long time ago! Do you want me to show you, uncle?” She hollered, leaning back and squirming in his arms in attempts to slither out of his grasp. Seonghwa raised an amused eyebrow, shaking his head knowingly as he set the pup down to her feet. And, he was not given a moment to reply before his hand was being taken by one not even half his size, and the charm of a young girl was leading him toward the marketplace.

It made his chest swell and his heart bloat up with warmth, how five of her little steps were hardly one of his. She looked around with a determined gaze, devoted in leading them to their destination, even if she had to ask him which way was north and which was west. The sun gleamed through the trees where they could not shadow the grounds of the woods, rays breaking through crevices like divine stained glass clerestory windows. Then, when rows upon rows of tents came into sight from afar in open space, the pup gasped satisfactorily, letting go of Seonghwa’s hand and darting toward them.

Fuzzy ears were pointing up out of her head of messy hair, tangles he cringed at the thought of having to brush out. A swaying tail like a bloom of a rainy roses behind her, so much life in the gloomy color of grey. She was like the sky, most days. The winter season was gone weeks ago, and spring came to pour rain and cloud the regions with a sleepy fog. The markets had been closed more frequently because of it, so he was pleased when he entered the world of trinkets and wonder behind tall, white curtains.

Spices were the first thing to hit his nose, bursting herbs and seasonings, with powders and natural flavoring. He could taste it on his tongue, paprika and parsley, cayenne pepper and dry onion in large containers, stored behind and atop shelves where he met eyes with wolves who gave him pleased expressions, bowing at his mere presence alone.

Bows to which he returned, his eyes thinning in acceptance and greeting with his faint smile, coming and going with each nod his way. Never had he walked past his pack without finding them to gaze at him with this unspoken kind of promise, with pride in their eyes, and they’d puff their chests out as a sign of dignity and connection without a word to be exchanged. Even the wolves with fur that lost it’s vibrancy, which could be instead found in those old smile lines, their freckled skin dull but their hearts as alive and flourishing as a young wolf in growth. Forever young, the elders would laugh.

But, Seonghwa quite liked that mindset. He found that it would be nothing but dreadful watching the wolves he had known all his life lose their light as the years passed by. Slipping through their fingers, with no will.

”Hugyeja.” A gentle voice, quiet but heard above the calm chatter within the tents. Seonghwa turned on a swift heel, a smile already filling in for the naturally hardened expression on his face.

A woman with crinkles beside her eyes and softly tinted lips, pink as the apples of her cheeks. And a pup in immediate resemblance hanging over her shoulder, giving a crooked smile, two missing teeth, with puffy gums where the gaps weren’t filled. His feet carried him their way, a counter full of beading and feathers, with as many colors as the stars in her pup’s eyes. Youngha tucked her head into her mother’s shoulder, giving a cheeky look before sticking her tongue out at him after she had run off toward the tents.

The beads in his hair alike the beads on display clanked when he tilted his head down to gaze at them, standing just before the counter. “Hugyeja, where have you been?” The woman smiled at him, and it was the most genuine Seonghwa had seen in awhile. Youngha had one just as pure, but then again, the young tended to smile at anything and everything.

Seonghwa adjusted his bag so that it slung over his chest, his furs warm over his shoulders as he pulled his hood down, revealing himself entirely; not that he was difficult to recognize to begin with. He was easily one of the tallest pack members, and the sculpture of his face was fierce, only the features of a heir alas, one born to be seen. A blessing, the elders called his birth. He had many names, but if anyone were to ask, he preferred Seonghwa the most. The one decided by his mother, but used by only one other living wolf.

”Nowhere, really. Just not here.” He spoke, his voice deep as it reverberated between them. “I’ve been meaning to stop by, though.” He hummed, glancing over to the left corner, where he knew the mammoth tusks to be, reserved at the highest price. The woman’s eyes followed his, and she easily shifted toward the container and reached up for it, the pup on her back squealing out, “Adventure!” In some slush of mispronunciation. Her mother chuckled softly, a scene that kept Seonghwa at ease until the woman was before him again, holding the tusks to her broad chest.

She sat it down before her, subconsciously patting Youngha’s thigh and gesturing toward the counter, and the pup pouted, but climbed down without a word nonetheless. She instead sat crisscrossed on the solid surface, eyes slowly lifting up to meet with Seonghwa’s in a cunning manner, before she was reaching out and tousling with the hanging artifacts from his bag.

”I’ve missed your face around here.” The woman admitted kindly, shuffling through a few drawers before pulling out a satin bag, deep purple, the same bags the prophets use to store their tarot cards. “I’ve been expecting you, but it seems that your things are often retrieved for you these days.” She lifted her head, brushing loose bangs out of her eyes to look up at him in a way that was somewhat analytical, as though she knew something that he had not told her himself.

Or, perhaps she was trying to find something in him that he had not yet told her. But if the way her lips curled up just barley into an amused smile said anything, she knew.

”The alpha.” She hummed, and the heir felt exposed to her knowledge. He had not been keeping it a secret, really; but the way she brought it forth with such precision made him feel like he was. “He is the very wolf your father used to keep you from, yes?” The container was unlocked with a latch. Her hand reached inside, searching for the large spoon used to collect the tusks. Her eyes fluttered back down as she pulled it out, setting it down to open the bag wide after undoing its ties.

Seonghwa shifted on his feet, nodding his head slowly, reaching down to unzip his bag and adjust it for easier access. His breath had hitched, wondering how the woman before him always managed to read him of the things no one else noticed. His expression was stern and mature, eyes sharp and lips pressed into a thin line, but his deep voice was softer by a minuscule, just barley sounding tender, raw and vulnerable for a moment as he spoke. “He is.” And it was gone, his momentary reveal of the softest part of him; because he figured that if anyone deserved to know, it would be the woman who always stood as a second mother to him.

”But he is at war now.” He muttered, lowering his tone to keep their conversation just theirs. And perhaps it was the mutual understanding between them two, how she could sense the stress on him, worn bare as his clothes as he stood before her. Her mate was at war, too. “I see.” The tusks were falling into the bag until it was full, and she closed it halfheartedly before securing the container once more. “He has grown. I do not know much about him, but from what I have seen from afar, he has found his sense of outlet and purpose.”

Seonghwa darted his tongue out to run over his bottom lip, crossing his arms loosely as his eyes went brazen in melancholy. “He has.” He reached his hand out, too, feeling the smooth texture of the bag beneath his touch.

But the woman had not let it go, and instead, she leveled him with a strong gaze. It was trusting and sincere, and she muttered quietly. There was something in the air, something prosperous, because even Youngha leaned in close with a firmly focused look in her brown eyes. “These tusks are for mating rituals, and mating rituals alone, Hugyeja.” And, her lips curled into a proud smile, one so tender and bright in it minimalism that Seonghwa felt his mother’s howling in his soul again.

His chest buzzed with a strange feeling, more ticklish than his hair tingling against his neck, and his fur coat brushing over his skin when the wind blew. “I know, noona.” He brought up his other hand, shadowing his fingers against her thin wrist. They must have been cold, because she shuddered slightly as the pads of them glided over the piece on her wrist; a bracelet with soft hues of blue, three small tusks embedded into the yarn. So, with a final nod, the woman dropped the bag into his palm awaiting palm.

———

His noona’s words strummed in his mind, thoughts lingering in the distance of his subconscious as he threaded the tusk and thick, leather yarn once more. They were not frightening, really, but they were almost awakening, in a way. They were confirmation that this was very truly happening, and that brought bold and front the reality that was of him piecing together a mating piece, with utter time and devotion. The morning had faded into late noon, and the sun would be setting upon another night of waiting, of trusting that his pack would be full once more, in time.

His fingertips had burned, in the beginning. He was not used to wearing his skin or earning callouses, so tying the smallest knots and rubbing together leather and yarn while pressing together hooks and predator teeth hardened his hands, and he was able to work for hours upon hours, late into the most silent of nights.

This was something he would cherish more than anything else, a piece that did not compare to what was previous. He could grow angry after hours of dedication within his cave, only to feel that he was achieving nothing at all, and drag himself to nest, and sleep. But when he truly stood back, gazing down at what he had done, his gut twisted and turned with incomparable emotion. Because nothing had worth, until you were doing it with striving. Because if there was nothing behind the struggle, then you wouldn’t be going through it to begin with. There was always something, whether you knew what it was, or whether you did not.

With the quiet knocking of wood on wood, bone and beads beneath his fingertips as he gazed down at the art within his palms, he knew what his striving was. His heart felt torn into halves, with each side still pumping rapidly, more alive than it had been for many, many long moons. Full moons, where he’d stared out at the sky while listening to howls from foreign packs, miles away. Half moons, where pups continued to play late into the night, because their mothers were just as restless for their alphas as Seonghwa. And blood moons, where the sky glowed red and he thought of the tales told on his walls all over again.

When the moon went red, it meant that somewhere, a pack of wolves mourned a lost life. The night his mother died, where sleep was nothing to him, the moon was not more than a blur of a crimson sphere before him.

He wondered how she felt now, watching him where he sat alone in his haven, in the tranquil of nothing but reminiscing and feeling. He found that thoughts could come and go as they pleased, and that regardless of how they stole him, he was a man, kneeling there with a neck piece of warm colors blanketed over his thighs. It was fiery and passionate, hungry and so, so full of desire. A sync with the soul of his alpha. The man of spirit who was his opposing half; the one he knew would kill and bring back the head on a stick, before he would have another bring back his.

With a deep sigh, he swallowed thickly, standing to his feet with the necklace in his hands, and he clutched it to his chest tightly with protection, chewing at his bottom lip with a certain nervousness. Seeing it in its final form was somewhat nerve wracking for him, and he could do nothing but listen to the sound of his own heartbeat pounding rhythmically in his ears. He was brought to a mirror, clear and gleaming like a pool of fresh water, and dark brown eyes stared back at him.

A figure of the man he had grown into, a beautiful halo of skin and thick, tamed eyebrows that brought out his cutting gaze. There was a new kind of expression on his face, a new look of knowledge that would change him from here forward, and it almost hurt, in a way. Moving forward and maturing, with that pup he used to be stored deep inside of him, taking upon a role of such maturity. He found himself thinking of his mother once more, of his father and the grey hairs that grew fuller with every passing day.

It was a wayward feeling, like seasickness that made his insides mush around with unease. There were no firm arms to wrap around him when he stared at himself in that glass reflection, no chin to hook over his shoulder and no soft words of proudness and praise muttered beside his ear. It was only him, the warm light of that forever burning fire, and the piece in his hands. There was a distant howl, a sound so delicate and hoarse, the voice of a sick woman with dying lungs. A woman who sang from within him, one who kept him company as his hands trembled and his eyes watered.

In that instant, he did not know whether it was her, or him who had brought his hands up to hold the colors of ruby and bright oranges that was the mating gift, but his breath seemed to run and hide from him as he gazed upon the sight within the mirror.

It was unlike anything he had ever seen, still after the many times he had slept in his father’s arms when he was missing his mother, and he would stare at the dangling earpiece made of dragonfly green and velvet burgundy. The one that had a carved, smooth tusk on it’s end. The one he had once before watched his father close away in a box with delicate touches, storing it safe before leaving off to his first battle without her. The one thing he had watched his father kneel and cry before, the only thing he’d ever seen him cry for besides her taking her last breaths in her bed, before she fell into sleep.

If there was anything he had known, it was that this piece in his hands was nothing to brush beneath it’s significance. This piece was more than pretty looks and it was worth more than just admiration. It was a sign of a life where multiple would come into one, it was a swear, a stand at the final stage of development apart.

So, he lifted it gently. His fingers shook and his legs felt weak from the core of his very bones. And it took awhile, but when he attached the ends of that sacred neckpiece over his shoulders, he was awestruck. His wolf purred within him, and the feeling of the beads against his bare skin was almost like the touch of his alpha. He slung it around his nape, and it hung low, stopping just beneath his pectorals that were engraved with a tribal tattoo done by his uncle when he was ripely sixteen, the age where true responsibilities of an heir began to take toll.

It was like fire on fire, a great heat forming between his body and the piece that dug into his chest to pull out the strings of his soul. In that mirror, before him, he watched his own brimming eyes well with tears until he could decipher his own face no longer, and it was a blur just as much as that red moon had been. But this was not the same as that; it was far, far different. Then, he had been grieving. Now, he was cherishing. Perhaps that was something that came with the responsibility of an heir, too. Or, was it just something that came with the changes of life in itself? A gift from nature and her blessings handed forward with languid fragility.

His trembling fingertips lifted up slowly, and he blinked enough that his tears streamed softly down his porcelain skin, reaching to touch the smooth beads. A phoenix beneath the sun, glowing and spreading it’s wings wide, wingspan adorning the neckpiece.

He was proud. There was no doubt, no fear that it would not be enough, no fear that he himself would not be enough. Because with the man in his own eyes, for once, he felt sure of who he had become.

”Hyung— you must follow me quickly, the boundaries!” A voice so frantic, crying out like a mother in her birth rung out from behind him, and he jolted back from the mirror with a deep inhale. His neck broke over toward the call that was so close, inside of his haven and howling with utmost urgency. Before him, an omega he knew well, a brother to him. Eyes wide and blown, sharp canines pointing out from his mouth that was agape in shriek; Wooyoung did not seem to know what to do with his hands that were flared up into the air like firecrackers.

The omega before him froze in his tracks, shoulders slumping at the sight of the tears on Seonghwa’s face, but the elder did not stand down in slight from the intensity of the moment, giving his pack member a firm nod of assurance, before he stepped forward with a stern furrow. “What’s the matter, Wooyoung?” He immediately reached for his carved spear, the clean wood just within his reach, with only another heavy breath and an urging shriek to dismiss the instinctive action.

”No, my lord— hyung, there is no need! San— the blood hounds! The blood hounds are just behind the border…” The omega wailed, pointing toward the curtain he had entered through, and just then, a drum rang aloud from the distance. Then came the horn, three rounds of repetition.

Oh. The blood hounds.

Wooyoung did not spare him another moment, and Seonghwa did not need him to. The omega was gone and running, sprinting out of the cave with an untamed scent in his trail; relief. Seonghwa did not think, he was unable to think, because his fingers were numb and his mouth felt dry as he pulled his fur coat further over his chest, and he was rushing toward the boundaries in the wolf’s very tracks. When he pulled the curtain of his cave aside, he found him far ahead, with howling pups shooting off in distance to meet their fathers and brothers, uncles and close relatives. Mothers wearing aprons and wolves with longing hearts gone out to the blood hounds, the troop of their pack’s strongest alphas that had left for war nearly two years ago.

Seonghwa did not know what reality was then, his head was flooded by this palpable adrenaline as he followed through to the hundreds of wolves that stood as close to the outskirts’ bordering line that they possibly could, with loud cries of joy and wails of hope.

”Oh, the gods have been merciful upon us! They have returned to us!” The prophet announced as a final consequential voice above them all, falling to her knees to the cold soil beneath her. Uphill and among mountains, the blood hounds walked in a large pack of their own, at least one hundred with thick fur and large spears and torches, shields and wagons, pushing through until they could meet their homeland. The forest had not felt so alive in far too long, and there was no waiting point to see who had survived and what warriors were lost, because the time had stretched so far, and the battle had gone on for so many moons, that no one could wait for a wakeup call.

As Seonghwa moved further into the crowd, there was a pathway made for him naturally, wolves shoving their way aside for the heir as he moved slowly, his footsteps feeling heavier with each passing moment. There was no telling how courtesy held any priority at all, and if in any other parallel it did not, he would have not one to blame. His expression was cold and hardened, only for the face of maturity in the swarm of howls, his shoulders sharp and square, chin held high as he clutched tightly onto his own coat with piercing eyes. Like fish feeding from prey much larger, a fierce leopard shark in a piranha’s terrain, the first man he saw, was his father.

On the front lines with wide, broader shoulders than his own and weapons hung over a bouldering muscular back, with this thick rod of wood held tightly in his hand, as his head of wild black hair was all but parted across by a river of silver strands feigning a storm.

Many of the alphas were in the form of their wolves, for better stake at survival and health. But his father was not; he never was. He was the first, but perhaps not the last pack leader, who never was. The sleeves of his layered clothes were torn off, thick biceps full enough to crush skulls on display with bandages and scars, some old and some new, and his glowing crimson eyes, the eyes of a true warrior. The wolf who never failed at victory, even through having to lose his dearest amidst the way of achievement. The role model who was stern. The father who was his.

They were coming close, and fast. The drummers were going batshit at an unattainable rate, pounding on the their drums until they blew dents in the rings of metal, and Seonghwa swore he could feel it in the ground. He could feel it waking his wolf that rested at ease constantly, like a piece of the finest meat slumped before it in its slumber. The wolf that growled so gutturally, he could feel eyes on him from all around, a certain aura of ravage rolling off of him in waves that no other omega could obtain. The wails of a homesick man.

The miles cut down like the thin, red arm on a clock, and the ground was definitely shaking. It came like a hurricane, the stampede of wolves running at a deadly pace, and Seonghwa could see each and every one that shifted into men mid trample, and how they did it, nearly losing footing but pushing forward until the last of their breaths. It was a sight that made his eyes glow.

Then, they flooded in. The wolves who did not blackout the moment they passed the border were tumbling like drunk rednecks through the crowd, finding their mates and their families on scents alone, tackling them to the ground and falling to their feet. Those wolves were the few who had passed before the pack leader, the ones who could not wait another dying instant without the touch of their dear ones, without feeling the soil of restful grounds beneath them. Medics were at the far ends, taking in any wolves who needed immediate care the moment they were within reach. Arms slung out over the marked borders, pleading to touch as every one wolf’s foot pressed directly onto that line without daring to cross over.

Oh but then when Seonghwa’s father met the territory that was their peace, he fell to his knees. He fell to his knees and the omegas and betas and the few alphas who had not gone to battle moved emphatically backward, making space and gateway anywhere they could.

It was a sight to see. All alphas who passed by that line fell to their hard, cold knees. No matter how sore, how tired, if they were conscious, they kneeled to the soil with utter vulnerability and surrender. Alphas swole with muscles, ones mean and gruesome, some quiet and inquisitive, and others completely worn to their last wills, they became one. The fall of serenity, was what the blood hounds called it. An authority of ground over pride, gratitude toward their pack mates and brothers at war, an act of immediate rain from their heads held high to falling upon the grimy dirt like diligent prayer. Submission to the soil that would cradle their bones the day that they would die.

With each soldier to the ground, Seonghwa could see clearly the aching on every face, on the ones who returned with one less limb than they had left with, and the ones who never shed a tear before living man. Because no matter how tough, no matter how domineering, the fall of serenity was an act of great pride, one that must not be disturbed.

And before them, Seonghwa fell to his knees as well. Because he too had fought a battle just as long, just as painful and rough, one worth surrendering beneath. The wind was gone from his chest, with a tired soreness in his throat when it spoke of the hearts that had lasted nineteen seasons. And he closed his eyes, listening to the land mourn, but listening to its glee at once. He listened to its grace. Then, came the first howl.

A call let out into the air, from far north amongst the kneeling soldiers. It was rasped and broken, hardly one honorable by any beast at all, and still, the world had never gone so silent for that sound. Then another, east of the first one, closer. It was higher, like a whistling swan with torn wings and the moon’s glow for feathers. And then more, howl after howl, wolves singing a dissonance of a song, out of tune and harmony with no sync whatsoever, and yet, it was the most in fragile of harmony he could have ever recalled himself hearing. He could not tell why each of them were howling, because every one had their own meaning, every wolf had a thought that forced the howls out of their sore bodies; and somewhere deep within him, he wished to hear every story as to why they did.

He wanted to sit down and listen, watching every wolf come and go, even the ones he knew like the back of his hand. And, he wondered if their stories would sound anything like the ones on the walls of his cave. He heard them ring out through the forest, and he felt them in his lungs when he breathed the air that finally seemed to give him life. It had been a long time since he exhaled, and did not feel as though he was suffocating when he searched for that breath in return.

A meteor shower, with thousands of rocks flying across the earth, except they were howls, that could be heard from the center of the globe, so raw that they shook the core of the very land they kneeled upon. Seonghwa felt addicted to this fire in him, he sought out the burn in his chest that would not come from anything more or anything less, the ache that he only cherished after it was gone, like a season you despised in the moment; his hatred for the sun on hot, restless days so desired when the unforgiving cold reddened his running nose.

Amongst the howling, loud and vigorous, was one. So strong, so overpowering and loyal that it silenced all others’; his father. Quiet ran along Seonghwa’s spine in chilling waves, without a sound to shatter those currents created by the breaking ship, with a tailed woman like a beast carved into the very front.

Three deep breaths, a gush of nighttime wind, and the crinkle of leaves beneath his knees. Then, a crackle of the gong struck by its mallet. The trance the pack was sent into broke on instant, with the vibration of the loud noise trembling beneath their bare feet, the wolves tumbling from their soles to seek their dear ones. Cries and babbling, incoherent callings of names that entangled into singularity spun around over their heads like crows, and they were the ones that tore Seonghwa from his very own knees.

Blood hounds surpassed him, body by body, lost alphas finding their way back into consoling arms. And, Seonghwa would say that he did not know how they still had enough fight left in them to even get up off of the ground, but as he stood to his knees and his eyes drifted all around him, he knew that was simply not true.

His roaming eyes fell upon Wooyoung, the omega closer to him than he had known, standing so firm even with the great collision of families all around him, searching. He looked so focused, there was no way the omega would hear Seonghwa even if he called. It was a pearl of a moment in rogue, watching that furrow fade from his dearest friend’s face into the bright smile that he knew so well. It set Seonghwa’s heart aflame, and he could practically feel the beating of the younger omega’s from this far, pounding rapid and strong; he was anticipating.

Like lighting, a man came running toward him, with a force so powerful that Seonghwa was sure he’d topple Wooyoung over. Yet, so gentle but firm, the alpha collected him in his arms, lifting the omega from the ground and hugging him so terribly tight, crushing him between strong arms and swinging him in a circle. He could hear the laughter, the pure bliss from them both, and from the deep kiss San pressed to Wooyoung’s lips, Seonghwa knew that was how. No matter how tired, the wolves had somewhere to be, someone to return to, someone worth fighting for.

Few even ran with blind eyes but somehow, they managed to find their way back without a struggle. It was a perfected sense within them, one so deep rooted and bound, even Seonghwa could feel it. He was not mated, the heir with a terribly bare space on his neck, no bonding mark to seal his alpha’s love down, but he could feel him.

His gut twisted as though he had fallen ill, and his head echoed back the pumping of a pulse that was far too fast to be his own. Because for him, time was moving slow. He was in no rush, no hurry at all, how everything around him seemed to take place with much more patience and time than it did in reality. He stood upon his ground, without moving forward no matter the need, without feeling frantic to search for the man he ached so desperately to find.

Tall and broad, muscles like the founder of the forest, was a man with long black hair. A braided ponytail, stray strands messily blowing in the delicate breeze during such an intense return, his father’s eyes fell upon them all, the reflection of grace in them as he looked throughout his pack. Seonghwa saw the man, but the man did not see him, the red of his irises less strong now, but still glowing down against the sharp bones of his structured cheeks and jaw. His every step was deliberate, and with a single glance, you’d know he had just led a pack to war, and returned home as victorious. With the stillness of his shoulders as his locked back chest that pushed forward with pride, he was very certainly a leader.

For a moment, the son was not sure whether there was truly a thought behind those sharp eyes, or whether he just carried an aura that spoke naturally of importance, one that seemed like he always had somewhere to be. But he watched as his father looked over another man, staring down at him before reaching out and pulling him by his bicep with force, standing face to face with the hound. It was an exchange of words, from his father to the alpha he had pulled aside, and when he leaned down to whisper something into the man’s ear with a stone expression, Seonghwa could feel that foreign telepathic pulse in himself slow down.

He watched as his father’s large hand let go of the man’s bicep, each finger uncurling slowly and warningly, before the wolf that was a consumer gave a stern nod and quickly fled elsewhere. A flash of short, dark brown hair. Cold hazelnut eyes and— oh. The man was grinning, he was grinning like a feral while he hurried off after receiving whatever he had been told. Seonghwa could not feel his legs.

But then so quickly, there was a man before himself, too. One of the strongest he knew. And, he did not seem like a rampant wolf there before him, even with that furrow, those lips that resembled his own pressed into a flat line, with deep eyes that Seonghwa swore were glossier than he remembered. There was silence amongst them; they needed a moment to feel each other out and breathe each other in. His chest constricted as the man before him moved closer, this scent of molten steel and iron meeting Seonghwa’s senses as the alpha slowly lowered himself, kneeling on a single knee. It hardly made sense, a leader as brave and bold as this one kneeling to anyone, and yet he was before his own bred.

”My son.” A large, rough and hardened hand reached up so gently, and took Seonghwa’s to lift it like he was caressing the gentle pages of a children’s book. The skin was cracking and tough, and if Seonghwa’s eyes were closed, he might have sworn it was stone.

His palm pressed flat down against the one that cradled it, and he did not speak as he watched his father raise it with a rebirthing relief painted all over his expression, pressing a feathered, brief kiss to the back of his hand.

Seonghwa had only seen his father cry twice before then, and it was odd, he had not thought that the third would be for him. “Father,” he whispered inaudibly, his deep voice hoarse and rough in his throat, his words stricken with disbelief and revelation. He spoke as though he was not done, his only word trailed along like he had something more to say, but could not quite find it on his tongue. “Father.” He said again, calling him out, telling him to get the hell up and embrace him before he broke in front the one man that had always wished to see him at his most mature. Though, something told him that it would be okay if he was not that, just this once.

And, so he did. His father stood, reminding Seonghwa just how tall he was in the few seconds that he might have forgotten, and embraced him. It was not a tight hug, not suffocating or aggressive as one would expect from a man so large. He held him in the gentlest way, Seonghwa had to open his eyes to make sure he was even there at all. But low and behold, a bearded man who looked at him like he was still a young, still a pup, gazing over his fragility. He wondered if this was how those wild beasts looked when they finally laid themselves down, accepting that death was to overcome.

The man did not say much to him, he only looked, with the moon glowing hues of white and blue, making the silver of his hair gleam and glow in a way that Seonghwa knew his mother would have loved. He felt that the ache within him was weightless, but at it’s peak more than ever; and when his father slowly let him go, he knew that the man could feel it reaching cliff’s edge. With eyes searching him, finding him, his father’s voice like sizzling metal as it cooled, it spoke to him once more.

”He is awaiting your touch, missing you so.” It swore, and the clock froze, every time stamp went entirely still, before things did not sound like they were underwater anymore. Time was no longer slowed down, and his thoughts broke the dam in his mind, the river rushing through with a force so relentless that there would be no purpose in trying to survive it’s wrath.

He was told once, and did not need to be told twice. His father's hand on his shoulder was any assurance he might have wanted, before the man raised his head high, looking beyond Seonghwa to some place further, then his touch was a ghost. And the blessing of a man was easy on his feet, moving out and toward his haven, the cave with that warm, crackling fire. The woods were beneath him, the grass on his numb heels and the wind through the small beads woven within his hair. His chest felt heavier, and he could not tell whether it was due to the pressure pushing from the inside of him, or the hardly-there weight of the neckpiece imprinting on his flesh and mind; the one he would be taking off.

”Hyung!” A new voice. A new, though familiar name, that was not truly his, but a title. He wished to see the alpha who called him by his name. The name his mother gave him, a blessing, a star.

Seonghwa turned with much more urgency than he had before, feeling handsy with a name in his mouth. “Mingi.” He muttered back, gentle and calm enough that it was not heard by the alpha approaching him, a taller one following over his shoulder like a true protector. They both stood above him with cutting eyes, but Yunho had always been more intimidating than Mingi, regardless of the deeper voice and solid figure.

Swallowing thickly and shifting on his feet, Seonghwa raised his eyebrows with a neutral kind of expression, leveled and pointed. “It’s been long.” He spoke when they were close, staring at one another with Yunho just behind, the furs of his coat making an ombré of deep brown and grey as he crossed his arms over his chest, nodding once in respect and greeting. His black hair fell just over his eyebrows, shadowing his dark eyes that swarmed with a certain passion when he glanced over at Mingi. Always so indecipherable.

The brunette before him hummed, crooking his head to the side, and they did not speak. Seonghwa had a way with wolves, the elders believed. He could speak through a gaze, he could converse through unwavering eyes. He was not able to be read, but he could read many who crossed him. He had the eyes of an alpha, whether he was one or not, believed the elders. There, standing before the pair who he hadn’t known too deeply, but would give his life for, he understood within this time again what the elders had meant.

Yunho had saved him, once upon a time. A strange young pup, stranger than the wolf he has grown to be now well and mature. Although, that was what had always been unsettling to Seonghwa. There was not a time where he was not mature, for all the moons he had known the alpha, it was always that hard gaze and those distant eyes. But he had fed him, brought Seonghwa fresh meat and helped him chew when he did not care to win his fight after his mother had lost hers. He held him, would bring Mingi to play with him instead of keeping his distance and going to knock around that leather ball that the pups still used, reattaching worn leather before chasing one another to the goal.

Sometimes, he felt like he had not known the wolf at all. And others, when his mind was full and he did not have the time to spare to anyone, when he just wished to be alone but could not speak, he felt that they knew one another so, terribly well. Yunho had a way of doing that, when times mattered. Times like Seonghwa standing beside the borders, when he needed to see his alpha, to feel his touch and hear his voice that he had worried he would not remember if he’d ever lost him.

”Alright, princess.” Those crossed arms fell limp, and Yunho moved forward without another indication of what he meant, because his hand was on Mingi’s bare chest, pushing him back just slightly. “He has matters to tend to, I’m sure.” The alpha gazed down at Seonghwa with knowing eyes, turning with his front partially away from him while gesturing Mingi to follow.

Grateful, with a firm nod and shunning eye contact, Seonghwa was gone before they were. His back turned and footsteps definite, following naturally the trail he could walk along with his eyes stuck shut.

And, perhaps they were. Had he gone blind too and been unable to see a thing, unable to distinguish with his vision, because his other senses were alive and crying too loud, and his wolf was keening and howling in a way it never had before. He did not recall the approach, did not process having gone from the furthest end of the forest to an end beyond, but somehow his cold blooded hand brushed softly against his haven’s walls from the outside, and he could feel him within.

These walls were warm to the touch, with a different kind of fire from the one he’d left behind. A moth to a flame, a wandering man to a succulent mystery, the smoke and mist were too alluring for him to subside. And when he found in himself the courage to tear open the curtain ever so patiently, with his outburst of emotion refluxing, everything was heavy weight on him, before he felt like air, breeze and the wind, light and untouchable; in this kind of place where dreams were always caught, and promises were never to be broken.

Seonghwa stood at the entrance, in front of those wooden beads hung behind him, and his breath hitched in his throat. At small wooden desktop, where he kept his nonsensical artifacts and trinkets, rusted pieces of metal shaped into outdated airplanes, and broken compasses with only one arm, a figure stood with his back faced toward him. A ragged shirt that Seonghwa knew was his own, reaching down to the man’s knees, and a long skirt made of panther fur, velvet noir. Dark brown and hazelnut.

He stood there, starstruck and unmoving, with his arms lifeless by his sides and his palms in a cold sweat. Seonghwa knew distantly, in the back of his mind, that he was probably wearing the most sensitive, fragile expression a man could imagine. But more distantly, he did not care as much as he had long ago accepted that the alpha standing mindlessly across from him, head hung low and messing around with a wooden car missing a wheel, he was the only one who could ever soften him up like this.

That flurrying head of deep brunette lifted, a sharp nose with a thin bridge, pink lips in orange lighting that made him glow like a firefly amongst the dark, and the deepest tunnel of endless of brown eyes. A ball in Seonghwa’s throat, the alpha before him smiling in an incredibly devious manner, leaning back and resting an elbow on Seonghwa’s wooden desk with a cocky eyebrow.

”Where have you been?” He asked like the utterly sick, and annoyingly hypocritical fool he was. This was the light within him that no image could capture, no photo or portrait ever held the fire in those eyes, and it took Seonghwa a moment to swallow it down. It did not feel familiar, the wolf gazing at him smugly, after so many nights apart; but it felt right.

”If you’re just going to keep staring at me from over there, with those wide and pretty eyes, I might start to believe that you didn’t miss me at all.”

Seonghwa had the younger collected in his long, lanky arms within a wispy breath. He crowded the man against the desk, and his invasion was so delicate and light, yet so deliberate and intentional, with his every feeling poured into that embracement. His hands slid down the ridges of hips he craved to refresh in his mind, and he held on so tight that the alpha would not be able to leave his grasp even if his father had called out for another war at that given second.

”You’re fucking crazy.” Seonghwa choked out, sliding a shaky hand up the alpha’s nape, tangling it in shortly trimmed, walnut brown hair, slotting through the strands that were not as silky as they had been before. His skin was not as soft, either. But when he leaned down, resting his head on Seonghwa’s shoulder and pressing his palms to the older’s back, he was just as warm. A warmth that was not as bothersome as the heat of June’s sun, but as comfortable as opening an oven with freshly baked cookies, feeling that heat on your skin. A warmth like taking your clothes straight out of the dryer and putting them on, making you sigh in absolute relief. The kind of warmth that took the burdens off of your mind.

The alpha chuckled; A low, throaty sound broken airily through his lungs. And, Seonghwa wondered how many vile shouts while killing in cold blood had been torn from those very lungs. “So, I take it that you didn’t miss me?” He snorted, whispering like footsteps on carpet.

Though, the laughter was stolen straight from his mouth when he raised his head up to gaze at the one face he had fought for so dearly, only to find it tinted with spilling, caramel tears. He stiffened, his hands immediately sliding up from the fur of Seonghwa’s coat. “Oh, my star.” He mumbled, cradling the omega’s face like a rocking pup in a crib. “My Seonghwa.” A swooning alpha before him, gathering his jaw in rough fingertips.

”My handsome, darling Seonghwa that I would die for. The most precious star to have ever gleamed. My doll, my patient baby.” The wolf muttered, nuzzling their noses together tenderly, smearing the older’s tears and making him suffer the shed of more. “My Seonghwa that I went to war to protect. How I would go back if it was for you.” He pressed a kiss to the moist skin beneath Seonghwa’s nose and above his lip. A quiet purr rumbled through the alpha’s chest, a sound of sworn allegiance.

Still, Seonghwa only sniffled, shaking his head repeatedly and swallowing down a quaky hiccup. “No,” he glared, his teary eyes deep brown, cocoa beans and dark chocolate. “Don’t you dare. Don’t ever leave me again, Hongjoong.” The omega demanded, clawing tightly at his alpha’s clothes as threat to keep him there for eternity. A threat that made heart shaped bubbles float above the younger man’s head. A calloused thumb wiped away salty tears from his dewy skin, smearing them from his face, and he tried his best not to let that trail retrace. “Leave me and I’ll kill you.” He quivered, pulling his lover close and tight to him, burrowing like critters in the winter while rubbing his nose desperately against the alpha’s neck, trying to find his scent gland.

His alpha mused with a hoarse voice like cocktails and wine. “I see.” He leaned back, not pushing Seonghwa away for even a second as he tilted his neck. “Other side, my star.” And the smokey scent of burning firewood was already so prominent, so good and alluring.

Seonghwa shifted to the other side of Hongjoong’s neck, finding the source of that divine scent. His fingers twitched and he let out a low, keen breath, nestling further into the gland that produced his alpha’s relaxing pheromones. He slid his hands higher, pressing at the sides of Hongjoong’s ribcage, feeling tough muscle on the bones of that lean figure.

Fingers slid up into silk noir and jet black, caressing Seonghwa’s head and sliding down to the base of his neck. The omega melted further into him, like s’mores by the fire that was within Hongjoong’s soul. He tugged softly at the decorative beading in the black hair, long braids with colors like leaves in the wind when they’d fallen from their trees. “I love it when you bury yourself in my scent like this. I’ve missed the feeling.” The quiet, weightless voice of Seonghwa’s beloved muttered into his ear, a thumb stroking the back of his neck.

Seonghwa smothered himself in the scent until it was the only thing polluting his mind, before huffing out a deep breath of relief. His lips pressed against the scent gland in a kiss, before he was lifting his head to level eyes with Hongjoong. Thousands, upon thousands of crystal snowflakes, glowing and sparking as they fell from the woodland sky. The northern lights, glowing in a fury of green and purple, soft maroon and altos of blue. Phenomenons, feathers of a firebird spread and shed flames within those eyes. They gleamed at him with admiration, a look that faded into snarky mischief.

His own eyes, darker but never deeper, fluttered down to look at the tender lips that formed into a lousy grin, before he was whispering hoarsely; because he would not ever let go of this man again. “Say you’ll never leave me.” He required, Hongjoong’s waist fitting back perfectly within the gap of his thumbs and his pointer fingers. There was nowhere to hide, no buried secrets. The crackling fire was too bright for anything to be beneath it’s light and great reveal. Seonghwa breathed in deeply that scent again.

“But say it only if you mean it. Do not lie to me with a swear that you cannot live to fulfill.” He trailed his clawed nails higher and along his alpha’s body, before resting a warm palm right beneath his jaw, gently on his pulse; slow, and heavy.

Hongjoong raised an eyebrow, his smile fading distantly as he gazed up at his omega. His face washed down to an expression of stern compassion, a furrow between thoughtful eyebrows and a purse of his lips. He pushed himself closer into that touch, that scratch of claws behind his ears, making his long, full eyelashes flutter. “Never.” He whispered, searching Seonghwa’s features as if it was his first time ever seeing such beauty. “I will never leave you, my star,” his words were light, a misty little laugh when he spoke.

Hazelnut eyes, with snowflakes and northern lights and fire and everything precious, peered at him with care. They traced over the dunes and crevices of his vanilla skin, before falling down to his chest. Seonghwa could not tell whether it was Hongjoong’s breath that hitched, or his own. “Just because I am away, does not mean I have left.” The alpha muttered, a twisted expression of intrigue crinkling his features and thinning his eyes. The eyes that lingered and tracked inquisitively, and Seonghwa fluttered his own closed, allowing himself to be bathed by the light glazed upon him from those orange flames dancing in his alpha’s pupils. A reflection of wild, orange and red beads, setting arson to the ground.

The fingers curled up in his hair eased their way out of tousles of pure black, like Hongjoong’s coffee that made Seonghwa’s tongue feel numb on bitterness. The rough hands braced themselves gently toward the hems of the reflection around Seonghwa’s neck and against his chest, past an embedded tribal tattoo.

They grazed the beads that Seonghwa had stared at for hours upon hours, creating the most bizarre of patterns and threading for sittings that seemed to last eternities. They tugged at the netted yarn, leathery and smoother than a cobra’s coat after a new shed. And, just barley, they trickled down past the shaven teeth, to the thick and bone tusks hung at the ends. The heir watched, one breath at a time as his alpha slid his hand beneath a single tusk, resting it over the side and into his palm. “Seonghwa,” It was, without a doubt, Hongjoong’s breath that hitched that time. “You made this?” The man glanced up at him, unwillingly having to look away from the neckpiece for even a moment.

Another breath. “Yeah,” Seonghwa licked his lips. “It’s a gift. A mating gift, they can be made by anyone, but they are vital for heirs to make before mating.” Hongjoong knew what the fuck it was. Seonghwa knew that Hongjoong knew what it was and what it meant.

The alpha traced his fingers along the intersections of each road between beads and yarn, tusks and teeth. Then, his other hand shifted and pressed into the small of his back, before he leaned in and nuzzled himself into Seonghwa’s neck; scenting him.

Canines bit and nipped softly at the tender skin there, just below his scent glad. Seonghwa felt the warmth of bated breathing against his shoulder and down their blades. He exhaled through his nose, sucking back in the soft breath through his parted lips. “Hongjoong.” He whispered, hands sliding beneath the alpha’s arms to be flat on his back, like wings on both sides of his spine. His alpha purred in response, like a sleeping dragon awoken from rest to the treasure of a lifetime. “Hongjoong.” He muttered again, breathier, and said male bit gently at the lobe of his ear.

”What did my father tell you before you left the borders to come here?” Seonghwa pulled his alpha closer, protected by the warmth of a crackling fire. He could not tell whether the heat came from that burning wood behind him, or the beast upon him and clung.

The soft bites stopped, and the alpha’s breaths did not blow down his neck for a second long enough to make Seonghwa’s throat tighten, before a heavy head was rested on his shoulder, and he was brought closer. Hongjoong continued tugging at the neckpiece, admiring it and learning it with his eyes closed, the same way he has learned the pack leader’s heir with simplistic ease he should not have. But, then again, he had a thing for rebellion.

Dark brown hair against his bare neck made him shiver, lacing into the fur of his coat where the strands not reach skin. “Your father asked me if I would still be making well on my promise tonight.” The words sent shivers wracking down his spine. “I told him I would.” Seonghwa swallowed thickly, and he rested his weight into the man on his shoulder in return.

”The prophet has seen that I will not conceive within the next ten months.” He spoke as though the prophet’s vision would be an obstacle, as though he was afraid that he would not be mated this very night because of it. He was afraid; afraid that the alpha before him would postpone. But Hongjoong could see through him, he could feel the tension in his chest and he could pick up the slight sent of souring berries. Seonghwa was made of glass, fragile and transparent.

”Then you will not conceive, my star.” But he was not just transparent; he was a snow globe, shaken up in order to express the best form of himself.

”Do you think that is going to stop me? It simply means that you will not have pups yet. It means that we are not ready, nor at that stage.” His alpha whispered, and he heard Seonghwa’s every word. He saw through them for what they were, because there was not a time where he’d failed his omega. “I made a promise.” Hongjoong leaned back, wrapping both his arms, scarred from battle, around Seonghwa’s back. “A promise that I plan to keep.” Those cunning eyes were on fire again.

Seonghwa was brought back, taken to a night within these very walls. It was much colder then, no burning fire at it’s center; not even in his alpha’s eyes.

Just under two years ago, where it seemed that the sky would rain eternally and mourn beside him, where he held his alpha for one last night, before the blood hounds would be off for war just as the sun was to rise the next morning. Hongjoong had slept in armor that night, with a spear wrapped in leather and attached to his back. The steel and metal was cold, and Seonghwa did not sleep at all, could hardly close his eyes because he was afraid that with any more force, his tears would spoil his alpha’s skin, and the wolf would wake from his last chance at slumber before trudging through wilderness, proceeding to head off to a war that he was not ensured to return from.

Seonghwa was brought far, far back. ”I will return, my star.” He was afraid, then. Sending the blood hounds off with his final blessing at those borders, watching children cry on their fathers’ shoulders. ”And when I do, I will give you the most of myself that I have. I will hold you, and on the very night of my arrival, I will mate you.” There was no way to be sure of that so spoken arrival.

”But you must swear to me as I swear to you, my darling Seonghwa.” Unforgotten, kept sacred in the tomb that was the heart itself. The very source of pumping blood, life in glory. ”You must swear to me that you will take me back regardless of how long it takes me to return. If your father’s estimation is wrong, you must swear to wait for me. Please, wait for me.” If not a fighter, if not a vicious warrior or an alpha, Seonghwa was emotion. He was feeling, he was will and trust, a swear and an oath.

Seonghwa pulled him close again, pressing their foreheads together as a resting point, the origin on a map. That smile tore wider, spreading dangerously, filling him up past the capacity of adoration. Of absolute, and unconditional love.

There was not a parallel where Seonghwa would ever be blasphemous enough to call Hongjoong a liar. And, there was even less the possibility of one where he would not wait until he was grey and old, if his alpha asked him to. If Hongjoong had come home to him from that war with a gouged out eye, then Seonghwa would always stand on the very side of that missing eye to guide him. If he had returned with his ear drums blown out from malicious bombs or deadly impact, then Seonghwa would sit with him and learn sign language. He would speak with his face buried into Hongjoong’s chest just so his alpha could feel it when he whispered his overused love confessions, if matters meant that he could not hear them.

”I had just recently found out that the elders were growing angry with me because I have not yet been mated.” Seonghwa whispered out between them, his long, hooked nose pressed just beside Hongjoong’s sharper, pointed one. Fire on fire, different but similar. “But, when they were informed that I’ve been waiting for you to return all of this time,” he sniffled, and his eyelashes felt heavier than before, sunken like an umbrella in the rain.

”They spoke no more.” There was some strange comfort in feeling his alpha let out the deep breath that he did. “And they are proud, the prophet told me. They are proud that I have chosen such a mighty warrior to mate me.” In his head, Seonghwa spoke aloud that the elders were not the only ones who held pride. Truly, there was no one more proud than he; because he had the hands of the most passionate man on him, and there was nothing that was not to be proud of.

Hongjoong hummed quietly, a sound that buzzed through his body, one that ran down far and deep into Seonghwa’s chest. “You won’t regret it for even a second.” The velvety, rich voice was much closer now, with breaths puffing against Seonghwa’s mouth as it spoke; before he too, hummed.

”I know.” And he did, he knew it like he knew these woods. He knew it better than he knew the orange sea and the ridges of the carved hyena tooth.

The tips of their noses touched, and there was a spark; a firecracker that went alight like that soft dust that kept children young forever. A form of enchantment that left them floating on clouds, in a never land where the world beneath was none of their concern. Hongjoong’s hand lingered over his chest again, grazing bare skin that he had always sworn to be the most honeyed, before his eyes flickered down to the neckpiece beneath his fingertips. There was a certain haze in his expression, a glow that was more dim than Seonghwa was used to, but without doubt, just as intense; if not more.

”So,” That smokey scent filled the air with a certain mist, pheromones strong in the desire to protect, to keep his omega close and near. “When can I have my gift?” Hongjoong licked his lips, looking up at Seonghwa with eyes far more mischievous than necessary.

Seonghwa scoffed out a breath, looking away and sliding his hands down to firm hips. The wind outside of their haven sang and it howled, and, Seonghwa felt that if he had truly wished, he could become the wind. “As soon as you stop giving me those eyes.” The paintings on the wall shifted, they threw their spears and fought their battles that were caught in time, because there was some impact that was brought upon the woods by that piercing glare, ripe flames of blossoming pupils that would make a man think it could conquer anything.

”You like it.” A grin, cheshire and impish. Seonghwa stared straight again, blinking flatly before muttering under his breath. “Take off your shirt.” He swatted a hand in a manner not nearly as nonchalant as he would’ve liked it to be, crescent eyes accompanying pursed lips with a bothersome amount of warmth bursting within him.

The expression he was leveled with was nothing less of amused, a spark of victory in dancing flames. But, to Seonghwa’s favor, he did not speak a word while he complied, taking a step backward and pulling away with his touch fading like ancient writing after erosion.

”Of course, my star.” Hongjoong muttered, reaching down to pull at the hems of his shirt. His arms crossed over one another at either side, and inch by inch, the prettiest, most delicate scarred flesh was exposed to before Seonghwa. Skin that was as smooth and sweet as cocoa toffee, but as musk as coffee beans and worn as leather boots. The shirt was tugged up and over the alpha’s head, before thrown carelessly to the floor, and Seonghwa had it in him not to care, just this once. Although, he wasn’t blind to the way Hongjoong tried to subtly hide the shirt out of his line of vision with his foot.

Seonghwa sighed quietly, his plump lips pressing into a thin line, mellowed out into a smile at the corners. “Such a pup.” He breathed out a breathy giggle, reaching out to touch the soft, lush skin. His fingers brushed against collarbones draped over by milk tea, coated in the gentlest layer of glaze. A dune where the bone beneath skin curved in a way that called him to touch, and those deep, hazelnut eyes fluttered closed when he did. An exhale of breath, from the lungs and through the mouth, warm like the blood that rushed through Seonghwa’s body at the mere knowledge of his alpha being in a contented state of mind.

Hongjoong had never been so compliant without throwing out a cocky word before, and Seonghwa trailed his fingers to brush against the dip between his neck and shoulder. “Can’t get enough of me, can you?” Ah, there it was. Perhaps the annoyance was not the claim itself, but in the fact that it was true.

”Mm,” Seonghwa hummed, walking slowly to round the alpha where he stood. “The call is coming from inside of the house.” He whispered, pushing Hongjoong forward just barley, standing behind him and kneading the muscles in his back. They were tight, tension built between nerves and joints wherever Seonghwa’s hands seemed to roam. A deep sigh, and a body was melting back into and up against Seonghwa’s sincere palms.

”Are you saying I’m full of myself?” Came a quiet, low voice, smokey and light. Seonghwa’s hands caressed the sides of Hongjoong’s ribcage, gliding up and down with ease and care. He pressed his fingers into tight nerves in the dark, his eyes weighed down heavily by the restfulness of that moment, with his thumbs rubbing firm circles into sore skin. He smiled distantly, a strong surge of endearment in his gut as he shrugged mindlessly, leaning forward and pressing the lightest kiss to the bottom of the alpha’s nape, where his backbone connected to his keep his head on right.

Skin on skin was momentary, before he was pressing warm palms into thick shoulder blades. “Am I?” He chuckled, raising an amused eyebrow that Hongjoong could not see. Then, his fingers traced the rough edges of uneven, raw skin. A jolt and a wince, and Seonghwa was murmuring gently into Hongjoong’s ear. “You’re hurt?” He breathed out, ever so gently feeling around for that area of thaw and tender tissue.

He felt the muscles beneath his hands constrict again, before loosening almost immediately. His alpha sucked in another sharp breath, before nodding slowly. “Battle wound.” And, the words in themselves had Seonghwa’s chest tightening with a suffocating amount of pressure; the kind that made his throat burn and inflated his heart until it was heavy. He felt more hesitant to touch, for only an instant, before tracing the length of which his fingers could feel the wrinkles and stitches of torn skin. It went down beneath his skirt, further than the waistband of loose cloth, and stopped just beneath the shoulder blades, where fiery wings of a Phoenix would burst out of his skin if he had been reincarnated as a bird to best represent his spirit.

Seonghwa’s eyebrows creased, and his nose stretched as he frowned, pressing his other hand gently at the alpha’s hip. His mouth opened, fearsome words on his tongue and ready to escape, before an answer was coming before he could even begin to speak those words or ask his question.

“It isn’t recent.” A little less weight, less suffocation pressing down on sores of a protective heart. “Nearly healed, actually. I had it wrapped for most of the journey back, so the tension has left me sore.” The voice was like chamomile and melatonin, and Seonghwa’s sour pheromones were not as strong, and they hadn’t even gotten the chance to rot. Because, somehow, Hongjoong always knew what to say. He knew what was plaguing his omega’s mind like he knew which way to point a spear; quick, sharp, precise.

If it had not been so dim in the cave, then perhaps Seonghwa would have checked for the severity of bruising and discoloration, but there was something in him, an intuition that allowed him to trust Hongjoong to tell him if the wound had even gotten close to infection. As little as he trusted the alpha to properly care for himself, with a single look over his shoulder, there was a a glow of wholeness and promise that had Seonghwa tripping and falling all over again.

”Have you been allowing the medics to disinfect it after your bandage changes?” Seonghwa muttered too calmly for the way his utterly in love heart pounded, voice a shallow whisper, but so nurturing in all it’s reality.

”To the best of their ability.” And there was ease. Gifts of mutual sighs, relief in them both but for reasons that did hardly differ. For Seonghwa, the release of worry that his alpha may have been in a pain so miserably long without him. And for Hongjoong, the release of worry that his heir was worrying over some ineffective wound; because no matter how many scars he’d been prepared to return with, none would ever be as deep as the ones that would dim the stars in those eyes.

Then, between them was nothing but the crackling of embers in the air. The lightest popping and snickering from born flames, before there was the knocking of wood on wood, and tusk on tusk.

So diligently, above a head of dark brown where walnut flickered up to gaze at the neckpiece brought down from behind, Seonghwa did not breathe as he placed it over his alpha’s chest. He tied it in the back all the same as he did himself, letting it hang as a significant kind of symbolism, one of utter adornment. Yet, it was not the same. The warm skin coming into contact with the very tips of his fingers and leather yarn opened up a deep part of him, more than his soul had opened up when he gazed at himself in his mirror, first settling the piece on his own neck to admire the work.

Because, not every stitch was perfect. Not every bead was shaven properly and not every ancient numeral or pattern was carved into them in the way they were charted down in books, yet, it was the most impactful thing to have ever been done before his eyes. Gone by in the smallest fraction of a second, blown past like the nature of a blinking eye, Seonghwa was leaning over Hongjoong’s shoulder until the neckpiece was nothing but blurs of colliding reds and oranges, blobs of yellows, strings tying together where he could not even define the knots or origins. It glimmered much more this way, through the stained glass of tears.

They were clear as soon as they had blurred, but the feeling that kept his heart alive could not have faded even if he had reached into his own chest to curl his fingers around the bloody organ, choking it dead himself. Like a headless man with a curious mind, forever living.

But, his alpha tore open those stitches. He tore them open, because he was the only one who knew how to restitch them with the ease that he did, the only one who could reach in and pump his heart back to regular rate, before sewing closed the open wound. “I can feel you.” A rush of fiery rain flooded and poured from the dark abyss above them, because Hongjoong turned his head over his shoulder, before shifting to face Seonghwa while sending saucers of flames to the ground.

“I can feel you,” calloused fingers pressed into the bare skin of Seonghwa’s chest, where warmth melted honey and berries. “I can feel your heart as it thumps.” And with a hand on his chest, Hongjoong lifted the other to curl around the thickest tooth that was embedded into the center of his neckpiece.

Nimble fingers enveloped it, and when the alpha closed his eyes, there was a shower of dozens of meteors, wailing from the sky in Seonghwa’s belly. Because the man with the beautiful head of brown hair touched that tooth as though his beating heart was truly within it, syncing with the pumping in a hollow room beneath those two fingers with their rough edges. A halt in time, where the moon was just a rock and electricity was just a spark of skin.

All was still, even as Seonghwa reached out a numb limb, his arm stretching the length of those few breaths between them. His fingers rested at the alpha’s temple, his gentle thumb brushing over a closed eyelid in the most delicate manner. He traced the crease, felt soft hairs brush beneath his skin, and the flesh was tender like many things. How it was tender like the grin that curled at the ends of his lips, and it was tender like his core. “You are a warrior.” He slid his hand down so that his thumb pressed lightly into the curve of a cut cheekbone. “A very strong one.” And, there was no way to relieve himself of that familiar pride.

He purred low in his chest, keening as his thumb encircled the surface of skin beneath, and it was grounding. Seonghwa was upright, and his churning stomach would hold everything he was drinking down like a vault of emotion. Then deep, walnut eyes opened daringly to see through him, trailing across all that he could define as himself. Feeling each other out, touch after touch, breath after breath.

”Yeosang hadn’t told you?” He spoke. Seonghwa’s hands vanished and his arms fell to his sides. He turned just barley, facing the desk covered in a livelihood of trinkets and old wooden miniatures, picking up a snarling lion with a missing leg. Hongjoong too, followed. He looked toward the world of artifacts, like a flourishing collection of treasures and old tales, laid out before them. His hands instead, lingered along the dusted corners of the wooden desk, gazing down at the sight of slender fingers with pink knuckles as they curled around a fierce beast.

It resembled the tales that young pups would whisper about in the courtyards, or the history of their people that was to be recited before battles to the death when in severe tribal conflict. A whole generation of lives, wooden humans made of the very trees that breathed air into the lungs of every wolf beneath them, and wooden cars. Rusty springs with less value, and broken radios with loose wires, or shiny things like rings with a missing gem, hair pins with metal flowers of which it’s pastel paints had been chipped to ruins.

Slender fingers draped over a small, silver plane, with short wings and plates on it’s tail that spun if he gave them a push. ”Yeosang hadn’t told me what?” The sound of rolling wheels from the boat made of clay trapped in Hongjoong’s hand made a comfortable kind of white noise.

A desk with wonder on it’s surface, and two doves at it’s very edge. “Well, I’m not going to tell you.” A lovecall was that gentle laugh, a giggle that made walnut eyes crinkle with a mouthful of pearly teeth and shaven canines. “I bribed Yeosang not to tell you, and anything he keeps secret, Jongho keeps secret. I kind of thought he’d tell you regardless, though, because he has a thing for doing what he wants.” The voice was supple and tender, like moisture in a cloud, with the barest sparks of stunning lightning. “But now that I know he didn’t, why would I be the one to spoil my own secret?” Another lovecall rung through the air like waves of light.

The silver plane would be forever on the ground, because Seonghwa lifted his chin and tilted his head to the side, eyeing Hongjoong with an incredulous look. “You’re insufferable.” He huffed out, shoulder checking the shorter man beside him, the man who met his gaze with a snarky expression.

Turning forward again, with inky hair, noir and silky, did Seonghwa mutter with a teasing breathlessness to his velvety tone. “I find out everything. So, it’s only so long before I know what you’re hiding.” He raised an eyebrow, thick and arched as he spoke matter-of-factly. His face went poker, and his shoulders shrugged his thick fur coat down just barley, adjusting it so that the warmth of it could spare him a moment of the cool breeze that shuddered all down his spine when he was responded to with a low, throaty laugh. He could feel eyes linger on his tribal tattoo that found exposure from beneath his coat.

”Right,” and he could practically hear Hongjoong lick his lips. “Because you’re the son of the prophet and secrets are whispered into your ear through your dreams.” Really, Seonghwa almost argued that he might be, just for the fun of it. But, instead, he gave the more logical and truthful solicitation.

With a hum, his plane was taking flight across that wooden desk this time. “No,” he shook his head, deep voice a solemn whisper. “Because I have an alpha who couldn’t even consider refusing to tell me anything I ask of him.” That must’ve done it, because a clay boat was sinking into the darkest corner of the sea with an unforgiving groan that could have pointed it’s own finger. He was probably cruel, a witch with his brew or a ghost with his haunting, never at rest. But, forgive him if he missed calling Hongjoong his, and forgive him if he was curious as to what he was being held out on. And, besides, there was that crackle of amusement, that grin in his alpha’s voice that dared him to find out.

A satisfactory hum honeyed through Seonghwa’s lungs, and he whispered with a suggestive eyebrow. “Unless I am mistaken.” His plane made landing, and he rested his hip on the wooden desk while turning toward the man beside him. Those eyes that were so deep, he was bold enough to search them, to walk into their flames and set himself on fire. And, perhaps that sunken boat made peace at the bottom of the sea, at rest in a world full of the deepest blue and mossy green.

Hongjoong shook his head, and he mumbled with a fond eye roll. His fingers tapped against wood, and his canines glimmered as the flash of an undecipherable smile curled upon his beauty. “You are not.” Were the words whispered from his lips without a second to hesitate, or a moment to deny? That was something known by every other in their pack, because it would have been simply unrealistic to believe that no man saw that passion in the alpha’s eyes when he looked at their heir. A passion that went deeper than protection, deeper than respect and honor. Something that had to be given back, in order to blossom with the most fruitful of colors.

The neckpiece of flames seemed to glow brighter then, a fire that could not be put out if you pleaded it to. And the wild beast it adorned was no less alive. “When we were at war,” a smooth voice spoke, and Seonghwa knew he had won. Like the strongest of liquors, that left a burn in your throat and knocked you back a few blows, was that voice in it’s surrender.

”I was afraid. I mean, everyone was, but I think I struggled more than the rest of the pack. I was truly afraid, and the moment I was out on the grounds of a battlefield, was when I realized how easily I could have been killed. Because amongst all else, I was but a man. No stronger than any other there.” There was a furrow in his confession, a sense of confusion that left his head turning with thought. As though he was really trying to find out how the world could have your head one way, just to turn it another.

”I would tell you more,” There was the softest chuckle, and Seonghwa felt the warmth of a familiar fire again. “But I’m not too appeased by the idea of my boyfriend thinking I’m a coward.” And there was a scoff, breathless and amused. Hongjoong raised an eyebrow, looking up at him with a challenge in his eyes. Soemthing told him that the alpha was not at all afraid that he’d ever see him as cowardly, that it wasn’t even a thought in his mind. But, just as much, there was something telling him that whatever he was not being told, would take time. Because the scar that shred his alpha’s back raw had not come from thin air, and Hongjoong had not ever before jolted at his touch, no matter how sore the wound.

Those few words were enough. They were bravery and vulnerability if the gods had ever condoned it, and they were fulfilling. The slightest, vaguest, quietest confession, spoke thousands of secrets that Seonghwa took quite seriously.

Seonghwa knew that what he had been told was no lightweight joke, and it was no delightful memory to reminisce. He knew by the flames that settled down in those warm, walnut eyes, and he knew by the gentlest smile that assured him of all his worry.

Through the collision of their easy gazes and the mellow atmosphere, there came hum. “Mm.” Seonghwa tilted his head to the side, hair brushing against his golden skin. It was healing in itself to see, and Hongjoong would have never told him how adorning those boba eyes were. He liked to keep the things he loved most to himself. “What could you have possibly bribed Yeosang with to keep that from me? You? Afraid? That is by far something he would never shut up about.” Liquid smooth, molten and warm, honey on the tip of his tongue as he spoke could have made the moon howl to wolves so humbly.

With a huff, Hongjoong rested his hip against the desk, too. It must’ve been cold, because a shiver trembled down his body as he crossed arms, a neckpiece of a million beads sparking the kisses of fireworks against his skin. “I told him I’d do all of his hunting for him when we begin to prepare for the winter seasons in the months to come.” So easy, yet so distinct. Yeosang would give for a bribery as simpleminded as that, was Seonghwa’s instant conclusion.

So, once more, he hummed. His pink lips pressed together softly, with the upper lip just the slightest bit puffier than the bottom, and he nodded. His eyes roamed the face he was an utter fool for, taking in the texture of that molten skin without touch. “Mm.” He shifted on his feet, hand reaching out to rest on a warm bicep, and he moved to crowd Hongjoong against the desk with warm eyes, and a warm, thawed heart. He stood before his alpha, towering over him with hands touching skin like a hammer to glass, in the most fragile form.

The quietest, most delicate breath was exhaled between them, with a harmless hint of smoke and firewood. Breathing it in, the scent he had only ever known to follow with dark brown and walnut, the words on Seonghwa’s tongue were careful as his fingers where they laid themselves out against skin.

A tender smile from a precious heir. “I told you I find out everything.” He murmured, sliding a hand up to cup Hongjoong’s jaw with diligence. The skin was like silk slipping through his fingers, and it tickled in sparks like the hairs against his nape. His ring finger traced a healed scar that he knew was behind the alpha’s ear, closing his eyes with a deep exhale as a fresh wave of smoke spread through from the brunette’s scent gland. His knees felt weak, and his eyelids weighed down heavy with the comfort that wrapped around him, limb by limb like a cotton blanket, or a quilt sewn by the shaky old hands of a grandmother, with a slice of cinnamon apple pie on a porcelain plate.

He swallowed thickly, his hand falling to his alpha’s bare shoulder, leaving a path of flames where it slid down to trace over a gorgeous mating gift, before his palm was pressed flat against a muscled abdomen and a warm belly. He licked his lips, because they felt dry as his throat, gone parched as he melted into the floor somewhere in a distant state of mind.

Instead, came a hand to his very own neck. A brazen touch with patience, then the honey of him had it stuck, before calloused fingers scraped against his jaw with this touch like grief, a feeling so heavy but freeing at once. Seonghwa had sought out that touch, and a long time ago, had he come to accept that it could only be found by the branch of these warm fingertips. “If that’s true,” his alpha was speaking again, and he was listening. God, he would always be listening. “Then, perhaps you should find out what it feels like to be mated.”

In the pot of Seonghwa’s gut, a feeling moved itself in and settled down. He couldn’t find footing, and his heart forgot to beat without missing it’s cue. He could feel the blood warming his alpha’s whole self, and he could feel that strange sensation twisting his insides into relentless hunger. Weak knees and a weak mind, with eyes like saucers fallen from the sky themselves. Sweet, sweet berries. Raspberries and blueberries laced it’s scent in the smokey crackling of firewood, held of flames stolen from deep, walnut irises.

Seonghwa leaned in close, like children crowding a teller of folk tales; returned, this moth to bright reds and oranges. “Yeah?” He whispered, lips brushing against his alpha’s chin. His hands were heavier than he recalled when he lifted them to rest on a scarred waist, and they were at a drought of strength when he held tight, like opening a jar of strawberry jam early in the morning, when your limbs were still weak and your bones were lame. Somehow, he was nuzzling into that addictive scent again, burying his face in the scent glad behind the curve of an ear, breathing out with no breath at all; “Do you mean that, Hongjoong?” Chest to chest, and a reassuring murmur.

There was a tilt in that voice, a grit that was knocking over the pot in his gut again. “Yeah.” And the hand that had slid around to the back of his head was at his throat, softly, with nails like the calibers of a bullet. “Need me to show you?” With gentle force, Hongjoong was easing his head until they were face to face. Familiar flames were brightest this way. Or, perhaps they were brightest within that split second before contact.

Some strangled noise, shocked and caught off guard broke through Seonghwa’s chest as he was pulled in rather aggressively, torn into a deep kiss; lips devoured by a beast, heat against his mouth from the scorching touch of the wildest phoenix with fire breathing from it’s soul. He recollected himself, hands roaming before set to slide up a warm back, and his eyebrows furrowed as he relearned the patterned movements of the mouth he had not felt against his own in so long. At his throat, short, calloused and rough fingers replicated the edges of shapes mindlessly. A heart, wrapped in blood that was rich and velvet. An attentive thumb traced a heart over the lump of his adam’s apple endlessly, and he was nothing less of kissed senseless.

Embers were breathed down his throat, and drunk on the feeling, he was pushed up against the desk instead, collectively unaware as his alpha turned them around. He leaned down to meet the starving mouth, and it was as though they could not stop after they had already begun. “Fuck,” Seonghwa huffed, sucking in a sharp inhale as he was taken on by a warm muscle in his mouth. The languid tongue against his own was so good, blunt tastebuds slowly rubbing the roof of his mouth in an incomparable sensation.

”Hurts,” Seonghwa spluttered, pressed up against the desk with such force that the wood had begun to penetrate his spine in a way that he was not pleased to feel. But, he was pulled away from it the very moment disapproval left his reddening lips. And, that made influx to his building arousal like a cherry on soft cream. The hand on his throat pressed down just barley, and he was guided to the floor with a thin string of saliva keeping them attached like the crimson string of fate.

”Easy, baby.” With the upturn of a taunting smile from his alpha, he was on his knees without complaint. “That’s it. ‘m going to mate you, going to show you how much I’ve been missing your pretty sounds.” The pot overran with addiction, and it boiled over like the arousal seeping from his pheromones. He sat back on his calves, and Hongjoong met him halfway for another carnally restless kiss. Hands and claws were everywhere they could reach, and the juicy, sweetened scent of berries was incense as much as the smokey scent of dark chocolate; sticky s’mores of lust.

His wanting stretched into it, marshmallows between their warm lips. He nodded like a drunken dog, leaning in and opening himself up from the inside, and there was a pause, a moment of the clock stolen. A hand that was rough by nature but gentle by sickening love held his jaw to keep him still, and with lips ghosting one another’s, low words were mumbled into him.

”You know I missed you, right?” Light strands of dark brown hair tickled his forehead and dusted over his closed eyelids. His fingers found their way higher, threading into it and curling amidst the tresses like he had never felt the touch of man before.

Seonghwa let out an inaudible mewl. “Mm,” a thumb over his bottom lip. “I know you missed me.” He spoke, and the smile on his swelling, glossy lips outstretched like the beauty of a million thieves, as much as it flowed through his thick, baritone voice when it thrilled. Something in that singing voice of his intuition knew that his alpha could feel as much as he could hear it, and he would treasure it as much as he had missed it.

A hoarse, breathy chuckle had Seonghwa crumbling to his last bits and pieces. “I’m responsible for making you wait so long. So I’ll make it up to you, yeah?” And, it wasn’t truly his fault he had been away for so long. With no doubt, war was amongst them and the blood hounds were supplied with the boldest of warriors, and they both knew as well as the other that it would be a foolish act for Hongjoong to stay. But, that sweet talk was a form of bliss that had his head spinning round and round, like the flashing lights on a carousel. So perhaps, the false severity was just as horrible as the heir’s adoration for it.

But when there were these firm hands sliding beneath his forearms and lifting him slowly to his feet, whether it was or wasn’t did not matter. He was following his lover blindly, guided to a world where everything was so safe, past one fire that warmed the back of his neck and the side of his face, while being led into another, with flames that were no less tame.

He tumbled and wobbled with his best management of footing, but the truth was that with his alpha gazing up at him through the world that went up and flames at their feet, he had already fallen. A taunting smirk, a tamper with his self control, and he had fallen again. Then, a body pressing his to the bed, pushing him to sit at it’s edge, he had fallen once more. The fire breathed into his throat had his lungs sore and burnt, each inhale filled with ashes and smoke, and he watched as his alpha melted into the sea of orange and red that reflected so prettily onto the wooden planks of the floor.

Leaning back onto his palms, Seonghwa spread his legs wider to invite his alpha in, the one man who could ever look up at him like this. He whimpered desperately, seeking his alpha out, the one man that could ever make him pant and beg so restlessly. His imp of a lover kneeled slowly, pressing hands onto the cloth above his thighs, closing himself in between the open legs and kneading any part of flesh in reach. Seonghwa exhaled shakily, head dropping back as his alpha began nuzzling into the dent just beside the forming tent in his pants.

His hands clawed into the sheets as the sharp nose pressed around playfully, canines nipping so gentle to where he could hardly feel them, but he knew they were there and roaming. What he knew more than anything in that instant, though, was that his alpha was going to give him all he needed. His alpha was going to make well on his promise.

”Please— just…” Seonghwa’s neck craned as his head lulled around dumbly, like a blindfolded man running marathons on a cliff’s edge. His body was already so warm, his knuckles white and pheromones untamed. But, the fierceness could not level the look in Hongjoong’s eyes when he slid a hand from his thigh to cup the boner right before him.

And, Seonghwa knew the words like a graceful poem by heart, or a song with lyrics so beautiful, composed by the gentle and raw hands that caressed like Hozier. “What is it, Seonghwa? What is it that you want from me?” The man breathed, and the hound was so striven by desire that the sweetness of berries was slowly washed down, overpowered. Because fire could set even Mother Nature to her last trees and ridges, if it dared to be hungry enough, and if it was so bold to feed. “Tell your alpha what you’ve thought about all this time he’s been away.” He was not waiting, and his fingers were shameless as they worked on the fasten of Seonghwa’s pants.

The heir tilted his head back so far, his neck must’ve snapped and his crown of a million invisible blessings must’ve fallen just as harsh as he had. The beddings weren’t enough, and his twitching fingertips found a head of dark brown hair. He decided then, that he would never let go. He would entangle his fingers until the very strands of hair were embedded with them.

”And I don’t mean all of those precious tears of longing you must’ve shed, although those are just as special.” He whispered, licking his lips. “Im talking about the late nights that you’ve spent alone, writhing around in bed and grinding into your soft palm, wishing for something rougher…” Seonghwa was lifting his hips, and his pants were tugged down below his thighs.

“For hands that could treat you properly… that could send you into a bliss of ecstasy. What did you think about, Seonghwa?” The pants were thrown elsewhere, sent to burn in the flames. “Who did you think about, Seonghwa?” There was blood rushing to Seonghwa’s fingers, and his grasp was steel.

His head fell back with a strangled, choked up and wispy moan, hips jerking up from the bed. There was a hand inside of his boxers, touching around and feeling up the puffy head of his cock blindly, pressing two fingers against the slit. He was dizzied, drunk on his every sense, because he was being filled up with an undying passion through all forms of relevance.

Those hazelnut eyes, his own gone blurry as his vision fixed on the ceiling. That smokey scent of pheromones creating an untouchable mist around them, the taste of those lips lingering. And the sounds, the quietest hitches and hums, they lured him in like a starved dog. But, at the foremost of his mind, quite literally on the surface of his skin, were the rough hands that Hongjoong spoke of, and the rough hands he knew were his. There was no man else who had that balance, no wolf as full, no alpha as gentle.

So those hands caressed him, touching and brushing against his cock that had begun to weep, and when it was pulled out and over the band of his boxers, the air that encompassed it was just as warm. Everything was on fire made of the tenderest flames, like the soothing heat of hot chocolate on your tongue. His eyebrows furrowed, and he mewled in a manner so beautiful pitiful, the alpha chuckled, leaning closer with every passing breath until his lips were pressed up against the side of the curved cock. “Look at me. Look at me while I make it up to you,” the words were murmured against the pulsating of his length that throbbed even more, aching and sober.

All efforts made to look upon that gorgeous face, curled into something sly and seductive, with grinning lips pressed up against his cock, they had nearly gone to waste when Hongjoong licked from the base and up to the cut of his cockhead. His eyes rolled back, and against his will had he torn a hand from the tresses it was in to bite down on, muffling a moan.

”Missed you so bad, you know.” Somehow, even with that soft tone, Hongjoong’s voice was so husk and raspy. And, the fire in his eyes complimented the oranges of his necklace well. But the tongue licking another wet stripe up Seonghwa’s length had his brain gone dumb for an unnecessarily long breath. “Do you remember the last time we did this, my darling? Mm. It was you on your knees, with your mouth on me last.” The alpha chuckled out, so quiet that it was chopped out and breathy. “I still think about it. Been wanting to return the favor for so long.” Both hands were on it, stroking slowly, tauntingly.

They went still for a moment, just letting the length limply hang over the sides of his fingers as it twitched and hardened, but it was worth, because when the strokes came back, they were firmer, with purpose. “Been dreaming about swallowing down this sensitive cock. So you’re going to watch me while I take it, yeah?” Vines with fresh and ripe berries hung from the walls, polluting the air with sweetness. Seonghwa closed his thighs, pressing them into his alpha’s warm body, and he whined helplessly. The dry friction was so strange, a feeling that had him burning up from the outside in.

An elbow gently nudged at his leg, and Hongjoong gazed up at him through his eyelashes and brown hair, his lips carved to such perfection that his words were almost irrelevant. “Open up for me, while I open up for you, baby.” The man leaned forward and pressed his mouth to the smooth skin of Seonghwa’s toned stomach, reaching down to pat his thigh with a touch like summer wind.

Prickling at Seonghwa’s hairline were droplets of sweat, a rose in the rain, and his eyebrows furrowed as he nodded with a shaky breath. Like gates to a gift, a blessing like the one he was, his legs spread wider without jabbing into his alpha’s body; slowly, he opened up. And in immediate response, Hongjoong’s wet mouth was on him, taking in his pulsating cock and engrossing it within seared warmth. He hollowed his cheeks, eyes fluttering closed while his hand clawed at the heir’s thigh, the other firm at the base, holding it still for him to suck.

Unable to last even a minute with his slender legs spread, Seonghwa closed in on his alpha again, caging him in between his soft thighs once more, but the mouth had not let up. Rather, it took his cock deeper into that heat, compressing his tip deep into Hongjoong’s throat. He groaned around it, blindly reaching to claw at Seonghwa’s leg, lifting it up and over his shoulder while giving an approving moan back to the choked up cry his lover let out. It sent vibrations through his cock, and it shot trembles down his spine.

”The other one… give it to me,” Hongjoong let the heavy meat slump out of his mouth, tongue pressed up against the underside as he murmured. His lips glistened, coated in the thinnest, shiniest layer of saliva as he kissed along the curve. “Put your legs on me.” It came out rough and hoarse, a sound that only he had, before he was taking it deeper, until his nose pressed into Seonghwa’s pelvis.

In a state of mindless bliss, the heir was stripped of every royal robe he had ever worn, of all the golds and silvers his mother used to gift him upon her return from the far lands, way out past the borders, and he was left to nothing but his last instincts. That return of howling within him, a wailing that never ended, it broke out as a silent moan when his mouth fell open at the feeling of his cock deep down in Hongjoong’s throat. He squirmed and blabbered out incoherent pleas, hands frantic and indecisive; in his alpha’s hair, in the bedsheets, shoulders, mattress, balled up until his knuckles turned white and marks were in his palms.

”You’re so good… alpha, ‘m going to cum— I’m,” his back arched up so he could get impossibly snug into that mouth, before his stomach was contracting and his hips were lifting off of the bed. Still, his alpha pressed him back down, taking his other leg and hooking it over his shoulder. Sucked dumb of the sense in his mind and the stars in his eyes, he locked his ankles at the neck, hands at the back of Hongjoong’s head as he fought the urge to buck up into his mouth. “Getting me so close, mmph…” he let out a wet sob, tugging at the tresses that kept him connected to the only reality he was able to process, and Hongjoong slid his rough hands up to the dimples in his lover’s back.

He moaned around his mouthful of cock, the fire in his eyes so alive and proud, smug and playful as he watched how he made the man above him fall apart. And if his plump lips weren’t wrapped around that glistening tip, the filthiest, foulest words would be spilling from his tongue in place.

His hands pressed beneath the soft skin of Seonghwa’s ass, kneading curiously and pulling him closer, until his face was blurred by the casted shadow from his hair, pressure from the warm abdomen that was coiling with the urge to release, or, perhaps it was the tears welling in the glistening pearls of Seonghwa‘s eyes. Within them, a million wild flames strung together like the chords to an unalike rhythm, a form of devotion, a form of reflection.

Hongjoong moved to that rhythm, a melody of crackling fire that set ease within the haze of pleasure and love. He bobbed his head, puckering his lips and knitting his eyebrows together in deep concentration, making sure that his beautiful little blessing felt nice.

He swallowed down on it, pulling the plump, warm butt closer, fingers pressing into the flesh as he pulled the cock as far into his warm, wet, soft mouth as possible. The bridge of his nose pressed into the faint outlines of abdominal muscle of Seonghwa’s honey skin. “Mm, mm…” he moaned lowly, a gargled sound from far within his throat, forced out past the cock he hollowed his cheeks around, taking it with greed and hunger.

A hiccup, a whimper, and nails clawing at Hongjoong’s scalp while the heir winced in sensitivity, hips bucking slow and desp, full rotations until his balls were the only thing keeping him from shoving every visible part of his aching boner down his alpha’s throat.

”Ah, ‘m going to… can’t hold it—” he whined further, moans growing so loud that they scraped his throat sore with each one, until he was flaring like the wings of the firebird in his alpha’s eyes. His arms curled around the back of the man’s head as he bared his canines with a whimper that came straight from the core of a helpless animal, clinging onto the warm body. “So deep, you have me so deep and I can’t… a-alpha,” he gasped, the wind out of his lungs and sanity out of his mind. He hadn’t known whether to pull away or chase the pleasure, it was so overwhelming that it hurt. His pheromones were so strong in this blinding mist that he wasn’t even sure he was upright anymore, as long as he was thrusting into the heat of his alpha’s mouth.

The hands pulling him closer roamed his skin, fingers clawing at it as though Hongjoong wanted to eat him alive, and a strong moan vibrating all around the girth of his cock had him doubling over, shrieking like a pup caught in a trap, his toes curling as he captured his alpha in a domain of his presence. He could feel the fingers smear slick around, brushing against his hole and filling the room’s entirety with the intoxicating sweetness of raspberry. His cock jerked inside of the tight throat, and Hongjoong closed down on it as though he knew without doubt what was coming, and he wanted it all to himself. A wolf of greed and hunger, one who touched him and held him like he knew every route to every curve.

It took nothing more, and with a broken up sob as a final warning, Seonghwa’s frame compulsively stiffened, and he let go of the turning feeling in his belly. As soon as the hot cum filled Hongjoong’s throat, the wolf was growling and inhaling strongly, like he could feel the connection all throughout him. His curious hands became entitled and desperate, and they found their placing as he swallowed down the last of the semen.

There was so much of it that the sticky release made his mouth bubble up, creamy white at the corners of his swollen lips. But it was only for the second before he gulped thickly, wiping his mouth with his finger then sucking off the excess. The sight had Seonghwa’s world spinning, and his hands fell limply from his alpha’s hair as he dropped back against the mattress mindlessly, feeling himself shiver and mewl as he was milked out.

Hongjoong sighed contently, gently licking at his omega’s cockhead with a tight grip on the base, fist pressed up against his soft balls. “I’ve been needing you so bad,” he breathed out, voice hoarse from the soreness of his throat as his hands relocated, and he was pressing Seonghwa’s hips down against the bed while trailing sloppy kisses up his thighs. Then, he guided them to a milky chest, unmarked and full. “So fucking bad.” He hovered above the man and pressed his hands beneath his underarms, before using a force so immesnse that Seonghwa yelped, hiking him up higher on the bad.

He was crowded against the blankets and headboard as a fire obtained him, encircling him in a state of vulnerability. The flames touched him, cradled his jaw, and they whispered to him. “Never want to forget how your cock feels again…” and they corrupted him, finding their way inside as a light in his overwhelmed spirit. He reached out to the flames, and tugged them closer, drowning in the abyss of their warm promise.

This needy, helpless whine broke through him as his alpha gazed down at him by an irresistible heat, pupils dilated so far that his eyes were black and clouded. The neckpiece glimmered that way, filling in for the light that the man took from himself to put onto Seonghwa. “Never want to forget it,” he confessed again, jaw squared and eyes narrowed. He pressed his thumb to the heir’s chin, holding it still as he murmured. “Want me to remind you how my cock feels, too? C’mon. Tell me you want it.” His other hand slid down to fumble with his skirt, the fabric long and black, draped over Seonghwa’s lower body like a shield of protection.

The man beneath him squirmed, desperate to be filled, to be knotted and bred. “Hongjoong, if you don’t give it to me right fucking now.” He gritted, back arching as hands slid down his stomach. His moans were breathy and uneven, wavering with each one that came out of him in a series of pleas. That familiar, smug smirk curled onto his alpha’s lips, lopsided and lousy in a way that had his cock twitching back to hardened capacity. And, he covered his face with a flustered hand, feeling the immediate impact of his demanding tone. Yet, he was still shameless enough to murmur under his breath, knowing he’d be heard. “Stop teasing and mate me already.” He hissed, arm slumped over his eyes with this false sense of tranquil that if he couldn’t see Hongjoong, then he himself could not be seen.

”Oh,” the alpha chuckled, leaning back to kneel over him while undoing his skirt, pulling it down and off of his body, and he was a sick bastard for having nothing of undergarments beneath. “You want me to put my mark on you, right?” Yet, Seonghwa’s eyes rolled back into his head with a loud moan at the thought. This entire time, his alpha had known how desperate he would be.

He knew how much he would want to have him, and had changed himself into the simplest of things, a gorgeous silk skirt with an outer layer of panther fur— Seonghwa’s skirt, at that, and removed it like the unsheathe to his swear. “What if I gave you more than one, mm? Took my time and marked your body up. Made you feel like I was rearranging your guts, baby.” The man chuckled, wasting no further time as he reached forward to pull Seonghwa’s boxers down the rest of the way, fingers brushing against tender skin as he disregarded them.

Seonghwa was left open and bare, but not without the alpha that covered upon him, holding up a guard of thrones for but only one man, for an heir, for a lover. “I don’t want to wait anymore. I want to mate you now.”

He breathed out deeply, leaning down between the smooth, spread legs and sliding two fingers down to collect the sweet slick that thinly coated plush thighs and a puckered entrance. He groaned, smearing it around in more of a mess while biting his lip to refrain himself from sinking his canines right into the supple flesh his fingers traced along. “So sweet. My pretty Seonghwa.” He murmured against the skin, quickly darting his tongue out to lick a feathery stripe up the man’s entrance, slick on his tastebuds like the most natural berry juice.

”Hongjoong.” He attempted to sound stern, and he truly did want to, but it came out as a sensitive whimper, the name of his alpha nothing more or less of a moan by his tongue. “Mate me.” He searched for those hazelnut eyes, hand wandering up to the sharp jaw that trailed along to the breathtaking face with a million small scars. “Reduce me to your breeding bitch, Hongjoong. Then tell me you love me after.” His hand fell back, his eyes went closed.

Still, the alpha followed with kisses and his clean hand to cradle his lover, hoarding and treasuring the man he once swore to, and would swear to again and again. He pressed a palm into the bed for stability, but the other was too feverish not to press to his star’s skin at the waist, lingering there as a low hum built up within his throat. “Spread your legs wider.” Was all he mumbled, the hand with residue of smeared slick wandering down as Seonghwa did just that. His rough, nimble and diligent fingers moved to the pooling juices that pre-coated the tight hole between those vanilla thighs, gathering it up and smearing it all over his own aching cock.

Each sound was incredibly obscene and filthy, and the heat of the great flames in the room wasn’t all that made Seonghwa’s chest warm. His alpha caged him in and held him down, hovering between his legs and smearing his slick all over that warm, stiff cock that ached to be inside. He reached up, sliding a hand behind a tender nape, and another over the man’s shoulder to claw helplessly at his back when the time would come.

He was pulling him down to nuzzle into his neck, inhaling one another’s scents in a way that was intoxicating, filling the room with the pheromones of pleasure. He pressed an everlasting, consoled kiss into his alpha’s shoulder, nipping at the skin. “Take it slow, please…” and the responding hum in his ear was ever so taunting, with both his feet in the sand of a playground with desire for pillars and lust for fences. His knees locked onto the brunette’s waist, and the heels of his feet pressed into his lower back as the tip pressed against his entrance. “Mm, not that slow,” he laughed through a hoarse whisper, but it was knocked out of him with the first thrust, pushing a wildly deep length into him.

A tongue was licking at the shell of his ear, a hand fumbling with his balls slowly. “Like this, Seonghwa?” The man whispered, his voice husky and amused. He leaned down, their chests pressed against one another’s as he sank into the feeling of that soft heat.

It all felt surreal, truly. Just hours ago, before the moon had set when the sky was still ripe, Seonghwa would not have thought that it’d be this very night, that he’d be under his alpha so terribly soon. Yet the body against his was undeniable, and he could not possibly be dreaming one of those vivid dreams, because never could his mind recreate the fire that was within the hound. It had tried time and time again, to comfort himself of his own desperation, to remember what that touch felt like, what the heat of orange flames felt like.

The hums breathed into his neck, the nails clawing at his hip, the strong scent of aroused pheromones, chocolate and graham crackers and sweet marshmallows over the smokey crackling of wood, it led him like a compass through the mountains he was near stranded in. He could look out upon that arrow, and it’d lead him back home, it’d lead him back to the swimming pools in those eyes and the treasure box of a pearly grin. To the top of a peak, because he was taken so high into this pleasure, and he’d howl his restless sounds of approval to the moon for it to hear how it’s blessed him.

The room felt dimmer, the air foggier and his heart fuller. A waiting haven in the center, an empty place at the core with ink to fill in the blank lines. “Hongjoong,” he called weakly, turning his head to look his alpha in the eyes, to touch the back of his neck and to say his name. “I’ve never been in love like I am right now.” The words were like satin on his tongue, slick dribbling down his twitching thighs as his heat was penetrated. It hardly moved inside of him, yet it still felt so deep; only when their eyes met as they locked together in intimacy, did he understand.

Hongjoong was inside of him. He was in everything that he was, everything that he did. At some point in time, when you fell this deep in love with a wolf so reckless, with a soul like passion fruit, it was hard not to open up, it was hard to close out the winds that sang to breathe life into his lungs. And as the alpha found his hands, locking their fingers together and pressing them into the bed so hard that he felt his white knuckles go numb, he knew he had already let him in. He knew that they were one, that the string pulled out of their chests were tied so tight that no blade could breach it. Wrapped in the bed of blankets and furs, the alpha flashed him that thrilled smirk again.

”Oh, pup.” He cooed, swollen lips curved at the corners as he drifted his hands up and down the heir’s sides, the very skin that was once caressed by the sheaths of graceful robes. He leaned down, nuzzling into Seonghwa’s neck and pressing his mouth to that flush skin, chuckling. He pressed his hips forward, earning a hitched cry as he’d intended to hit the bare womb inside of his lover. “I love you so fucking much.” A deep growl echoed through the dome of his chest, once hollow.

Resting his thumbs beneath Seonghwa’s pectoral, he pulled out slowly, savoring the sensitive whimper that rang through his ear, before thrusting back in with one quick, thorough movement. It had his omega wailing for more, nails pierced into his back.

Groaning, that tight hole clenched around him, and he felt the way it made him throb, desire in all forms coursing through his veins. Seonghwa laid back and took it, clinging onto his alpha with restlessness. To be so close, to be one, to be mated. He closed his eyes and arched his back, the slow rolling of eased hips relocating all of those spots that made him see stars.

”Going to stuff my cum into you, make you feel all stretched out and full on the inside. Might even give you a baby bump of my cum since I can’t give you a real one yet. Hm? Does my omega want that?” He couldn’t help but nod frantically, because that was all he had wanted for so long, all he could think about. Some certain sense of surrender within him, an insane caving was what made him give all of himself away to his alpha. It wasn’t often that Hongjoong used his primal hunger to an advantage, but when the beast on top of him growled, Seonghwa knew that there was no chance he wouldn’t be torn apart then pieced together again, all on this very mattress, coveted in that smokey scent.

They let go of themselves, bare skin against bare skin, warm flesh melding into each other like candles beneath fire’s heat. The slick that squelched with each thrust was filled with sweet pheromones of arousal, and Hongjoong pressed his lover into the bed, panting and growling as his mind was drugged on it, like some animal let off of a muzzle, his instincts devouring him whole. The chain of command, the circle of life that came back around. His longing tore him of any sane flesh he had left, and he would tear Seonghwa down next, would press his nails into that milky flesh until he could lick the ruby blood from his fingertips that it resulted in.

The heir felt his chest tighten as his gut twisted, each thrust knocking his body higher up on the bed as his shoulder blades pressed deep enough to leave dents. He yelped helplessy, howling in deprivation of this addictive feeling that was pleasure, needing it to eat him up. His nails dug so harsh into the alpha’s back that they had begun to crack, and he could hear Hongjoong’s rapid breaths rushing down his neck in a husky stream before he could hear his own thoughts.

”So needy,” he felt the way Hongjoong nipped at his shoulder, enough to tease and make him anticipate, but nowhere near enough to even put him off on momentary satisfaction. “Shredding up my back when l've hardly returned. Missed me that much? Missed my fat knot that much, baby?” It was forming, thickening at the base of his cock, and Seonghwa could feel the bulge pound against him with every skilled rock of his alpha’s hips.

Like the beautiful song of wind chimes or the graceful gleaming and chiming of piano keys, the beads and tusks of the neckpiece dangling above him lulled him into a haze where he lost his mind on ridiculous pleasure, and the flames surrounding his whole being kissed him into a viscous death as the cock driving itself deeper inside of him chased their orgasms.

”Hong— Joong…” He slurred out, but his dark and blurred eyes were shot back with the heated gaze of a sharp glower, one that was not at all of hatred, but in deep focus and concentration, one in thought and conscious. Directly from his face, those eyes faded south, roaming his barest parts. Each place he loved so dearly to be left with dozens of hickeys and love bites. It was sickening in it’s nature, because how could a man with the heart and soul of a wild beast make him feel that he was crowned atop a throne by doing nothing but laying him down?

He listened to the sound of the bed rocking, headboard banging against the wall like white noise and static for a pup in a crib, a crib that was the gentle palm on his cheek. “Mm, I missed this little cunt too,” his alpha hissed, nuzzling at the skin of his bicep with a halo of orange over his head, and the eyes of a wicked jester. “Missed seeing your pretty face.. right before your eyes roll back when I shove it all inside of you.” The heavy breaths breaking through him were rougher, less soft, less decipherable for any man. Down to their very last laws of mankind, they weren’t men at all. And Seonghwa could feel that howling in the stairwell of him once more when teeth sunk into his arm without forgiveness.

There was so much for the heir to think about, that he hadn’t been able to think a thought at all. His hips rocked down with familiarity to chase each sensual roll and thrust, and the feeling of being bitten had him baring his throat, willingly, with his back arched up in a silent act of self sacrifice.

The breaths on his body were burning him up, and his smooth, bared throat was what Hongjoong was turning his head to bite into next, canines puncturing deep, red indents that broke the first few layers of skin. He hiccuped over his first sob as the welling tears in his eyes fell from their ledge of prayers.

It was so far into him, throbbing in his lower stomach, cock hitting his insides and pressing up to places it probably wasn’t supposed to. His prostate was pounded sore, and he felt numb from his tailbone and below. He keened deep from his chest, nodding rapidly until his head was spinning, a carousel with no lever, and he was drooling all over himself while his restless hands tangled themselves in every tussle of brunette strands they could reach. They pressed up to the tenderest areas of every wolf’s head, feeling around for what he knew was there.

Still, reality had this way of thrilling everyone for better or worse, making that known feeling intensify when you faced the truth of it from a different perspective. The fur from warm, brown and fuzzy ears stood up between the slots of his thin fingers. He pressed them both into the punctures of his thumbs and forefingers, massaging them gently. Thrusting quicker and sloppier, the alpha was torn on the bends of growling and whimpering.

And, in every way was it getting Seonghwa so close, the sounds, the biting and lack of self control, feeling the wolf’s ears twitch beneath his caressing hands. The bed creaked in the far end of his mind, and he could hear the wood of the frames scratch against the wall and flooring. His gut twisted, and his sensitive cock jerked and bobbed in response to the rampant thrusts. It’s head slapped against his toned stomach, coating his milky skin in wet splatters of precum that rushed all the way from his abdomen, up his chest and to the column of his throat.

Hongjoong’s hand lingered, smearing it all over his body before gliding up and pressing at the base of his throat, giving minimal pressure. He forced himself in deeper, sliding in every inch as his knot formed and fattened itself up with his need to cum.

And all of the thick, hot and sticky substance would color his lover’s insides, filling him up so that it was spilling out of his swollen and puffy hole still after the knot would go down. “The rest of the pack is going to wonder where their pretty little heir went, while you're kept on bed rest because I split open your soft cunt, Seonghwa.” His head tunnel was dark on all ends, and his pitiful cock twitched once more, his cheeks flushed pink and his hair in a frenzy of midnight black, sprawled out on the bed like his sensitive body.

”What am I supposed to say when they ask?” There was a frown in his voice, false pity and sadness laced in those words rooted in amusement. “Want me to tell them the truth, that I mated you and knotted you full?” Something that hit Seonghwa as deep as the climax approaching, looking over his shoulder for the instant to shove him over the edge. In his vulnerable and tilting mind, he was in the rawest, most protective state. And in fulfillment, he was sickeningly drawn to that possessiveness. He was drawn to the pride Hongjoong held in wanting to be his mate, in making him his mate.

Hongjoong buried himself in the scent gland of his lover’s neck, sweet and mushy berries, so fruitful and ripe that they practically melted on the tongue. He was so aware of everything in that instance, he felt the heels of feet locked around his hips as they pressed into him, and the hands that soothed his twitching ears, so aware of every sensitive sound that broke out beneath him.

He wanted to hold it all to his chest, to press it against himself where his heart ached and pounded on his ribs. But it couldn’t get out, so he buried himself deeper into the scent gland, pushed himself firmer against the body, and let their hearts pound together, calling to each other like their intuition toward the glowing full moon.

His head was pressed further into Seonghwa’s neck by the man himself, brought back in to nuzzle in his scent, sweat sticking to their bodies, reopening the place in his soul that he had closed down for the return of the one man that could ever go there, the wolf that could ever nestle into the woods of green and brown, the chest of his core, and the chest of his most precious gems. And laid out on a wooden desk within that locked room was nothing but a rusty old silver plane, and a cracked boat molded together from clay.

”Tell them the truth.” He murmured, eyelids heavy and skin rubbed raw with passion and devotion. “Tell them what you’re doing to me, alpha.” A strong thrust pushed it’s way inside of him, but it wasn’t as deep as before, because the swollen knot formed at Hongjoong’s pubes pushed a distance between them, and to have their skin flush once more, the thick knot would fill into the entrance that was within the tenderness of a blessing. They broke into one another, split apart and shuffled was a deck of a million cards with the faces of hearts.

Teeth grazed across his scent gland, pheromones spilling from his skin all to be breathed in, and gentle biting beneath his ear had chills running down his spine as he tossed his head back. “I’ll tell them.” A deadly rebirth of life was breathed into him, a smear of palms against his stomach before they pulled his arms down and pressed each limb into the bed by in the sacred of an instance.

The thrusts worked up again, picking their speed with slow rolls, deeper and more precise as his alpha eased on the momentum. He was nearly foolish enough to think that the immense force would have been any more restful, but when a push of hips forward and into him nearly had the bulging knot filled into his insides, he gasped in a strong breath, back arching as he let out a strangled noise, sitting up on his forearms with a guttural cry of that familiar name. Like the arms on a clock, Hongjoong hadn’t missed the right second to pull his omega close, hushing the man and wrapping an arm around his slim waist with a kiss to his neck.

Seonghwa breathed deeply, exhales shaky and nerve wracked as he allowed his arms to collapse back into the bed again, falling back into the pressured hold of his alpha. The sweat prickling in his eyebrows made his eyes burn and water as they fluttered closed, tears sleeping on his eyelashes as words washed over him like dove.

”I'll make sure they know.” They scrubbed him clean of any doubt or hurt that could have possibly snuck in and found a haven for hiding in the crevices of his healing heart. “Going to make sure the elders never question whether or not you're mated again.” His hands clawed harder at his alpha’s back, tearing skin as he whimpered mindlessly, pained hisses breathed into his neck. Then kisses bloomed on his skin, blossoming like flowers from his pores as he was laid down, praises of encouragement muttered against him and brought to life as the slow thrusts pressed with more fever, with more structure and purpose. Blood prickled beneath his nails, and Hongjoong growled as he pulled out to his flushed tip.

When he pushed back in, Seonghwa knew immediately to draw his hands back down and instead claw at the beddings, because the blood circulation in his hands cut off completely as the knot at the base of his alpha’s cock began to push inside of him slowly. The unsustained supply of slick kept him wet and warm, and it was the only thing that stopped him from being torn open as the pulsating bulge pushed into his soft walls.

”Cum with me, my star.” Hongjoong whispered hoarsely, his throat burned raw as fire crackled in his stomach, and his knot buried deep inside of the warmth that his seed bursted inside of. In sync, he reached up to lousily wrap a hand around his lover’s stiff cock, but the slightest brush of his fingertips had Seonghwa arching up into him with a broken warning, white spurts spilling out of his slit as his eyes rolled back.

The orgasm was so strong, so fulfilling, and the bliss of it had yet to die when Hongjoong inhaled his omega’s scent strong, burying himself in it, before nestling his teeth in the smooth, ripe skin just beneath. The sweat of their skin drenched them as the fire bathed them in orange light. It’s crackling heat lived and flourished more than ever, like the passion in Seonghwa’s chest that poured out of him as his vision turned to stars. A passion that nourished the brunette, fed into his system only to come back and gleam. Reciprocation with an intensity of tenfold, filling him up with all of this raw love and savory.

His teeth buried deep into his lover’s throat, sparks and embers flying throughout his mind like popping firecrackers, their scents and fertility tying together with the bond of the mark they had promised one another. An identification of their love, a sign of their maturity, the vows for wolves, withholding like significance rings to mankind.

The retraction had always hurt the most, this indecent pain that struck a newly mated omega or beta like lighting, enough to make them howl like a wolf in birth. The elders said it was because when bitten, your souls truly touched, like the moon goddess had forsaken. So, when the bite was broken, they took a piece of each other’s soul, tearing it from the strength of it’s own origin. That was why the act of mating needed not to last for too long, because when touching souls were left in contact more than they were supposed to, they could combine and thread together, impossible to take apart. And, retracting the bite was more painful than traditional mating bites, because it tore away two souls that were already physically in tact, and more times than not, it tore at the love used for the mating bite just as much.

So, he was careful with the heir, cautious with his blessing of an omega. His hands soothed warm skin, encircling Seonghwa’s hips gently as he quickly pulled back from the bite, immediately going to suck on it for the numbing to overpower the naturally inflicted pain. His mate hiccuped at the sensation, yelping as his swollen and soft cock jerked again, the ends of his nerves going through an electrifying shock.

The buzzing beneath their skin and between their touch was like magnets, pulled in by one another, and on the other sides of an unlikely life could they ever be pushed away by only the force that was gravity. But when the alpha leaned back, rubbing a tender thumb against the bite in his lover’s neck as he was left with his beating heart while looking down on the sight of pure beauty, he knew that not even gravity, or a million lives, whether this was his last and Seonghwa’s first, none of it could keep them from touching.

Like the midnight of his hair, and the pale of his skin, those gorgeous eyes held within them the moon and all of it’s faces. A crescent, full, eclipse, and the one thing that stayed the same, was that the man on it’s surface was Hongjoong himself. He looked deep within them, gazing back in a pool of glorious stars.

That kaleidoscope once more, a never ending stirring that went on for eternities, mirrors facing mirrors, palms against palms, something that was itself in anything else. An expansion of the inside, a domain where every target was fated to be hit. Arrows pulled back on a string from the ends of his fingers, he was pierced back to back.

Like a feather in the fall, the alpha fell on top of that burning star, chest to chest with Seonghwa as he allowed the cum on his skin to spread between their bodies, the fluid of love and lust, the product of desire. He pressed his lips to the temple of his lover’s head, kisses like a fever as he sighed contentedly, feeling the way his mate breathed like their souls were merely one of the many things that had touched. Because, he swore right then another thing: hidden from the world, their minds were one alike.

Hongjoong softly rolled his hips and rode out their highs together, milking every drop of himself into Seonghwa, because he knew that he wanted all of him. He’d waited for so long, stayed so strong for his alpha, and deserved nothing less than everything. Nothing less than all of it. “Feels so warm,” he whispered, eyes heavy and narrow. His hand trailed it’s way up to rest on his own stomach, rubbing the swole skin as his other palm weakly lifted to rest on his forehead in drowsy exhaustion. But, his alpha gently reached up for him, his knot still holding all of his cum inside as he laid a fragile hand on top of his, their fingers interlocking on top of his full tummy.

And, as Seonghwa’s eyes fluttered open to look at him, expression in a strange bliss of sleep and conscious, Hongjoong’s fingers felt numb from all that warmth. His other hand slid beneath his mate’s back, lifting him just barley before falling onto his side, pulling them both onto the bedding, face to face. And this dumbly twisted smile was plastered to his alpha’s face when he looked up at him, something of familiar pride, but much gooier, more tender and mushy; chocolates and marshmallows, and the smoke of a bonfire.

”All mine.” This distant whisper, murmured slow against Seonghwa’s tingling lips, was the truest form of verbal admiration. A lousy grin of his own curled at the corners of his mouth, his legs still wrapped around the alpha’s hips, both their hands rubbing thoughtlessly at his stomach and feeding into it’s warmth.

A reset scene was this nostalgia of recollecting the first time they had ever laid each other down in this bed, and looking at Hongjoong now, just as much could he still see the starstruck man who had first covered up beneath these beddings.

But the orange flames in his eyes were much fuller now, and his hands touched with confidence, with this loving entitlement that threaded through them mutually, a certain rawness that wolves found tearing their chests open when they heard the howling within themselves for another. The very same howling that made Seonghwa go dead on it’s sound as he laid there on a tilting canoe of ecstasy and surrender. His stomach was as warm as his chest, and they were as warm as dusted rosiness of his sensitive skin, with smoke pouring into him like remedy. His irises, like bittersweet black coffee and glistening speckles of sand were clouded over with dense fog, thin and moist the longer you stood within it, and he stared at his alpha with a wobbly smile painted onto the canvas of acrylics that were his lips.

Hongjoong frowned so gently, tilting his head with a shuffle of the blankets, breaking the evened sync of their breaths. His scarred hand slid up Seonghwa’s chest like a waterfall of nectar from the ripest honeycomb. His eyes fluttered down to trail along the path made on his lover’s skin. A path made like the a treasure map, with obstacles that were love bites and sore bruising. Across this bridge, rubies to every heart’s content was an enclosed mark at the base of Seonghwa’s neck.

His fingers brushed along it, his breath hitching quietly. “Do you not like it?” He murmured, a shot in the dark as he chewed at his bottom lip, intimidated with the way Seonghwa was staring at him. But those bubbly eyes narrowed so easily, it almost had him tucking his tail and backing away for considering that the man wasn’t fond of the bite he’d left. It made him wonder how he could even doubt him, when that very omega had been howling beneath him and clawing at his back, when that strong lover had sent him off at the borders, and had met there for his arrival. When his neck was adorned with a forest of flames for beads and heat for tusks, and he had been swayed to promise that mark.

”Hongjoong.” Seonghwa hissed, stern, sleepy. His heavy eyes draped upon his alpha like the moon upon their mercy. “Don’t be foolish.” It was almost a scolding.

He reached up, and the brunette gazed at the way those pretty hands trembled to look for his own rougher one, guiding it back down to rest on his belly. And, he didn’t quite know how, nor did he know why, but there were tears welling in his wandering eyes. His palm pressed against that warm, sticky skin once more, connecting with his mate’s womb spiritually.

And his eyes went a little wide when this faint howl, a soft one that sounded so similar yet so different from Seonghwa’s, so familiar, echoed for a split second in his mind. Like a fired canon into an abyss of passion. A motherly voice, one so nurturing that if it wasn’t the heir’s, it must’ve birthed him and watered his soil all this while. So, it was not hard to fall back once more into the warmth he had left, and it was not difficult to find himself wondering how love had got to him when the orphaned pup inside of him swore it never would. His hands traced every crevice of his lover’s naked body, and there were wind chimes that he knew was the clanking of tusk on tusk from the piece adorned around his neck.

The heir, the blessing that Hongjoong hadn’t figured out how to forget ever since he’d first known him, he pulled the most soft sewn quilt from beneath them, with this smooth blanketing on the underside to layer above them, just over their interlocked fingers. “You know I love it.” His other arm loosely lifted to rest over his alpha’s neck, tangling his hand in the deep brown hair at the low of his nape. The milky skin of his forearm pressed lightly at the curve of a suntanned shoulder.

A light was brought back to the warm liveliness of those eyes, the kind that made Seonghwa groan and roll his eyes. “You do, star?” The brunette leaned in close, lips brushing against the core where his mate’s collarbones met in the middle. He smothered them lower to the sensitive skin of these full pectorals, hand still rubbing at the warm stomach it was guided to. He kissed his way down, mouth on a body like snowflakes on a roof, and he looked up through his eyelashes in the very way he knew got his lover sensitive, giving the gentlest of a mocking pout. A shaky sigh, and he could feel the deadweight of a relaxed man sink into the bed in response.

”Fuck off,” a hoarse voice called out above him, yet the hand in his hair pulled him closer, and he giggled breathlessly. With a low hum, his mouth pressed along the smooth skin and muscle of Seonghwa’s chest, and his hand found occupation in slowly massaging a pectoral. His fingers kneaded it like dough of a savory pastry, and his thumb rubbed below the plump bud of a pink nipple. The same color as those lips, as the head of that soft, poor cock that was sensitive and tingling. And, Hongjoong loved all of it. He’d kiss them all, suck them sore and swollen without hesitation, too.

Breaking his lips away from the bond of whatever sugary glass had him addicted to that skin, he breathed deeply, nuzzling into that scent gland that smelled of fruitful and woodland berries. Intertwined fingers did not unravel, and his rotating thumb did not move any further as he nipped at his omega’s mating mark. “Can't wait 'til I really get you pregnant,” he murmured, and he knew who he’d given himself up to the moment those eyes blinked open to find his own, before searching them inside out and reading Hongjoong like a kind of book, like a legacy that would never die. “When I can have the chance to suck some of the milk from your breasts. It'll be so good, so sweet.” A playful smile, and his thumb finally lifted to press down on the sensitive nub.

Seonghwa’s hand in his hair was gone in a breath, only to swat at the one touching him so purposefully with a bothered whine. “Don’t mess with me if you’re not going to go down on them right now, you little fucker.” And when the alpha immediately let his hand fall away at the gesture, he kissed along the shell of the heir’s ear, with carved gemstones pierced into the lobe. He smiled against it, snuggling closer with an inaudible murmur of some sickening kind of love poetry that always managed to flow off the top of his head, before it’d be helplessly spilling through a smug mouth.

Tearing their hands away from his stomach was a pain that ran in his gut, like a needle and a shock that struck you dumb for a moment, before he was sliding his numb cock out of his mate’s heat, pushing the man onto his back and crawling onto his lap with a shaky moan.

“Didn’t even feel your knot go down.” Seonghwa winced, drawing attention to the way he bit his lip in stimulation without having to try. His own hand went to rub at his stomach no more, feeling the slight swell go down as the the stuffing poured out of him slowly, making his eyes roll back and closed with a silent hum of relief.

And, when he opened them, there were those hazelnut eyes staring at him with a different kind of heat, one that was strange in brewing; a reminiscence of the future. “I’m for real, star.” Hands were back on his chest, rough ones with thick lines between the skin, and he loved that irreplaceable feeling. “If I…” he leaned closer, adjusting to their bare bodies’ comfortability. “When I get you pregnant. Would you let me? Would you let me suck your swole tits of their milk just once?”

The hands pressed and pulled, pushing both of the soft, cushiony pecs together, and Seonghwa couldn’t help his silent whine. Just beneath the cliffs of them, warm thumbs traced circle on his tender skin, feeling his heartbeat in it’s life beneath. Bending down, the beads and smooth teeth of Hongjoong’s neckpiece tickled his abdomen as warm breaths puffed against his skin. And gently, were the words in the heir’s head forming, but distantly they were fading to the drunkenness of trust. He was falling into it, and he was okay with that. He was okay with being touched and whispered to, if it was by the man with dark brown hair and hazelnut eyes, with this undying fire and cunning smile, he was so filled.

Soft lips parted open, pressing down around his nipple and engulfing it within the warmth of his mouth. They didn’t take it in and suck, and his tongue didn’t lull out just yet, because he was letting his mate expect and embrace. On top of Seonghwa, hands kneading those soft pectorals, he listened for the hoarse deepness, the breathiness of a response. “You know your answer, Hongjoong.” It was like grace, and he closed his lips around that pink nipple fully, suckling on it with a contented little sound.

Seonghwa let his head fall back into the pillows, fingers finding and threading to hold onto those brown tresses, and he sighed, pulling the head close. His mind was not there, and perhaps his body was not either. But, wherever they were, as long as he could feel that rough skin and that warm fire, he did not need to decide.

He is the very wolf your father used to keep you from, yes?

He is.