Chapter Text
You should never have come here.
Skipping the Tokyo National Theatre's red carpet stairs two-by-two, you grabbed the brass railing and swung around the base of the staircase to the main floor, sneakers scuffing marble past the crowded intermission bar toward the mezzanine.
This place was not the vibe.
There were two coat checks inside. One near the east entrance where there were already cabs waiting past the pavement with their yellow lights on, maybe for second act-leavers who were drunk or bored of pretending to be cultured. But you'd chosen to check at the west side, closer to the bathroom because you were definitely a little loaded when you got here, nervous as hell and more out of place amidst the velvet and violins and black ties than you'd ever been before. It had seemed like a good call at the time, but here you were now, twitching your right sole back and forth over the polished floor as you waited anxiously behind some rich-ass drunk who couldn't find the coat check ticket he'd lost in his ten piece suit.
The bow of your upper lip was beaded full with sweat, the back of your neck turning dangerously warm.
You were sure the guy hadn't noticed. There was no way. Someone like you was a smear in a place like this; some swanky event you'd only agreed to come to because your pervert boss wouldn't let it go, and then when his wife got wise you decided a little solo ballet evening wouldn't hurt your worldview, so you came anyway. Sucking back two eighteen-hundred yen beers before the first act (is that what ballet sections were called? Also who the HELL could afford to drink here), you crushed yourself into the velvet seat between the wall and a sea of old ladies (at least one of whom was a scammer, because the seat on your left was for sure paid for by your boss) and let the theatre lights dim and narrow in around you.
Black. Then a spear of blue light, stabbing the stage, hollowing the pale form of a male dancer. Ballerina...ballerino? That couldn't be right. He rose as though lifted by an invisible string, the blue light following him, running like a river around the scuff-black stage. His feet fell, raced, beat like hooves wrapped in satin. He jumped, stretched, bent his back ecstatic... Like—like sex. Like nothing you'd ever seen before. Muscles throbbing, fingers outstretched, reaching longer, longer, deeper...
You felt the familiar swell of your dick stirring under your zipper. Shit. You had to piss, too. Two beers were a bad idea before sitting into a culture trap. You wanted to get up, needed to, but couldn't stop watching him. The music pressed higher, a fast piano into a windstorm of sound, and the man flew, lifted, pushed his limbs up like naked fingers through batter, spinning thick and sweet. Unreal. Forward in your seat, you wanted to run, to strip your clothes off, push your thighs through shallow water and fall in until you were face-first. You wanted... wanted to press your hips into his body. Or maybe take his into yours?
Damn. That was unusual.
At some point too soon it ended. He vanished behind the cut of stage lights and sound, and all the old ladies hopped up spry as chickens the moment the intermission bulbs came on. Throats wobbling, they pressed over the litter of wrappers and scarves at their feet, bumping past your knees out of the row like you were invisible. But you were invisible. Because you couldn't get up, or think, or even breathe, really. You didn't know anything about ballet. Or classical music, or anything fancy. This was supposed to be a lark, y'know? One of those things where you could say, I went to a ballet once! It was super boring, isn't that hilarious? But instead you were all shivery with your back to the wall on the second balcony like a little bitch and you still had to piss and nothing really made sense in your head because the way that man's body had moved made you feel things.
And that was when it happened.
The tall, sandy-haired man walking up the aisle for the exit lifted his eyes your way. Wire-rimmed glasses, round like moons caught the light just so, made you look, blink, click.
You said click because there was really nothing else to describe it. Like two magnets falling into one another. Like shhhk. Like shunk. Like doom.
It only happened for a moment as the guy went past you through the covered alcove to the balcony, and behind him you fell forward over your lap like you'd been pinned; a breathless, ruthless heat prickling up under the skin of your nape. Fuck... fuck, FUCK. Time to go. Time to go, and right this second.
Jumping down the row, you sent candy wrappers skittering as you side-stepped the seats like a panicked insect, aiming for the opposite door. Out onto the balcony with your head below the level of the crowd, down the stairs to the mezzanine with your heart thumping in twos, down to where you were now stalled at the coat check, jiggling your leg like keys in an electric socket. The drunks had found their ticket. Fucking Jesus. The attendant slithered into the back, out of sight, and unconsciously you fingered the back of your neck. It was hot; the soft hairs lifted like goosebumps. No raised mark though. No mark.
Maybe it wasn't what you thought after all. He might have just been that good looking – it was possible, right? But you'd never experienced this before, so you had no reference. How did the other omegas deal with this shit? This feeling—like tires skidding out over black ice. It was fucking terrifying.
"Sir?" emphasized the coat attendant in a tone that suggested he'd already said it once.
The drunks were gone, leaving a gap between you and the counter, and snapping your hand down from your neck you leaped forward.
"Sorry—here," you said, pushing the yellow ticket into his hand. "And I'm in a hurry. Sorry."
The man looked at you with a hell of a lot of attitude for a coat checker, then disappeared again. You patted down the countertop. Surely, yeah, it wasn't what you thought. Just some guy and your body being weird in a new environment. This was the last time you were coming to a ballet, that was for sure.
The inside of your nose tickled, and you sniffed. Stopped. Turned rigid.
No. That wasn't...
With a jerk of your head you caught sight of him. Coming down the stairs, turning, scanning, searching for someone. For you. Your nose panged, your whole brain blooming suddenly with his scent, and not waiting a second longer you pushed off the counter and bolted.
"Sir!" called the attendant over your shoulder, and for an instant you looked back longingly at the winter parka you had no choice but to abandon. The fuzzy hood you loved to sleep with snugged in around your face whenever it was cold, or when your pervert boss kept you out too long, like a fox burrowing into its tail. There was nothing for it though. You were already running, already drawing too much attention. But the only way to the front door was across the mezzanine, and you had to get into one of those waiting cabs and out of here, right the fuck now. That man's scent was already crowding in behind your sinuses dizzying; a sharp, heady smell like the syrup of pine, or being lost in the woods at midnight. There was no mistaking it anymore.
This was the smell of an alpha.
Ripping onto the main road in the dark interior of a taxi, you were so relieved the driver at the head of the line was young.
"You don't got a coat?" he asked rhetorically, cranking the heat to blast. He had tattoos on his fingers; pretty rare for Tokyo, even these days. Osaka maybe. You'd only been there once and the grunge scene made you feel old even though you hadn't yet hit twenty-six.
"It's still January, man," the driver went on, skipping the turn signal as he jetted into a dicey right between the waves of oncoming traffic. "Gotta be careful of frostbite when it gets like this." Outside, the snow was beginning to fall again, making fast shadows of the neon up and down the buildings.
"For sure," you mumbled, dazed as you followed the lights with your periphery. Those beers were sitting heavy on your bladder but the relief in your body was palpable; your heart finally slowing away from panic, the fiery sting at the back of your neck turning to a small, albeit persistent itch. Covering it with your palm, you leaned your crooked arm into the window well, letting the fabric of your sleeve make humid smudges across the glass.
Fuck. That had been seriously scary. It wasn't as though you'd never come across alphas before, although they were almost as rare as omegas nowadays; generations of interbreeding with the general population had thinned the special traits to a watery trace, with pure alphas and omegas occurring in only one out of every ten thousand births. Of course, in a city the size of Tokyo that still left over a thousand of you, but even finding a hospital willing to offer special traits care these days was tough. The doctor you'd seen after first discovering your omega sex had since retired to Hokkaido, and the small cohort of omega friends you did have had slowly trickled out of the city where it was safer, and where they could live without anyone discovering them. A few had found mates – one alpha, one normal. The rest you had no idea. Back in your parent's day it was pretty common to hear about alpha attacks on omegas, but these days just about anyone might throw you down if they found out – minority sexualization and all that. Still, since the government had banned mandatory disclosure it was rare that they ever did, so long as they never caught you in heat.
But you were a rare case among rarities; a recessive, mostly useless omega, meaning your heats were extremely rare, even if inconveniently random. Most alphas couldn't even smell your pheromones to sus out that you were an omega, allowing you to live a quiet—if solitary—life under the radar.
But that guy tonight... He was on a whole other level. Was he dominant? You could have sworn that was a thing; maybe you'd read it once on a pamphlet from your old doctor. Just remembering him was turning up the heat under your skin and you twitched a little over the seat.
Shit, you really had to piss. Wiping the new condensation from the window, you realized the cab was only just coming up on Sobotori park – still a good twenty minutes from your one-room apartment in the concrete towers of Ichiwaka. Squeezing your hand over your crotch, you willed yourself to hold on. You'd be home soon. Home and safe with a familiar toilet and even a fresh packet of kimchi ramen to slurp on before bed. A cozy single futon. Alone.
Just then there was a short beep from the road ahead and the driver hit the brakes, punching your bladder hard against the seatbelt.
Nope. Nope, nope. This was officially an emergency.
"Hey," you said to the driver, lifting your hand to the back of his seat as gingerly as possible lest you explode. "Can you pull over at the park?"
"You feelin' sick? Gonna puke?"
"No, I—" God damn, you could hardly talk. "Just please pull over. Please."
The driver was already swinging the wheel around with the heel of his palm, swishing across the wet lanes toward the curb. "I gotchu, I gotchu."
Ohhhh goddddd. You were out of the car before it'd even stopped rolling, dashing across the pavement toward the green space, now buried in ice. There was no time to worry about getting a ticket, your zipper was down, dick out, ahhhh...
Oh yeah. Oh the relief.
Steam billowed from your stream as it hit the snow, but in the cold air you couldn't even smell it. Only the faintest wind. The whole world seemed to turn quiet as you dropped your head back in release. A perfectly cold night. A ten out of ten piss. In your head, you could hear the faint echo of the piano piece that gorgeous dancer had been moving to. You didn't know anything about music but it was there, stuck in your brain like a fly in a web. Da, da-na, da, da-na. You wished you knew the name of it to find it; you'd like to hear it again sometime. Somewhere in the distance you heard the sound of a car pulling up, a door slamming, hard footsteps across the ice.
A low, gravelling voice split the silence.
"You. Snow-pisser."
The sudden scent of pine forest sucked the air from your lungs, and you looked, gaped, the whites of your eyes freezing round in the cold. Hands in the pockets of his long tweed coat, the sandy-haired man stared you down, his expression cut in shadows under the streetlight, his jaw a wall of stone. The alpha from the National Theatre, and you with your limp dick still in your hands.
"Are you the omega who imprinted on me and then ran?"