Chapter Text
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Dry grass broke under his feet as he ran, hard and relentless, breath burning high in his chest. It was like stretching to hear a pop—running until his legs sang with it, until his blood was pounding at him, through him, like a drum. It hurt—and still he kept pushing. Faster, faster, faster.
The morning air was cold and dry around him, mountain crisp, in a field on the outskirts of Denver. Snow and dead leaves—late fall and a cold winter coming. In between the steady thumps of his feet hitting the earth, the back of Seth’s neck prickled out abruptly, rising with sudden gooseflesh.
Seth sucked in a breath. He couldn’t hear anything but the wind in his ears, but he was immediately, unshakeably aware that there was someone running after him. Gaining on him.
Seth made himself go faster.
Nothing out here but the horizon, dry brush and a couple of twisted trees, hunching under the endless weight of the sky. Nothing to hide behind, nothing to weave through and ditch this tail. Far behind him and to his right he could hear the cries of the run going in a different direction, high and exhilarated whoops in the distance. Too far away.
He’d veered off from the group of his teammates maybe a minute or two ago, and with all of them moving at speed that was enough to spread a wide distance between them.
Seth was alone, except for the pace of feet behind him.
It didn’t matter. He didn’t dare look over his shoulder, because it wouldn’t help him now. The ground under his feet was dry and flat. His blood crashed around in a rush, loud in his ears. Like the wind. Like the churning of an ocean he couldn’t see. There was a metallic taste at the back of his throat. He ran.
And felt the breath explode out of his body as a heavy weight crashed against his back.
They knocked to the ground together. Muscled arms clenched in a vice-grip around his waist, bearing him down to the dry and dusted ground. Seth’s knees skidded in the dirt, slowing his momentum a split second before his shoulder took the rest of it, surface-level pain erupting as his skin chafed and broke.
It wasn’t nearly enough to daze him. He scrambled quickly onto his back before he could get trapped on his stomach by the body behind him. Seth clamped his knees around a thickly muscled waist and surged to twist, throwing his weight forward to flip the other man onto his back.
Above him, Mack didn’t budge.
“Fuck,” Seth swore, sweaty and out of breath. “You fucking. Bastard.”
“Gotcha!” Mack was grinning. Seth made a half-hearted attempt to swipe at his face, hoping to catch him with a scraped-open palm.
“What the fuck was that for, asshole?”
Mack shrugged. His dark eyes were bright and triumphant. “Saw you hauling that beautiful ass of yours. Couldn’t help myself.”
Seth gave in to the urge to facewash him, then. Got as far as dragging his bloody hand through the sweat on Mack’s face before strong hands wrestled him back down, pinning his wrists down to his chest, grinding his shoulders into the dirt. Mack was so strong. Like, so strong.
Seth growled viciously up at him, showing his beta teeth.
“Oh,” Mack smiled. “Is that how you wanna play it?”
Mack pressed him down harder, a matching growl in his own voice, nearly crushing Seth with his weight. It absolutely did not send a zip of satisfaction up Seth’s spine to be pinned like that. And even if it did, that didn’t change what he had to do next:
He’d already tried flight.
There was nothing left to do now but fight.
It was dirty pool, but he knew that Mack was extremely ticklish under his ribs. If Seth happened to wriggle a hand free and jam him with a finger, that was his business. No one was here to call him on it.
He got his arm around Mack’s neck when he bent forward, laughing, throwing him off balance enough for Seth to pull him down to the ground, to wrap limbs around him like a boa constrictor and roll them over in the dirt.
Mack fought back, of course he did, but with their bodies so tight against each other there was really no room, no space for him to get an arm up. They rolled several more times over in the scratchy dry grass, kicking up dust and dirt, skin on skin in their thin shorts and team-issue Avalanche t-shirts. Mack’s thigh was thick and hot and solid in between both of his own. Seth held a gasp back behind his clenched teeth.
“Bridges! Millwright! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Seth froze instantly, still half on top of Mack, whose hands had dropped away from him fast.
When Seth managed to look up, Landy was jogging towards them with a concerned frown on his offensively chiseled face. The rest of their teammates were moving in clumps in the distance, still running.
Seth dropped back onto his ass in the dirt and wiped his bloody palms against his cotton shorts, watching out of the corner of his eye as Mack got slowly to his feet beside him. He turned his head away completely when he saw Mack start to glance back at him.
“Now’s no time for wrestling, boys,” Gabe said when he got close enough, still frowning. It took him only a couple of seconds after that to notice Seth’s hands, his torn up knees and elbows, and he rounded quickly on Mack.
“Are you fucking out of your head, Bridges?” He glared, voice rumbling with disapproval. “Get out of here, now. Back to the other alphas.”
Mack cringed a little, and he must’ve done something apologetic with his scent because Gabe’s nostrils flared and the line of his mouth softened. He didn’t drop his hand, though—still pointing at the loose pack of the team’s alphas in the distance behind him.
Mack ducked his chin and trudged in the direction his captain indicated. He glanced searchingly back over his shoulder only once he was behind Gabe, trying to catch Seth’s eye. Seth sulkily didn’t let himself return the look.
“I’ll have a talk with him, don’t worry,” Gabe was saying to Seth, shaking his head, hands on his hips. “I can’t believe he’d think it was funny to run down a beta.”
Then Gabe was crouching near him in the dirt, frowning and touching the spot on Seth’s shoulder where blood was soaking through his t-shirt.
“Are you okay?”
Seth flinched and pulled his body out of reach. “Fine.”
He stood, and Gabe stood with him. Seth suppressed an eye-roll and finally met Gabe’s frown head on, and they stood there staring at each other.
He got the satisfaction of seeing the alpha shift his weight uncomfortably under the even hold of his gaze.
“Uh, okay then— I mean. Good. You should probably get back to the other betas, then.”
“Okay.”
“And— Look, Millsy, I’m sure Bridges didn’t mean anything by it, eh? It was probably just a little instinctual slip. I mean, I wouldn’t worry about anyone mistaking you for an omega. Sometimes the hindbrain just gets a little confused, this close to season.”
“Right.”
“Wouldn’t stray too far from the others, though. Just to be safe.”
“Sure.”
Gabe gave him a look. “Hey, Millsy?”
“Yeah?”
“You sure you’re okay?”
Seth stared at him. The lines of his face felt stiff enough to be carved out of stone.
“Peachy,” he said, and walked away.
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As soon as he was back with the team’s betas, weathering a grab-bag of concerned glances, sympathetic looks, and raised eyebrows, he felt a flush come over his cheeks. Seth hadn’t meant to be rude to his captain. He thought back to his stare-down in response to Gabe’s—perfectly reasonable—concern, and cringed.
He’d been embarrassed to be interrupted and told off by his captain, by the team’s lead alpha, in the middle of some childish rolling in the dirt that he’d been enjoying probably a bit too much. And, even worse, his instinctive reaction had been an indignant sort of anger that Landy had no right to interrupt them, which just wasn’t… true? Of course he did, they’d been goofing off during a team run, and one where there wasn’t supposed to be any intermingling between dynamics. Basically exactly to prevent the kind of tomfoolery that they’d done today.
Stupid to be wrestling in the dust together, and beyond idiotic that Mack had run him down to put him there, but somehow, someway, it hadn’t felt like that when they’d been grappling.
It had felt right. Natural. It had felt like Mack liked him so much that he’d needed to catch Seth when he saw him running away, and Seth had liked that. Liked that Mack was so fast, and he’d liked wrestling Mack too. It had all just felt good.
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In the two years they’d stayed steady on the roster together, Mack had made Seth his, the way alphas tended to do. It was why it was so hard to have more than a handful of them on a roster together, especially if they all had more dominant personalities—any kind of territorial streak. That was just nature. It was natural for Mack to draw a pack of people in close to him. Not just Seth, but a bunch of guys he’d consider his more than they were Landy’s or NateMac’s, even though really, all the guys were Landy’s. Mack was way too young and new to even think about changing that, and in his own way, he was Landy’s, right now, too.
The Avalanche were lucky that their three strongest alphas had different priorities; hadn’t tried to carve out the same territory on the roster, at least for now. Seth shuddered to think of what a challenge between any of them would look like.
Mack was strong. An alpha’s alpha. He had dark eyes under dark hair over dark stubble. Seth’s sister said he looked kind of like Joe Manganiello, which Seth was never, ever going to tell him because it would go right to his head and then some, but Mack was, undeniably, stacked like a brick shithouse, with sharp cheekbones and warm eyes, and his hair had this certain way of falling across those eyes when it was all sweaty and lank, out from under his helmet in between periods—that some might even call distracting.
But the point wasn’t just that Mack was good looking with completely unfair muscle tone—he was also intensely capable, and charming, and he was kind.
He was a good alpha— fuck it, he was pretty much as perfect as they came. He was going to be captain one day, if not in Denver then somewhere. It was obvious. Seth had known it the first day he’d met the guy at training camp, and somewhere in there—years down the line—Seth was going to be more than happy to be settled down with a pretty beta girl who gently put up with his bullshit, little boy and little girl rug rats running around the house between them, and—he hoped—a pack Alpha of even half the calibre that Mack was to hold the whole thing steady. He knew that. He knew what was coming.
For now, Seth was maybe a little star struck. Maybe that’s what it was.
Most days, he really hoped that’s what it was. Because there was nothing in him that was built to respond to what Mack had done today. He was supposed to like running, but it was a total fluke that he had liked that Mack could catch him. Bring him down, like a great big wolf on a deer. Pin him there, with strong hands that turned gentle just as easily, as soon as Seth wanted them too.
They’d just been playing around, was the thing. Gabe was right. Mack hadn’t meant anything by it. Mack was a strong alpha—his instinct to keep the things he thought belonged to him was probably really strong too.
It was embarrassing that something in Seth had twisted and snarled when Landy had interrupted them. That he’d been disappointed when Mack hadn’t fought against Landy’s orders to go to the other side of the field, get away from him, as if it was anything but a good thing that Mack didn’t want to challenge Landy. Like that wouldn’t completely blow up the team if he had—
Seth had just never been so close with such a strong alpha before; that was probably it. Just because betas couldn’t pick up on scent cues, and didn’t have strong instincts, didn’t mean they didn’t have a scent or any instincts at all. The pheromones that everyone put out, that he couldn’t for the life of him translate into smells, could still affect him. Make him feel irrational and territorial. That was all it was.
He had to get his head back on straight, he thought, driving straight home after things with the team wrapped up—bailing on coffee with Sammy G but whatever, Sammy would understand. He’d lick his wounds and shake off the weirdness of the morning, and that would make everything better. It kinda had to.