Chapter Text
Little Jimin came into the world already unwelcome. Born unto a runaway, pack-less, mute omega, who had stumbled up the mountainside one wild and stormy night with the wind wailing through the pines like a banshee—heavily pregnant and her only possession a sow’s ear purse of three gold coins to pay for her shelter till she birthed her pup—he was all alone by the time he took his first breath two days later. Cut from his young mother’s wretched, rake-thin body, by the Jirisan Pack surgeon’s blade as she lay limp and lifeless on the forest floor, lost in labour.
That ruthless blade proved to be a rare act of kindness shown to the baby pulled from her still-warm belly by the hands of his adoptive pack.
“Such an uncommonly straggly, snivellingly ugly thing”, the Head Alpha’s mate, Kim Jung-Hwa, remarked over the bridge of her priggish, upturned nose, as the tiny, blood-smeared newborn cried unanswered for his mother’s milk (his mother’s love).
“Another miserable, penniless mouth to feed”, her other half’s reply drawled with indifference—Kim Yong-Gun subconsciously patting his own stomach, full with the spoils of an afternoon’s winter solstice luncheon feast.
“Yet, feed the strays we must”, the Luna sighed, shifting eyes up to the sliver of a crescent moon, etched ever-present upon December’s pale skies. “The Moon Goddess blesses Jirisan for our benevolence”
So, rather than being buried with his mother in the cheonmin pauper’s grave into which she was cast and covered, beneath the perpetually-mourning yew trees of the village’s graveyard, Jimin was permitted to live. Though ‘life’ may have been all too grand a word for it.
He was given a name, eighteen months on a pack beta wet nurse’s breast, and then a basket in which to sleep so that he wouldn’t roll out of the damp and cobwebbed cave homes—the outcasts’ area known as Daldonggul—to certain death on the jagged cliff below. Beyond that, the foundling baby raised himself—though it was often said that the Moon Goddess herself must, indeed, have lent a helping hand.
Jimin’s earliest memory was of being three-and-a-bit years old. Brown eyes—bright with curiosity—observing the Jirisan omegas as they sponged their children clean in the village stream’s crystalline pools at equinox, and him copying—teaching himself to scrub the grime from his own skin so that he looked almost like he belonged when he came down from the caves to collect the scraps not needed for livestock, from the communal dining hall.
At four and five, he babbled and chattered cheerfully to the daisies, bees and butterflies in spring and summer, then the magpies, musk deer and snow angels from autumn into winter time—gangs of village youths hounding him with snowball attacks that stung rosy cheeks raw as he helped a red squirrel find its forgotten stash of acorns for hibernation from the bitterly biting winds above ground’s frozen, unforgiving earth.
Those perennial tormentors, along with the rest of the pack’s young, were schooled at the foot of a great ginkgo tree with a lightning scar gash to its mighty trunk, where an open-sided shelter had been constructed to house them all, and by six years old, Jimin had become an expert at positioning himself close enough to be in studious earshot of lessons, but at the precise angle between the village allotment’s bokbunja bramble bushes that put him just out of the scowling schoolmaster’s line of sight.
Alongside his unconventional education—and absorption of knowledge from the annals and archives of the natural world around—growing Jimin passed his days dancing around the shadows of the other outcasts of the Jirisan pack who inhabited the cave huts connected to his own. The Daldonggul neighbours were not a large group, and never closely acquainted enough to be called a community. A dozen at most; population fluctuating as unfortunates were cast out from the village, then in turn left with death’s reaper when the carousel turned.
Each had woven their own tale of woe that had led them to that desolate place. There was the middle-aged potter who had lost his head to drink after his six children perished in a kiln fire and was said to be haunted by their spirits after dark. The orphaned bandit cousins—notorious fingersmiths—who stole from sellers around the local market towns. The old, wizened, wheelchair-bound widow with no means to live and no one left to tend to her. And amongst all the others, the fleeting presence of pitiful souls quarantined from the village afflicted by incurable or infectious illness. Yet, one thread in the so-called weaving was spun in common: If they were of age, they were omegas…
In order to ensure well-bred alphas didn’t abandon their mother packs to chase like moths to the flame after the allure of 'unchaste', rogue omegas and the secondary gender’s 'immoral' kisaengs, Joseon lawmakers dictated that in place of being banished, exiled omegas be kept closer to home. Kept there to live in limbo as a marked and tarnished tribe. Too shameful an existence to form bonds of friendship or comforting camaraderie, they hid their faces and kept themselves to themselves, to fade away by the day.
But Jimin, who had never known any other life, tried his best to make the makeshift gaol of Daldonggul’s huts—ramshackle wooden frames that were built onto, and into, a network of natural stone caverns—homely. He plaited reed mats for hard floors, hung posies of dried flowers from each entrance arch, and worked tirelessly to turn all manner of Jirisan’s unwanted items into treasures: Fixing broken chair legs, darning moth-eaten blankets, filling cracks in pottery and crockery; smiling to those who passed, and humming to himself as he went along when his greetings were not returned.
Because what he truly missed to make a house a home, was a friend, or...family.
Then, when he turned ten years old, he met his sister.
It was the warning hoots of a grey-feathered ural owl on the bare branches outside the cave huts that roused him from his sleep. Then his own curiosity that drew him down, in nought but a nightshirt, towards tense, whispered conversations at the main river, Deokcheongang’s, edge. Concealed by the mists that veiled the moon’s face that night, Jimin watched on, wide-eyed, as three men hurriedly stacked stones from the pebbled shore into a sack, tied its top, and then bundled it over the bank into surging, rain-swelled waters.
“Puppies? kittens?”, he shuddered in horror—for, unmistakably, Jimin had seen the sack moving from within as it was tossed. He scampered as fast as unshod feet could carry him, knowing that the one and only hope of saving the lives of the litter would be to reach them before the next major bend of the river, where waters rushed through a gorge into a bottomless pool, and the weight of the stones would surely drown them even before they succumbed to the treacherous section of white water rapids that followed beyond.
Without pause for thought, he plunged waist-deep into the dark waterway—gasping as the icy chill gripped his body like an iron vice, but fighting the merciless current to wade out to the river’s middle, night shirt clinging to shivering limbs. Just in time to intercept the sack’s course and drag it out of the water and onto the grassy verge.
Numb fingers fumbled at the strings that tied it shut. Then he was collapsing back onto the bank, aghast.
“A…a ch-child?”—in fact, it was barely even that. An infant not more than two years old. Blue with cold, cut and bruised from the stones, and coughing up water from her little lungs as she tried to crawl out of the sodden material that seemed to suck her back in, even then.
Starting into action, Jimin stripped away his wet nightclothes and scooped up the little girl to clasp her tightly to his naked chest and give what meagre body warmth he had left himself, alternately rubbing and patting her back to help her clear her airways as he stumbled blindly back up towards Daldonggul.
Once there, he swaddled her small frame in the only blanket he had kept for himself, and built the quickest fire his suddenly-clumsy hands could, by the flickering light of his last candle.
“All will be well now”, he soothed, one child rocking the other back and forth until she slept. Then for a long time, he just sat there, staring down at her face from beneath a furrowed brow. Watching as the soft amber light illuminated the innocent hopefulness of her rounded, baby cheeks—and wondering what the angel in his arms could have ever done to warrant such abhorrent treatment from her kin.
The next morning, he got his answer, when he upset a pan of hobak-juk to the floor with an ear-splitting clatter and clang. The girl didn’t turn and cower, or even flinch. Just went on making a pattern with the pleasing shells she’d found amongst Jimin’s old play things.
“I see”—a slow release of breath as understanding dawned. “You cannot hear. Only now, as you grow, others, too, see it clearly because you will not speak”
Any child born with a difference would be considered defective by a Jirisan pack that prided itself on its prowess in all pursuits, with notions of Gods-given superiority. Rather than suffer the ignominy of sending her to live with the outcasts on the periphery of the village, this family had plotted to take their daughter’s life in a form of honour killing instead.
Jimin shook his head. Then spoke to her back, with a stubbornness that would prove immovable:
“Then I will give you a new life, Aegi. You’ll be a Park, like me. Park…Park Dalgi—the spirit of the moon, because that is the blessing you are. We’ll be brother and sister, and I will teach you how to talk with your fingers – I’ve seen it once! All will be well now…”
All will be well now.
And for several years, it was. Like the forest’s twisted trees, they reached for one another, linked arms, grew together in harmony. Laughed and cried together. Ate and drank and signed and slept there, all together.
Until one day—a summer’s day in his fourteenth year—Jimin woke up feeling different. Still himself, but something else as well…
“Omega”, the broken-toothed lady in the corner cave—who talked solely to herself and the sparrows—chirped in a sing-song voice, rocking back and forth on her step when he passed by on his way to bathe, “Omega…omega…knew that one’d be an omega. Pretty as they come too – dear me, oh dearie dear, ‘tis a crying shame”
As the morning ticked on, his body felt unusually hot and agitated. A fever that prickled and piqued beneath his skin, nagging and gnawing at his brain, his bones, until he keeled over on the pathway home. When at last he came back to himself, a full two days later, it was to six-year-old Dalgi’s anxious hands pressing a damp rag to his neck—tears welling in greenish hazel eyes upon seeing his squint open at last:
‘Oh’, she signed, letting out a little sob. ‘I was so afraid’
The fever marked Jimin’s first steps into a pre-adulthood that the Jirisan pack called flux—a transition consisting of the most monumental changes, as a body matured to embody its own essence, or bonjil, and genders.
Certainly, he was no longer the “straggly, snivellingly ugly thing” that Kim Jung-Hwa had once spitefully professed him to be, ironically just a few seasons’ growing away from becoming the kind of unassumingly, breathtakingly beautiful omega who could be accused of leading alphas-who-should-know-better-when-they-hadn’t-so-much-as-even-glanced-their-way astray by that same pack Luna.
His eyes were a subtle, addicting shade of honeyed brown, half-hidden behind shy, feathered strands of dark hair that hung all the way to his nape at the back. His cheekbones were high, lips pink and plush. Skin milky fair and easily blushed. A dainty figure that was slender but strong, lissome—every movement as light and effortlessly graceful as the balletic fawns of the woods around.
And in spite of that deer-like, cervine stealth, those who lurked like wolves in the twisting, elongated shadows of those woods’ trees noticed his ripening...
Jimin felt eyes on him when he went to gather firewood with Dalgi, or to fetch food scraps for his Daldonggul neighbours. Stares that crawled like cockroaches up and down his limbs, hissing “first snow”, “untouched”, “defenceless”. Louder and louder, stealing closer and closer, until one evening, climbing the wide dirt track from Jirisan village, overladen by the pile of animal pelts on his back, he passed two alpha traders on their way home from market.
He smelled the sour stench of stale makgeolli as the cart trundled towards him, and sensed his heart thud all the harder with foreboding in his chest.
Then came the sound of the older of the men hacking up phlegm to spit in his direction, followed by an unpleasant rasp: “Pity the pretty boy’s a bastard mutt”
It was dusk. The forest around eerily quiet—as if it, too, was holding its breath.
“But omegas in flux are the very freshest of fruits”, the second, younger man slurred—Jimin recognising him as one of the bully gang youths of his childhood, “And who’d even know if we took ourselves a bite, Samcheon?”
“Woahhhh”, was the uncle’s command, and the slackening of reins as the cart horse was pulled up to a stop. The chilling, “I won’t tell nobody if you won’t”
At that, Jimin flung the cumbersome bundle of pelts into the roadside ditch and ran, but had barely taken five steps before he felt the stinging lick of the whip wrap around one ankle. He fell, head hitting a tree stump and blood clouding his vision in crimson as caustic, mocking laughter reached him between the clanging alarm bells of his frantic mind.
He pulled his knees into his chest and squeezed his eyes shut beneath his streaming wound. Body closing in on itself as he braced for the violence, or worse, that was surely to come.
But suddenly, in place of that mirthless laughter, the sound of retching and discombobulated cries.
“A c-curse!”, the slurred voice was stammering dramatically. “Don’t breathe the stink into your lungs, Samcheon”
“Bleurgh…filthy omega mongrel”—more choking from the older man—“W-witchcraft? You dare to use your sorcery on us?”
Then the receding of footsteps, the turning of cart wheels, the dying of spluttering coughs into the distance.
And when Jimin wiped the blood and tears from his eyes with the wrists of his threadbare old overcoat, he found himself all alone. On his back on a forest’s floor of autumn’s fallen leaves, with a canvas of softly-glimmering, bittersweet stars above.
“How beautiful the world is”, he said to himself, then added, “And how cruel”
The following morning, when an uneasy Jimin and Dalgi unbolted their Daldonggul door to set off in search of the previous night’s precious bundle of pelts to prepare for winter, they were met by an ominous greeting committee of the Jirisan Pack’s most illustrious figures on their doorstep.
Kim Yong-Gun, Kim Jong-Hwa, the eight-person council of elders, chief holy woman, physician, and first guards.
“There have been certain allegations made against you, to the council…”, Jong-Hwa’s tone was level, but her eyes gleamed with a rare, rabid excitement—reminding Jimin of the way a she-wolf looked at the precise moment her canines pierced the throat of her prey to seal its final breaths.
“We have opened an investigation”, Yong-Gun more officious, as if he merely hoped the inconvenient diversion would not take too long out of his busy day. “It’s become a matter of pack security. Uigwan-?”
At which the shaven-headed physician turned to the elders of the council—ignoring Jimin’s presence entirely—to explain: “In the time of flux, a subject’s pheromones are typically not yet stable or controllable. They tend to wax and wane”
A beta elder smoothing his long, wispy beard, as he pondered the problem:
“Then to smell his scent…the malodour that the traders described…”
“We must actively provoke it somehow”
“And how might that be achieved, Uigwan?”—a hawkish female councillor flexing her talons to enquire.
The physician’s reply as emotionless as if he was discussing the mildness of Joseon’s mornings of late, with his next door neighbour over the hanok fence…
“Fear or pain would be most effective, since we are not so uncouth as to use arousal in one quite so young”
And with that, the gleam in Jong-Hwa’s gaze ignited: “A beating?”
A curt nod—“That should suffice”
Jimin felt his legs weaken beneath him, then as he swayed…
‘I won’t leave your side, brother’, his younger sister, his Dalgi—having lip read the gist of the conversation—signed over and again to him with trembling hands.
But-
‘-No. Look away. Promise me that you’ll look away’