It wasn’t a calculated move. He just couldn’t bear it anymore; he shot to his feet to breathe and stay alive.
The place he’d come to as a hideout to collect himself was, in truth, enemy territory. How had he lived not knowing until now—everywhere he looked it felt like nothing but people who knew Rau’s secret. The threat and the danger were right there, inches away. Right behind the smiles of kind, gentle people.
A peaceful daily life—he’d learned enough from his mother’s accident just how easily that fragile glass floor could shatter, and he told himself he was on guard against it to a fault... but once life decides to get mean, there is no such thing as enough preparation.
Without even thinking to grab his bag or jacket, with no plan for what he’d do, just to survive, Ihyeon left the table and strode hard and fast for the entryway.
“Ihyeon, Ihyeon!”
Halfway down the hall to the door, Inwoo caught his arm in a hard grip. Forced around, Ihyeon found a desperate look on his face—but he didn’t want to let something like that break him. He wanted to harden, to get ruthless. Dragging his gaze down to around Inwoo’s chest, Ihyeon bent at the waist. He shoved him in the stomach.
“It’ll sound like an excuse, but I only found out recently. Ihyeon, please... hear me out. I know you don’t want to see me or Wikun right now... if you really can’t stand it, I’ll leave—just... don’t try to walk out. Okay? If you go out now, where are you going to go?”
Inwoo’s fingers dug in so hard trying to pull him up that his arms tingled, but Ihyeon couldn’t even register the pain.
When Shushu told him Rau was turning his body into an omega with that special ability of his—at the time... there was instinctive shock, but it didn’t feel real. Now, looking at Inwoo’s reaction with his own eyes, the story that had sounded like a vague urban legend changed into reality, something happening to his actual body.
What he wanted to run from wasn’t Inwoo so much as that sense of reality. Like someone trying to shake off a swarm of winged insects rushing at him from all sides, Ihyeon shook his head.
“No... I know it’s not your fault. You’re not the one who did wrong. But right now, what I know in my head is useless.... It’s like the head’s shut down and my limbs are all moving on their own... I can’t control it! I want to... handle this calmly, but... my body....”
“Don’t blame yourself. Who could be calm in this? That would be the weird thing.”
“I don’t even know what’s weird and what’s normal anymore... I don’t know that either. How am I supposed to take this—this situation... the boss... how... in what way am I supposed to accept it?”
He tilted his head back to look up at Inwoo. The steady balance he usually kept—his emotions rarely swinging wide for his age—was gone. With the face of a scared boy lost in chaos, he gripped Inwoo’s arms and shook him, repeating the question.
“What... is this, hyung?”
“......”
Like a truck plowing into a taxi that was sitting at a light, listening to the radio, waiting for green.
With no warning, it rammed into the side of everyday life, smashed everything, broke the flow, ruined the plans... and in one stroke turned the feel of a person he’d taken into his very core, someone who had felt as close as himself, into a nameless, alien chill.
That he would take a shock of that strength twice in one life...
Staring down with a face like he was holding a mouthful of bitter medicine, hands locked around Ihyeon’s arms, Inwoo hauled him in hard. He wrapped his shoulders and cinched his back with no restraint at all.
“You don’t have to understand. You don’t have to try to accept it. You did nothing wrong.”
“Then what... do I do? How am I supposed to do this?”
“......”
“Do I blame him, resent him, demand responsibility... is that it?”
“If that’s what you want to do, then do it.”
The feel that the other person’s shoulders sat a little lower than Rau’s when they faced each other and embraced—that awkwardness. The warmth of the chest pressed to his, the way their cheeks and ears overlapped, the fact that it wasn’t him... made Ihyeon flinch inward.
But now, even in Rau’s arms, he probably wouldn’t feel the same familiarity and ease as before. He was realizing that in someone else’s.
He slowly pushed off Inwoo’s chest. The arms that had clutched in tight like they’d never let him go slid off so easily it was like the pressure a moment ago had been a lie.
Steadying a stagger, he backed up and dropped heavily against the wall behind him. To hang on to the last shred of composure, he scrubbed his face with both hands and flattened his voice.
“And after that? After I dump my feelings out to my heart’s content... do I just go back to before like nothing happened? Or....”
Or is it... something you must never forgive.
He bit down so hard his lips went white and swallowed the words that were about to follow. For now, more than the horrible change Rau had brought about in his body, the face he’d shown Ihyeon—sincere, or at least what he had believed was sincere—and the words of healing and empathy felt closer to reality. That accumulation was still trying to defend him.
“I’m sorry... I honestly don’t know how to apologize... No, this is past the point of apologies.... No matter when I learned it, the fact that I kept my mouth shut makes me the same kind of bastard....”
Ihyeon shook his head, cutting him off. As Inwoo said, this wasn’t an apology problem. An apology wasn’t what he needed right now to get calm.
He gnawed his lower lip and muttered.
“I want to say it’s not something you should be sorry for... I want to say that, but... I don’t know....”
“I’m an alpha and I can’t make sense of it—someone who’s lived as a beta like you... there’s nothing to say. I kept quiet because I agreed with him on one point—that if you said it yourself, maybe your shock would be a little less—but... if he was that afraid of your shock, he shouldn’t have done this in the first place. I know I can’t claim to be free of responsibility for staying silent because I fell for that twisted logic.”
Inwoo’s voice was rising with agitation. He leaned his back against the wall opposite Ihyeon and raked through his neatly waxed hair. Like before a blood draw, he clenched and unclenched his fist, over and over, eyes fierce on his own forearm bared under a sweatshirt shoved up to the elbow.
“‘The pheromones ran wild. The alpha instinct I’d never given in to took over.’ For a so-called golden alpha—near perfect—that’s a pretty shabby excuse, isn’t it? If he couldn’t refuse the pheromones... if he couldn’t control himself when he looked at you and touched you, when he was near you... then he should’ve given up being near you at all.”
He closed the fist he’d been opening and closing and looked like he was holding back the urge to smash something. The veins in his forearm bulged a mottled blue.
“He stared at the object of his lust, watched you every day... and claims he had no intention of rape—how is that any different from an excuse like that.”
His voice was low and quiet as a whisper, but it had gone cold as metal, like there was no room to revisit his conclusion.
“......”
The word rape seemed to drop the ambient temperature in the room and inside his body by a few degrees. Ihyeon flinched and stared straight at Inwoo. But he was boiling at a man who wasn’t even here, and he didn’t even register Ihyeon.
Strictly speaking, there had been no coercion or force in the act itself. But he had not been told at all about the fundamental bodily change that could result from it. It wasn’t rape in the usual sense; even as the word grated on him, he couldn’t step in to defend Rau as if it were an outrageous leap.
Was it really that. Had he done something as repulsive as rape... to my body.
The severity of that word stirred through [N O V E L I G H T] his head and doused all the drifting thoughts. He needed to go cold. To see the truth beyond this temporary murk without distortion, he had to sink heavy and cold. But it wasn’t easy.
“How... can you turn a beta into an omega? By what method did I....”
The end of his voice still trembled thinly. Inwoo’s gaze, full of guilt, met his with care.
“Through knotting....”
“......”
“Ordinary knotting has no effect on a beta, but... a ghost can do a special knotting. It can trigger some kind of change in chemistry that can’t be explained. If he keeps knotting a beta in that state, bit by bit they turn into an omega, and that’s... called changing. That’s what I heard.”
He hadn’t heard it this concretely from Shushu. That Rau was a golden alpha, a “ghost” with the special ability to turn a beta into an omega. That whenever he attempted to turn someone, the color of his irises would cloud over like a literal ghost for a few hours. That was all.
Ihyeon wrapped his shaking body in his own arms, holding tight.
“Then... all those times he knotted....”
After the mutter, a hollow laugh slipped out. The sex with Rau he’d thought of as their most intimate communion being his tool for a thorough deception—shock stacked on shock.
Inwoo gripped his shoulders hard again as Ihyeon gave a small shake of his head like he didn’t want to believe it.
“We’ll go to the hospital tomorrow. We can check how far along it is, and whether, if we stop now, there’s a chance you can live closer to beta... We can run tests. I’ll put it through as a VIP workup and treat you myself.”
Ihyeon looked at him. His eyes were out of focus, as if to say, what use is that now. Inwoo loosened his hands on the shoulders of this defenseless, wounded creature and stroked him as gently as he could.
“Of course, if you’re not ready, we don’t have to go right away.”
“How long will it take to know the results.”
“Even with ultrasound, we can get some idea right away.”
“You’d know by... how developed the uterus is.”
“.......”
The word uterus felt as alien to him, raised as sharp and metallic as the word rape; his speech slowed on its own. Watching Inwoo answer only by hardening his mouth and looking away, Ihyeon let out a thin sigh.
He remembered Rau saying, I want to stay with you till morning, so let’s not have sex, let’s just sleep. He remembered his own question right after, asking if they couldn’t sleep together after sex. A bitter laugh came. Right, of course not.... What face had he worn when he looked at me then.
Regret? Guilt? Conflict and pity? Whatever complicated mix had been in there, in this moment he didn’t want to block his own feelings in order to read Rau’s.
He drew a deep breath and bit down on his lower lip.
After the first penetration and first knotting in Hong Kong—how he’d scraped at his body like a madman to get the semen out—now he could vaguely understand why. Why he’d apologized over and over, why the “unnecessary cleanup.” In his confusion he’d needed to do anything to contain what couldn’t be contained.
“I want it. Do it to me. Knot me... do it again.”
His own lewd whispers begging him for knotting rang vivid in his ears. He dropped his arms from around his upper arms and scrubbed his face like he meant to knead it out of shape. It was hard to control his breath as it climbed sharp again. He almost wished he’d blacked out, like the first time he faced Alienation again in Rau’s living room—but his foolish body demanded he witness every step of the pain whole.
All the time with him looked different now. Sex with him where he felt freed from norms and morals, grandly even feeling a kind of liberty—as if he’d become a completely different person. The way, after sex, when he remembered it, he’d spit out words so explicit his face would burn even alone, and yet feel a deeper intimacy with the other person—only marveling at how that could be—showing each other the bottom and feeling understood, the deep ease.
It had all been an illusion. For him, sex with Ihyeon wasn’t only that. It was an act with another purpose, or at least with another purpose included.
“I asked for it....”
