Chapter Text
Four years ago
Jane Crocker’s door slammed open with an exuberant
BANG!
“Jane, we need to sponsor a troll.”
Jane jerked back from where she’d been squinting at her monitor, startling so badly she bared her teeth for a moment at her favorite cousin.
“John, what- why on Earth would we- no, that’s the wrong question. Why, pray tell, would you care to sponsor a troll?”
John slapped his tablet down on her desk with a flourish.
“This guy. You know this guy.”
“CarcinoGeneticist? Yes, John, who hasn’t read his blog, or at least heard of him-”
“He’s still on Alternia.”
That got her attention. One perfectly groomed eyebrow expressed some skepticism. “That hardly makes any sense, he’s a sensation-”
“He’s got some sort of fucked up blood or something. He hasn’t even tried to get on the roster, Jane. He let it slip in one of his capslock rants at me last night.”
Jane’s other eyebrow joined the first. “What was he doing rant- wait.”
They stared at each other in silence as Jane’s expression drifted from surprised to steely.
“Johnathan Egbert-Crocker.”
“Uh oh.”
“Shut up. Are you implying that your pitch penpal, the troll with whom you have been exchanging lengthy, eloquent hate mail for the better part of a year, is the one and only, actual-factual carcinoGeneticist?”
“Yah. Wait, did you not know that? I thought everyone knew that.”
Jane closed her eyes and rested her forehead in her hand for a little while.
John toyed with her letter-opener, flipping it idly in his hand.
“John,” Jane finally said, not even bothering to raise her head. “You know the paperwork can take years, and if he’s not favorably positioned on the hemospectrum, it’ll take even longer. He could be culled before we can get him out.”
John blinked at her bowed head, once, twice.
“Jane,” he said slowly, “contemplate your rolodex for a moment.”
Jane raised her head and stared blankly at him for a few seconds, before understanding dawned on her face.
“Oh. Oh.”
“Yeah, oh, come on Jane, I’m in your office for a reason.”
“Right.”
She straightened and spun in her chair, reaching for her phone.
“Good morning, this is Jane Crocker, and I- yes, hi, yes, that’s me! I need to speak to secretary Lance about a potential Alternian sponsorship of some… political significance. Yes, thank you,” she said, glancing sidelong at John.
He gave her an exaggerated thumbs-up and headed for the door, because this is the part where things got boring.
“Oh, wait- John?” She called to him, covering the receiver. “He’ll need a housing sponsor. Who are we even going to put him up with?”
John threw her a breezy grin from the doorway.
“Oh, that’s easy.”
======
Karkat was having another unusual day in a series of highly unusual days. One minute he’d been enjoying a nice lunch downtown with his once-roommate-now-boyfriend, the next he had been hauling a red-faced Dave back to the office for some emergency semi-public rutting.
Splashing their sex pheromones all over his workplace was going to do things to his reputation that he didn’t want to contemplate, but there was no way in hell that Karkat was going to fuck him in a public bathroom ever again if he could get away with it; giving Dave a ride sufficient to settle his hormones back down often came at the cost of leaving him completely senseless, and that made for an extraordinary walk of shame after.
Granted, a scene like that was hardly uncommon in the wake of the global suppressant recall (widely referred to as The Heat Wave, The Great Fuckening, or simply Omegapocalypse) but just because the waitstaff were likely to politely pretend they Do Not See didn’t mean Karkat was okay with Dave enduring routine public humiliation on top of everything else he was dealing with right now.
By the time he'd swiped them in through one of the more private back entrances, Dave was panting so hard he was making little hic-hic-hic noises on the inhale, and was subvocalizing a one-note peal that verged on piercing. The pheromones he was projecting could have roused the dead.
Karkat was feeling overwhelming gratitude that there was no one there to get in their way, then John rounded the corner with an intern.
Of all the days for that man to go for a walk through one of the lowest-traffic ends of the building.
With another alpha.
When they finally spotted Karkat and Dave, John and the intern froze, staring.
For the length of that breathless standoff, Karkat clung to the hope that they might just turn around and leave. It seemed completely random, which alphas lost their heads, and which alphas held it together, when in the presence of a compromised omega.
The intern’s eyes locked on Dave, and then he scented the air deeply, not even a little bit subtle. His gaze- suddenly, creepily empty- slid over to Karkat.
Well, fuck. Guess they were doing this.
Karkat flexed, extending his claws.
The intern lunged.
He didn’t make it very far.
John’s hand shot out, quick as a viper strike, and he had that boy by the back of his neck before Dave even had time to flinch away behind Karkat.
“Now, Braeden, are we going to ruin Hot Omega Summer by acting like an assbasket?” John said.
His tone was nonchalant, as always, but the way his face was twitching suggested that he was internally in hysterics.
Karkat was also internally in hysterics, for various reasons. For one, he’d never seen an alpha scruff another alpha before. He didn’t even know they could do that.
That said, John had always been a weird fucking alpha.
The intern, Braeden, was turning red, but he didn’t speak, just growled softly. That got a frown from John.
“Hey, I asked you a question,” John said, giving Braeden a shake that flattened his growl into a wobbly squeak. “Braeden. Dude. Answer me.”
Oh, he did the thing. The alpha bass-boost. It didn’t have any effect on trolls, but Karkat felt Dave’s hand shake a little where it was gripping the back of his shirt.
Braeden blanched, blinked a couple of times, and lowered his eyes.
“No? Sir?”
“Good boy,” John quipped, immediately reverting back to his natural ease.
He released the intern’s neck and twisted his hand in the collar of his shirt, dragging him bodily towards a side door.
“I think it’s time for lunch and a drink at Lonnie’s, don’t you?” He said briskly to his charge, pulling something off his belt as he went.
He tossed it at Karkat. It was a keycard, but not the standard one they distributed to employees.
“Emergency services key. Swipe it in the elevator and it’ll go straight to your floor without stopping. Do not tell Jane I had that,” John said, and then he and Braeden were gone out the door.
“Thanks,” Karkat croaked at the empty room, before carefully herding Dave to the elevator.