Chapter Text
He’s always had a stronger sense of smell than the others.
When it’s the cloying, dry scent of smoke that wakes him, he’s ashamed that his first instinct isn’t to find his sister, his parents, any of his personal attendants. No, his first urge isn’t to protect, it is to flee.
And so he does. Opening the latch on his bathroom’s west-facing window, he peeks his face out just enough to see the flames on the horizon, to smell the steadily strengthening scent of smoke and unknown, unwanted wolves. His coat is the only thing he has time to grab, left on his vanity only hours before after a long day of training and a run in the palace forest. He doesn’t even stop to consider he might want to pick up a set of scent dampeners, to lower a ladder or spend an extra few moments to scope out the best way to descend the palace wall, doesn’t even think to take a shirt.
One leg over the windowsill, then the next. His coat bunches up around his upper legs, and in the distance, on the other side of the palace, he hears the guards begin to realize that they’re in danger, that it is too late to be reacting with any hope of survival. The fall is considerable, two storeys and an uncoordinated, distracted roll out from the impact, and then he’s moving, like his body refuses to wait for his mind to catch up.
The palace forest welcomes him like a shroud, and he makes it far enough away, stealthily picking his way among the trees and underbrush, to avoid hearing when the screams begin.
🐾
He runs. The pants he’s wearing are the ones he’d fallen into bed wearing, and the coat does little against the cold of the north-western winds. Once he passes over the border, working against the winds the whole way, he hears nothing of the palace, of his kingdom’s villages, of the death toll. He hears only of the new king, the mighty alpha Jeong, from a longer lineage of alphas than San had been born from, only hears whispers of praise for his tactics, regarded as dirty and unfair but clever nonetheless.
San can’t be known as himself here, can no longer be who he has been his whole life, so he keeps his head down, eats what scraps he can manage to scavenge around the backs of taverns after eavesdropping on the conversations of those who prefer to smoke outdoors, sleeping in the upper levels of barns far enough away from the main homes so he isn’t caught.
🐾
After thirteen days, on one of his nightly escapades to eat as much as he can to remain strong enough to keep moving, he overhears that the mighty King Jeong has sent out his fiercest, strongest, most elite team of wolves to capture the coward prince.
They must smell the way his scent spikes in fear, dread, despair, because their conversation stops, all of the men turning to look at San with raised eyebrows.
“You from that kingdom, kid?” one of them asks around an exhale of smoke, and San can’t speak, can’t do anything but run.
🐾
He hasn’t turned since he first fled.
Their scents are stronger when they’re wolves, and San had somehow had his wits around him just enough to know that he needed to be as untraceable as possible when he first ran away from the palace, from his duty, from his family. As well, he has simply been far too weak for his body to sustain a full turn. Sleeping in small stints, living in constant fear, hardly eating enough to survive; it’s made him a shell of who he’d been, even if he looks much the same as he had three weeks ago. He’s thinner, sure, his bones showing more, but his muscles have kept any prying strangers from digging too deep into trying to converse with him, and even though his pants are wrecked, he’s tried to keep his jacket as clean as possible, scrubbing at it in cold streams and letting it dry over the wooden beams in the barns he manages to sleep in.
He doesn’t miss turning, not in the sense of wanting to be anything but alive these days, his wolf as frightened as he is, but he misses what turning used to mean. Freedom, power, safety. Turning and running through the palace’s forests has always been something he’s cherished for what it meant, for him, for his family, and to know in his core that he’ll never get that back is a special kind of sorrow.
🐾
He cannot think about his sister.
His parents, as much as he loves them, respects them, is grateful for everything they’ve given him, were older, beginning to descend into their silver years, where their memories would start to slip, their values erring on the side of traditionalist rather than what their kingdom truly needed.
His father, especially, San thinks of with the least fondness; not because there is truly any lack of fondness, but because it hurts the least to think about. Strict, harsh, a reserved man who only showed love once he was certain thrice over that it was wholly earned, has been where the least of San’s sadness has poured itself.
His mother, softer, kinder, a foil to the King’s hard edge, gains more of his sorrow. He cries more for the memories he’d shared with her when he was small than for what she might have done, all she might have given him, and the guilt that accompanies his thoughts of her is stronger.
His sister, though, did not deserve to have her life taken from her. While it wasn’t at the hands of her brother directly, he feels responsible for her demise, his cowardice having kept him from protecting her, as he’d always sworn he’d do.
The only solace, though, is that she likely thought him dead when she had died. He can only hope it was swift, that the new king’s cruelty had its limits, that she’d been spared the suffering of a slow death, one where she’d known San had left her to die.
He cries when he can, but it is not often. It is safer for him to conserve his energy, his strength, and so he does not think of his sister.
🐾
He wakes up to the smell of new wolves, wolves that are turned, whose presence spells danger, spells destruction. If he focuses hard enough, between the laboured heaving of his chest and the panicked beating of his heart, he thinks he might recognize them from the night he’d fled, shrouded by smoke and fear but memorable nonetheless.
He runs. He runs and runs, weaving in and out of towns, slipping through barns to try and confuse the wolves following him. He hardly sleeps with how much he’s running, how much distance he’s trying to put between them and himself, and it makes him weaker, his sense of smell the only thing growing stronger as his body fails him.
When they catch up to him, he’s leaving the town as they are entering it. They’re on opposite ends of the main road, and San’s heart tries to break his ribs from the inside with how hard it is beating against them when he spots the hunched silhouettes of a pack of wolves, all smelling strongly of alpha and all of them drooling at the proximity to his own scent.
He turns on his heel, sweat dripping down his back between his skin and his heavy coat, and he runs. It seems like they might’ve missed him, despite being over ten pairs of eyes looking to lock onto only one body, only one scent, and despite how far from plausible it seems to him, San has nothing else to go off besides the fact that the scents of the virile, hungry, furious group of tracking alphas don’t immediately flare and follow him.
He sneaks through buildings, smokehouses and butchers and a home full of newborn pups, trying to keep his wits about him enough to be tactical while still being in this near-constant state of heightened fear and panic, the kind that has kept him in a grey haze since he first fled.
It’s a risk, doubling back to the previous village he’d passed through, but it buys him enough distance that he can sleep that next morning. Every minute of rest is precious, precarious, and San knows all of it is punishment for the horrors he left his family to endure, regardless of how long they may have taken to play out.
He runs, he ducks, he scavenges. He looks nothing like the prince he once was, only a handful of weeks ago, but then, when he thinks about it, he isn’t the prince everyone thought him to be.
🐾
There are days that San has entertained the idea of death. It would solidify his place in history as his kingdom’s greatest coward, a story that would likely be told to children for generations to come as a tale warning against what kind of person not to be.
His father had thought him nearly ready to take up the mantle, almost mature and strong enough to lead their kingdom and their people to a future of safety and prosperity. Instead, San is cut up, bruised and weakened, running from a group of mercenaries who were sent to drag him back home to face his crimes, beg for penance and not be granted it.
There was a time that San was an alpha preparing to take the throne. Now, he spends his days running, eating garbage and trespassing, smelling of earth and sweat and the faintest smell of the perfume his clothes were washed with, in what now feels like a past life.
🐾
His sense of smell, acute and coming from no lineage of particularly gifted scenters, has proven itself the bane of his existence, as much as it is the only thing that has kept him alive until now, but San still curses it like it has never brought him anything but hardship.
This time, though, it fails him.
He doesn’t smell the alphas until he can hear them, the chickens and goats of the farm San had snuck onto looking for a patch of hay to rest in screaming in fear and surprise, and the raucous sound of alpha wolves snarling at the noise, knocking over barrels, boxes, anything San might be hiding under, inside of, behind.
It doesn’t give him much time to escape, and he knocks something loose in his left ankle when he drops right down from the hayloft to the floor of the barn. The horses startle, whinnying unhappily at the sudden rousing from their sleep, but San is gone, gritting his teeth as he puts one foot in front of the other and runs.
He has no chance. He knows it already, as soon as his position is exposed, that he is going to be caught. The resignation doesn’t feel as big inside him as the panic, his instincts impossible to quell no matter how hard he tries. If he were more of a coward, or perhaps less of one, none of this would have happened, and yet it is. Here he is, stumbling onto the paved perimeter of the temple that the humble farm gives onto from the back, its front facing the parallel road.
He’s hurting, he’s weak, and he’s cornered. In a last ditch move of utter desperation, his wolf tries to rear to the front of his psyche, trying to get him to turn so he can protect himself, but instead, he ends up pulling taut in an arch he’s never experienced, has never even heard of outside the stories the guards would tell of their prisoners, how those captured would often have one last burst of strength that would ultimately go nowhere due to their state of capture, their frail bodies, the weeks of deprivation of food, water, light.
As San’s body tries to turn, this final attempt to escape, the scents of the mercenary wolves come closer. He curls in on himself, making himself small as he heaves, the fear paralyzing for a moment too long. When he comes out of the protective curl, his muscles relaxing from their attempt to turn, to save him, he finds himself limp on his back, staring up at the night sky above him.
It can’t be more than a breath, if that, before there are hands wrapping around his wrists. The trackers did him the favour of turning back to their human forms before catching him, sparing him being torn limb from limb, from losing the coat he’s run with all these weeks, the tattered thing the last link he has to his home, to before.
They drag him back, though, and San feels the ground scraping at his coat, his instincts still too strong to keep him from writhing, from trying to break free of the stronger hands at his wrists. He’s markedly weaker than even one of them, but both of these strong, driven alphas are no match for him, especially not with the rest of the group so close by, compounding their power by their proximity, their bond so tangible it feels like the heat of flames against San’s skin.
He stills in their grasp for a beat, then two, and the men seem to think he’s lost the fight inside him, the spark extinguished when faced with the breadth of their victory. It’s then that he twists, wrangling himself free with a surprisingly powerful kick of his legs. Despite San’s weakened state, it’s enough to throw off their balance, their grips faltering in sync, and San manages to throw himself forward, landing on his knees and braced low on his elbows. He feels the looming, heavy presence of the other men close by, but can’t let himself be taken this easily, and when he tries to crawl forward, dragging himself away from the men who’d caught him, he feels his wolf so close to the surface, he almost wonders if he might turn regardless of his physical state.
The hands come back, grabbing at his legs now, rough and cruel and nothing like San has ever felt before, not even in the training ring or when he’d been in the forest during the roughest storms. They grab with no regard for what they might touch, where their fingers might land, and something like understanding rises in San’s chest at the feeling.
He knows what happens to wolves who have been captured, especially outside the bounds of the law. They’re on foreign territory, as well, and the lump that blocks his swallow is enough to make his mouth gasp open, needing air even as the other men surround him, grabbing and holding and hurting him as they take him down, hold him still among their combined mass.
This is it, he knows. Death would have been better, by leagues, by whole oceans. Whatever awaits him at the hands of these men, at the eventual hands of the new king, at the end of a sword, or a rope, or a long, long time left underground, it is nothing compared to what a gift death would have been.
San is a coward, one who couldn’t even bring himself to die when it would have been the lesser of all evils. He is dragged away from the temple, darkness closing in over his eyes when his head is shoved into a bag, and San cannot begin to count his regrets, how numerous they are.
Overwhelmed, weak, helpless, he succumbs to whatever it is this world will give him as punishment for what he’s done, for all he is.