Work Text:
“Hey! Matchstick!”
Flambae rolled his eyes as he turned towards Sonar, sticking a magnet on the note he’d written (another reminder to Robert about food outside of vending machines). The breakroom was empty save for the two of them, the sweet spot just before noon just before most of the dispatch floor scrambled to get to the microwave.
“You’ve got too much time on your hands with all of the fucking nicknames you give me.”
The hybrid’s lip quirked up. “And yet you answer to each and every one.”
“Fuck. You.”
Sonar didn’t respond, heading towards the freezer to grab whatever frozen mammal he decided would be his meal for the day. Flambae sat down and tucked into the wrap he’d made for himself, trying to focus on anything but the thought of what the hybrid was going to eat. Thankfully, it seemed that Sonar was taking the hint from a few complaints about his ‘preparation’ of food and unpacked what looked like a burrito. He opened the fridge and grabbed a small tupperware full of fruit and then sat at Flambae’s table in the empty chair across from him.
They weren’t friends, not like how Flambae and Prism were close. Sonar was a few years younger than he was, but acted immature to a point that made Flambae question if he hacked SDN’s files and changed his age before joining Z-Team.
Sonar tucked into his lunch, daintily spearing fruits onto a fork with longer tongs and depositing them into his mouth. Flambae brought out his phone, checking on Insta to see if Prism had taken any good pics of them while they were out on their last dual dispatch.
“Soooo…”
The fire user rolled his eyes. “What?”
“Might’ve heard through the grapevine about your courting before you and Robert made it official over the comms yesterday,” Sonar said, taking another careful bite of the speared fruit, “Never thought you’d be that guy to go for someone you work with.”
Flambae frowned, taking a bite out his wrap. “Things change.” He was not going to have this conversation during lunch while he was sober, that was a given.
A silence settled between them, broken just by the scrape of cutlery and crunch of teeth against bread and veggies (or voles or whatever Sonar had packed).
“How did you know?”
Flambae quirked an eyebrow. “Know what?”
Sonar swallowed down a bite of his burrito, clearing his throat. “When you wanted to court Robbo?”
“How do you mean?”
“Was it, like, a gut feeling or something else that made you wanna do it?”
Flambae tilted his head, considering the question as he took a bite of his wrap. He took his time chewing, watching the hybrid carefully. Sonar had set his fork and burrito down, more concerned with how his hands were moving against each other. His ears were twitching.
“What do you really want to know, Sonar?”
The hybrid looked down at his folded hands, twiddling his thumbs.
“There’s someone I want to court. Seriously. But I don’t fucking know how to.” He looked up at Flambae with clouded eyes. “The articles I’ve been reading make it sound like it’s a chore and that the omegas just accept things because they’re given to them, but it doesn’t actually happen like that, right? Even the omega articles I read talk about how just accepting an alpha’s courtship is the best thing ever, but they don’t explain anything?”
Flambae furrowed his eyebrows. “What the fuck kind of articles are you reading?”
“The popular ones!!”
Of fucking course Sonar’s articles would be red-pilled pieces of bullshit. Flambae was glad that the hybrid was reaching out to someone else instead of just going off of what he was reading. Instincts prevailed, even with an immature bat hybrid with a drug problem.
“Alright, alright.” Flambae sighed, locking in to the discussion, glad to see that Sonar was looking at him with rapt attention. “Firstly, I don’t want to ever fucking hear that you were reading shit like that again. If you have a question about dynamics, you’re better off asking an actual person. Physically. Like, in the same room like we are now, talking like normies about this shit.”
Flambae willed himself to cool down, knowing how his scent was expanding with how pissed off he was. Sonar’s senses were on a different level and he didn’t want to cause the hybrid any stress from his scent. “Secondly, did anyone ever teach you about courtship? Like, how things work and what you should focus on?”
Sonar dipped his head down. “A little bit in college? Kinda?”
Okay, there was the baseline. Flambae took a moment to let that settle over him. If Sonar had been exposed to traditional courting methods, there was a learning curve that rivaled his own when his mother gave him her own education on omegas. “Details. What do you know?”
“The different ways of courtship that reflect the omega’s wants. How it works off the love languages that betas follow, but just amplified?”
Flambae nodded. It always came down to betas, regardless of what the man who sired him tried to cement into his brain. “So, you’ve got your omega in mind. What’s the first thing you want to do?”
Sonar tilted his head back up. “Give her stuff with my scent on it.” He didn’t pose it as a question, but Flambae took it as one.
“You want her to associate your scent with, what? Comfort? Happiness? Contentment? You have to think about that if you’re bringing pheromones into the equation.”
Sonar let out a chuffing sound. “Is all of the above an option?”
“Traditionally, yes. But we’re in an age where some omegas might not appreciate that. It’s better to know someone outside of their secondary gender before you let your instincts run wild.”
Sonar was nodding, still hanging off every word Flambae was saying. That was good, maybe most of the conversation would get through to the part of his brain that retained information about crypto stocks.
“Robert and I started things out of order, but traditionally you could say I’d done things like an alpha should have. I wanted to court him before I figured out he was an omega, but when he-”
Flambae stopped before he went any further, biting his lip. He didn’t want to mention that the day Robert passed by the break room in an artificial heat, it was because of what had happened to Sonar a few minutes earlier. Flambae didn’t want to make it sound like he blamed Sonar for something he had no control over. Who wouldl’ve fucking known that there was a weird aphrodisiac that was being distributed by normie drug dealers?
He cleared his throat. “I smelled him during a heat when he was heading out of the office. I figured ‘hey, what better way to help him through a heat than to make sure he’s not eating fucking shit from the vending machine every day’ and decided that would be my way of courting him. But we’d only just started to not butt heads every five minutes and I didn’t want him to know it was me, so I dropped the food at his door to make him think it was a neighbor or something. Figured it’d still count as courtship, but I wanted to tell him who was leaving it there in my own time. And that fucking blew up in my face when that piece of shit doctor-”
“Dr. Torrence?”
Flambae pursed his lips. “Yeah, that fucker.”
Sonar growled, a low thing that vibrated through the table and through the fire user’s arms where they were situated on the plastic. Flambae usually wasn’t put off by the scent of other alphas, but Sonar’s scent had transformed instantly at the name of the doctor; from fresh mint and soil to something moldy and rotten. Seeing the hybrid angry without transforming was one thing, but with the change in his scent had Flambae’s hackles rising.
“That piece of shit isn’t here now,” he growled back, “Take a breath and pull back.”
Sonar let out another low growl and Flambae let out one of his own, leaning across the table and slapping his hands down on the plastic top in an effort to distract the other alpha. “You are not transforming here, pull the fuck back.”
Surprisingly, Sonar did, letting out a long exhale through his nose that made his snout twitch. His scent was still strong, but the rottenness was fading with every second. “Sorry man, didn’t mean for all of that.”
Flambae paused before he asked his next question. “Did he do something to you?”
Sonar took a bite of his burrito, cloudy eyes focused on the table. His scent had softened, but there was a sour note to it now, the mint sharp and cold like taking a breath during a snowy morning.
“Yeah. Yeah he did.” Sonar didn’t extrapolate, but the amount of anger in his voice was enough to keep Flamabe from asking more. His grip tightened on his food, making dents in the tortilla. “The last thing that waste of life did at SDN was lock an omega in a room with me while I was drugged.”
If Flambae had the chance to encounter Dr. Torrence again, he was going to set the man on fire and keep him burning until he crumbled into ash. Full stop. He’d let Sonar incapacitate him first, of course, but Flambae wanted to be the one to end the man.
Sonar was agitated, snout wrinkling in distaste. “I will never forgive him for putting her in danger.”
There was a question on the tip of Flambae’s tongue, something he knew would cause another spike of agitation from the other alpha. He turned it around in his mind for a moment, before settling on the wording: “Was she hurt?”
Sonar shook his head. “Nuh uh. She was putting out her scent to keep me calm. Me! The dangerous one in that situation! Even though she was probably fucking terrified, she was still trying to keep me calm.” He took a large bite of his burrito, chewing thoughtfully. “And it worked.”
His scent was still softening and Flambae decided to keep digging.
“Is she the one you want to court?”
“Yeah…” Sonar’s ears perked up. “And not because of what happened, that’d be fucked up! She was one of the nurses that was treating me through the whole Umber shit.”
Flambae nodded. “So, was it the care she gave you that made you want to court her?”
Sonar slumped onto the table, burrito released from his grip. “That, but more. She’s pretty, she seems really nice. Compared to some other people, she seemed to want to make sure I was okay.” He wrinkled his snout. “But there was something else too. Like, her scent smelled right.”
Now they were getting into interesting territory. Flambae dropped his wrap, waving his hand so Sonar knew to continue.
“In the beginning especially, when I woke up after I got into the infirmary, it broke through the drug and I could, like, think outside of the instincts. There were other nurses that checked up on me with all different scents and shit, but hers…”
He buried his face in his hands, mumbling something. Flambae rolled his eyes and cupped his ear. “Didn’t hear that? Don’t fucking muffle it, you’re already spilling tea about this, I wanna hear it all.”
The hybrid lifted up from the table and took in a deep breath. “Ithelpedmetransformbacktohybrid.”
“Hmm?”
“Fuck, I could transform back to hybrid because of her scent!”
That got Flambae to sit back in his chair. “Has that ever happened before?”
“No!!” Sonar said, throwing his hands up, “Literally every time she visited, I was in my big form. She’d do her stuff, told me that someone would be by to make sure I ate or some shit, and then leave. Her scent lingered and I’d focus on it because she smelled really nice. The first time, I legit took a deep breath and let it out and shifted back. Instantly.”
He curled his fists back onto the table. “It grounded me in a way that I’ve never been ground before. Like, it anchored me. I could focus. I’ve never been able to go from full bat and back so quickly and all it took was for her to be in the room.”
Flambae tried to keep his expression neutral. This felt like what he and Robert had heard from Dr. Almeda; something buried from an instinctual urge from generations of alphas and omegas. Maybe it was something like that? Normal, but uncommon.
“Then you make the extra effort,” Flambae said, “Learn more about her. Don’t just shove some shitty courtship gift on her and expect her to accept it.”
Sonar nodded. “Okay…but what would be something good to get her at the start? Just for reference, you know?”
“The goal of courtship is to focus on the needs of who you’re courting as well as their wants,” the fire user said, taking one last bite of his wrap before sticking it back in its tupperware. “That’s where learning more about her will give you more ideas.”
“Robert needed food, even if it wasn’t something he wanted. Still, it helped him feel better. I left him notes, something he could physically keep, even if what they said wasn’t what he wanted to hear at the time. He told me later that they helped him, my scent on the paper was what he needed to combat the false heat Umber fucked him up with.”
“I was attracted to him before I knew he was an omega,” Flambae finished, trying to drive that particular point home, “You need to separate those instincts and see if this person’s actually the one you want to start courting.”
“But-”
“No buts. If this is someone you’re interested in, that the alpha part of you wants, you need to know her outside of her secondary gender if you want this to work.”
Flambae knew this could be projection on his part. Sonar could have easily found the woman he was talking about as a compatible mate without his input. But it wouldn’t hurt to give the hybrid a little push to learning more about the woman that his instincts had signalled out. Especially if he was looking to tech bro and ‘alpha’ male articles for courtship advice.
Sonar’s ear twitched towards the breakroom door and Flambae looked past him to see a group of dispatchers laughing as they headed towards the fridge.
“You’ve got this,” Flambae muttered under his breath, just for Sonar to hear, as he got out of his seat to put his tupperware back into the fridge.
----
Flambae expected Sonar to approach him later in the week to talk about how things were going. He expected impulsiveness from the hybrid, just based off what he knew about him.
Three weeks went by and he was once again back in the breakroom when Sonar ran into him in a rush. The hybrid’s tie was askew, his fur looked rumpled. His scent was as soft as Flambae had ever smelled it, making him think of the garden his sister kept in the yard outside her condo.
“Flambae! Just the man I was looking for!” He sounded excited, bouncing on the balls of his feet, “You were right, man! Learning more about her and getting to know her…fuck. I like her. A lot. And I wanna go forward with courting her right.”
The fire user nodded. “Good to hear. So, anything you wanna spill? Or do you want to wait until the reaction she has to your first gift?”
Sonar blinked, then looked down at his feet. He cleared his throat. “I might have already started giving her gifts-”
“Sonar-”
“But it’s stuff that she needed! Pens and notebooks and protein shakes! Stuff that would help her in the day to day. And she’s been using ‘em!”
The hybrid sighed heavily, shoving his snout into his hands. “I’m not good with this shit! I want to be good at this shit! After everything that she had to go through, I wanted her to feel…”
He paused, turning to look at the floor, hands clutching at the fur around his neck. “I don’t know…like she doesn’t have to worry about anything. That she can take time and breathe and recover from all of the shit she’d gone through too during that week. I wanted to take some of that stress away.” He took in a small breath. “She made me feel safe. I want her to feel safe too,” he said, voice quiet.
Flambae was silent, his eyebrows climbing up his forehead with each sentence Sonar spoke. Once the hybrid was finished, he took a step forward. He hated how Sonar flinched.
He settled his hand on the starchy shoulder of the hybrid’s suit, patting him on the shoulder. He didn’t expect Sonar of all people to be an alpha that seemed truly concerned about the person he wanted to court. Not to say that it was rare, but the fact that he’d taken Flambae’s advice through it all made something like pride swell in the fire user’s chest.
Sonar looked at where Flambae’s hand rested, then back up at him. “I didn’t fuck up, did I?”
“No. You did fucking great,” Flambae said, flashing him a smirk, “Fucking initiative. You’re showing her you give a damn.”
“So…now what?”
“Now, it’s time to show that you know what she likes outside of work. Take a seat, let me help you brainstorm.”
Flambae led Sonar to an empty table, lunches forgotten, and let the hybrid talk. All the while, he tried to hide the proud smile on his face.