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Pond twisted in the sheets, body burning up, muggy with the unusual roughness against flushed skin. His body had aches that had nothing to with workouts or dance practices, sweat clinging to the inside of his shirt, where skin folded over skin.
Lit up on his phone’s harsh, bright screen was a reminder: rut in 2 days.
Every year, Pond dreaded waking up with this animal log burning under his skin, because it got a little brighter and more tunneled on a certain scent each time. Two years ago, drowning in bad club music and alcohol and the senseless violence of his pre-rut, he’d had to come to terms with what his body called for when it lost its humane rationality. Hunched over Phuwin’s number, roughed up by the endless stream of hate online, throbbing like an open wound—I love you. Do you love me?—Pond hadn’t meant for his dumb wolf brain to latch on to his partner. Pond hadn’t meant for a lot of things to happen, really.
“Fuck,” he swore under his breath as he sat up, the room lurching sideways before wobbling upright.
All his senses were heightened, and his nose was already picking up nauseous smells from all the way down the hall. Pond, like some alphas, got really irritable by scents during his rut period; ever since he’d picked up a slight (very slight) affinity for Phuwin’s scent, this condition had worsened and felt like his body was consciously rejecting everyone else by convincing Pond’s wolf hindbrain that they were stinking. Everybody was too much: too sweet, too musky, too smoky, too sour, too flowery—
Phuwin. Phuwin’s scent was just perfect.
No, Pond blinked away the haze. Stop. “It just doesn’t get on my nerves,” he muttered, and somehow he was standing in front of a mirror he didn’t remember walking up to, and his eyes were wide and bloodshot, and his bones poked stark outlines under pale skin. “It just doesn’t.”
Pond believed this. Pond believed the Pond in the mirror who believed this story he’d fabricated for himself. Actually, Phuwin’s scent had never grated on Pond’s oversensitive sense of smell; even during a pre-rut during their first year of acquaintance, he’d found it oddly neutral, like a cleansing room-freshener, but he never told Phuwin, fearing that it might be taken as offensive to have your scent compared to a room-freshener. When he first met Phuwin, the actor, his senior in the industry, hadn’t even presented, and Pond’d been grateful for that small mercy even as he’d worried about how different they were, how difficult they found to hold a conversation of any real depth.
And then, well, everyone presented in their own time. Sometimes, it was during adolescence; sometimes, right on the cusp of adulthood; and sometimes, there was no presentation at all, and they became a beta. And meeting Phuwin tilted Pond’s worldview many times, and not so gently, but it was expected that a presentation would happen before a person reached the age of thirty. I’m going to keep a tally, Pond used to tell himself back then, before Phuwin’d presented. Keep a record of how long we can work together peacefully.
Pond questioned himself and scared himself in the process of trying to understand Phuwin’s world: how he saw things, how he took the motions, what he thought of everyday silly stuff, how long he could act normal when something wasn’t quite right, and so on. Maybe it was because they were so different that learning to find common ground with Phuwin forced Pond to step out of his own bubble that he’d built with great effort after his father’s death, and the view outside the bubble was so stunning that he sort of just walked on, and kept walking forward, and never looked back.
Phuwin’s scent could be said to be one in a series of confrontations that Pond’d undertaken with himself right after Phuwin’d presented—as an Alpha.
It was expected that alphas would find each other’s presence, scent and behavior corroding and threatening during mating cycles (Pond preferred the term ‘heat cycles’—less embarrassing); that they would stay away from each other and instead seek the comforting scents of their omega counterparts, or their own dens.
It was expected that an alpha’s nature would have them lean away from another alpha during this period of heightened sensitivity and vulnerability. But Pond would have to accept the fact that for him, oh, that isn’t true for me was soon to become the response to everything that was generally expected.
He would never forget the first time he smelled Phuwin, smelled his pores, his open skin under that newly bloomed scent gland—such a long time ago on another filming set, in another world. He would never forget thinking that something was happening to him, something warm and scary, and that Phuwin would be mad if he told him. He would never forget thinking that he must, at all costs, keep this a secret from Phuwin.
Phuwin’s scent? What could someone like Pond care for that? Partner, friend, nong, boy, alpha, man—it was Pond’s choice to embrace all of him, wasn’t a chore, or a kindness, or a strategic fanservice moment. That meant asking less questions, being less invasive, knowing his boundaries. The room-freshener joke never quite made it out of his throat after Phuwin presented, because it had become so hilariously wrong that it ceased to be funny altogether.
Neutral like room-freshener was not how Pond would describe Alpha Phuwin’s scent. To say the least.
He knew mae would be displeased with his decision to go to practice today, and when he ambled down the stairs, into the kitchen, he was proven right. Her disapproval was sharp. “You’re supposed to be resting,” she said.
“Tomorrow,” Pond replied, grimacing at the riot of scents in the kitchen. “I-I’ll wear a mask, mae. We haven’t had a chance to practice the new, uh,” he stumbled, words slipping by him, and his mother’s frown darkened, “the new choreography. Sorry.”
Tawin, sitting at the table, looked between them in between bites of his rice, and stayed silent.
The flesh-bell tolled inside him throughout the drive to the GMM building, both his pockets full of extra soothing pills mae had insisted on him. His head was clear, he could be on his own just fine, and inside his car, it was even pleasant to be all alone for once—it was the others he couldn’t stand, their smells, their fluctuating emotions, their failing scent blockers. That bell swung from side to side, sending vibrations of awareness up his spine, and he crawled towards the building with his foot on the breaks, taking care to drive as carefully as he could, to stay in, for as long as possible.
The practice room was as painless as things could be for Pond at this frustrating moment, and when they started practicing, he felt almost okay, and Joong slapped a patch of scent-blockers on everyone who wasn’t Pond, giving them a stern, friendly order to “keep it down”. The scent neutralizers in the room worked just fine, and combined with Joong’s help, even breaking sweat after dancing for an hour didn’t make Pond want to hurl his guts, or claw at his own nose from oversensitivity.
But when he entered, Pond faltered.
“How’s it going,” Phuwin raised a hand in greeting, the other holding his phone, and tugged his handbag secure over his shoulder.
His scent spread like wildfire in a forest. Dryness ignited from nothing but sparks. And Alpha Phuwin smelled like it: heat, crackling, logs of drywood, sandalwood, temples, incense, and stars if humans could smell them, and home-made fire in some distant village of childhood, and an addicting raw substance in the bloodstream of a lesser animal.
He wasn’t looking at Pond, specifically, but at the whole group, and Pond hadn’t known that he’d come today—he knew Phuwin was recording his own song nearby but Phuwin usually told him these things, and this was clearly an impulsive visit. Pond was so fucked.
“Wait, can you put on blockers? Pond is, you know.” Joong showed Phuwin one of the apparently millions of blockers he kept in his bag, and Phuwin just frowned worriedly in Pond’s direction. Pond looked down, avoiding his gaze, intensely ashamed of god knew what.
The room roared with the presence of Phuwin’s scent. Pond slouched in a chair, taking deep, gulping breaths, eyes wide open and mouth parted as Phuwin’s voice rose commandingly in the air, like a sudden spike of alpha on top of everything else, making Pond’s stomach clench hotly, “That’s fine, I don’t need these.”
Pond was distantly aware that he’d broken out into goosebumps.
“Hey.” Soft hands curled around his wrist, making him look up into steady, dark eyes, like earth under an uprooted plant. “How bad is it?”
Pond flexed his fingers uselessly, “Just the first day. I’m going on leave starting tomorrow.” His gaze drifted, dream-like, towards the bare expanse of where that scent congealed, and without much thought, he found himself lowered into that graceful curve where Phuwin’s neck met his shoulder. All of a sudden, the entire tapestry of shame and conflict collapsed in on itself, in the face of that accessible, touchable patch of Phuwin’s body. Pond had the chance to think, oh, no, before his mind clouded over entirely, and his body just let go. “Smells good,” he mumbled, nuzzling into warm skin, rumbling, contentment suddenly flooding through him, pitcher of sweet nectar spilling down his throat.
“Oh-“ Phuwin’s voice was a nice, meaningless jumble of words at the back of his brain that made him rumble happily. “O-okay. Um, I think he’s alright, guys. Yeah.”
Someone said something, and it sounded shocked, or maybe amused; Pond couldn’t tell because he didn’t care enough. He melted into Phuwin’s scent, and his limbs went loose the way they did before falling into a deep sleep. A moment later, Phuwin’s arms came round his shoulders, and he rumbled again, louder, pressing himself as close to this wonderful, uncomplicate burst of perfect scent profile and huggable body as possible.
“Let’s get you home for now, hm?” Phuwin spoke, running his fingers soothingly through Pond’s hair. His nose brushed along the cord of thick muscle below Pond’s ear, pressing there lightly for a sniff or two, and Pond hoped Phuwin liked his scent, too. Phuwin gave a little laugh, jostling Pond’s chin which was resting firmly in the crook of his neck, “This is why you never skip leaves, huh? Look at you.”
“I don’t know what the fuck,” Joong said, loud enough for Pond’s ears to pick up on it, “is going on right now but, I mean, wow. Please take care of him, Phuwin.” It sounded as if Santa said something in reply, or perhaps in addition, but it was too low to pick up on, and Joong simply reacted to it with a, “Oh god, you’re right, he’s scenting him.”
“Yeah, he- sometimes, it’s—” Phuwin’s voice changed midway, as if he’d made a decision, and then he pulled Pond to his feet, “We’re gonna go. Yeah, I think we should just leave. I’ll—keep you posted.”
Pond was sure something monumental had just shifted in his life, but his wolf hindbrain was not bothered about it, so he wasn’t either. He was sure everything was going to be fine as long as he had Phuwin by his side. He hadn’t felt this unburdened and free in a long time, and it was a whole different storm of pleasure inside him. This is what I was missing, he thought with animalistic certainty.
And when Phuwin drove him home, he took off his shirt and handed it to Pond, but he wasn’t wearing an undershirt so he took one of Pond’s from his closet before he left.
Exactly one hour later, when the strongest haze of pre-rut had been banked temporarily, realization hit Pond with the force of a thousand trucks. But he was helpless, and he couldn’t hold onto the guilt and worry long enough before he lost himself to another greedy indulgence of Phuwin’s perfect scent. And all his wolf really cared about was that Phuwin had given it to him.
Pond hadn’t meant for it to happen, but he was really a lost cause.