Chapter Text
The omega is biting down a peach. A pinkish, fuzzy peach that the emperor has picked himself this morning, brought to the chambers of the boy and left, his servers kneeling at the door before the little shit and him barely even acknowledge them. Yoongi stares at him with his sword on his legs, half-sitting on a trunk with hands tapping on the blade’s cover.
He makes noises. Singing, whistling, something of the sort while he happily munches on the soft and sweet flavor of the imperial treasured peaches. And Yoongi finds it rather annoying, especially since he’s basking in the sun, sitting on his porch, legs swinging.
“You know”, he starts, cleaning the sweet juice off his chin with his thumb before sucking it off from there. “You’re pretty annoyingly present for someone that should be an assassin of a sort. Or, wait, what are you again?”
Yoongi grinds his teeth together not to unleash his sword on the boy’s throat there and then. Jungkook is still not looking at him, still with his eyes closed and face to the sun.
“I am an advisor, your highness.”
Jungkook makes an “o” with his mouth, nodding, taking another bite off the peach. “You stink. You’re stinking up my place, my peach, and my morning.”
He opens his eyes, then, pointing them directly towards Yoongi, even between the branches, where Yoongi should have been hidden well between. The dark gaze hidden between the soft features of his face shifts something in Yoongi, a quiet uneasiness that feels like leaves twirling under the wind’s will. Yoongi stands up, fixing his sword on his hip, walking quietly between the green leaves on the ground.
When he is in front of Jungkook’s apartments, he slowly bows in front of him, eyes not reaching the ground but staying fixed on his legs, expensive and soft pieces of fabric that the richest part of the world had woven just to end up on this body, a soft hum of sun highlighting the droplets of peach’s juice dropping on it.
Yoongi tightens his jaw not to whip out the sword and cut his pretty legs in halves. While the wind moves his long, blonde hair off his face, Yoongi remains expressionless, a skill he has learned and forged himself, cut out the excess to make space for his own fury to fill up the space and make him stronger.
And he sure as hell don’t “stink up” the place.
His pheromones are not strong to do so in the first place, but even if they were, Yoongi’s neck’s been scrubbed dutifully in the leaves picked fresh this very morning to make sure nothing of his scent is left to anyone to smell.
Surely not an omega.
Still, he stays bowing a second more. “Sorry, your highness, for my scent distressed you.”
A hum. Yoongi goes back straight again, and in those big eyes he sees, for a second, a fraction of himself, the soft hum of the sun against the pupils, frail and pale skin under the thorns of his black hair.
“Oh, you’re sly. Nice to know.”
There’s an unsettling way in the soft blinking of his eyelashes against his cheeks, in the way Jungkook bites down on the peach in deliberate bites that show off his sculpted cupid bow, proudly shown in pink laps on his face. Yoongi doesn’t look at him if not through his lashes, barely, from the corner of his eyes.
“I do have to ask your highness for his presence, with me. We need to go to his highness’ lessons.”
Jungkook snorts, watching the peach’s core getting unraveled by his rather rounded teeth under his fingertips. “I don’t need those, Yoongi.”
The advisor has strength and has been trained to be untouchable, unbreakable. He thinks, he wonders, would his scent spike and twirl like a tornado and a hurricane, if he wasn’t…?
But he doesn’t dwell on it.
He just blinks away the sun, feeling the sweat on his temples being caught by the black cloth wrapped tight against his head. “It is not up to me to decide, your highness. Your reading lessons awaits you.”
Scoffing at Yoongi’s lack of response, Jungkook gets up from the wood, the soft colors of his hanbok loose against his skin. He walks with slow paced movements, the translucent veil on his body twirling in the wind. “Reading, hm?”
Yoongi waits for him to get down the two steps of the stairs getting to his apartment, and while he does so, Jungkook gets off the last piece of peach from the pit, twirling it in his hand while walking towards the palace. “I don’t even know why I should be doing this in the first place.”
His scent is controlled, albeit sweet, a tangerine and lily mixture of some kind, and it feels like it should be swallowing up Yoongi’s figure completely, engulfing him in a cloud of sickly-sweet pheromones. Yoongi’s nose is slow and steady, only capturing it briefly.
“The Emperor requires you to be taught well for you have to be a part of his court.”
Jungkook throws the pit in the air and catches it right back when it falls, hand steady. “I know how to be part of a court.”
Do you? would respond Yoongi, but he just lightly clenches his fists against his side, stride steadily on the ground a few feet behind him and eyes on the back of his head like it’ll grow eyes any minute now. For all Yoongi knows, he could.
He’d never seen a more defiant, arrogant, presumptuous, irritating omega in his life.
The emperor has trusted him with breaking every member of his court personally, folding their rebellious concubinage into surrender. Yoongi has done his duty well, training every member of the closest proximity of his emperor to be the perfect doll he’d like to surround himself with.
Everything went smoothly: training them and making them behave the way it was proper was easy, for Yoongi, and even if he took no pride in doing so, he did his job unquestioningly, eyes dry even while the most rebellious of them begged for freedom.
Jungkook was different.
He was a gift.
And as a gift, the court expected him to behave as such, as the pretty doll with the blinking eyes that he acted like the first night he had arrived in the palace. All shy smiles and submissive eyes, Yoongi has watched the dinner unfold from the door, hand on the sword and ready at the signal, a signal that never arrived.
The messenger ate well, Jungkook barely grazed the food, straight back and legs folded quietly while rice stuck one grain at the time to his chopsticks, like a sign, an omen of bad luck. Or, well, Yoongi thought of it as such. And while he drunk the plum vine, head almost all the way turned to the door, Yoongi saw his face well, for the first time, the moon shining bright against his cheeks. While they looked young, lively and rosy under the yellow light of the dining room, under the silver slits of moonlight, Yoongi could only see knives.
But he shrugged his shoulders, mentally, at the thought, at his feeling, a shiver on his back. While the messenger from the Paek’s kingdom stumbled back to his rooms, Yoongi stayed back, quietly, in the shadow, watching the emperor start to touch. And Jungkook complied, sweet and shy, all of what the emperor wants from his dolls.
So, Yoongi thinks, it got addicting.
The first month went so well all the other concubines were on the verge of tears every day. Jungkook barely got out of the emperor rooms, and nobody saw him if not serves coming in and out of the room.
But after that, it all began to fade away, like cherry blossoms in the wind. And soon enough, the emperor was begging Yoongi to bring back Jungkook as he had so much enjoyed him at the beginning. Again, addicting.
Yoongi took care of his rooms, making sure they were as distant as it could have been from anyone else. Instructed everyone not to talk, touch or even just as much as get close to them, making sure Jungkook was alone, as alone as it could get, in that crystal chrysalides that nothing did more than just bring every eye in the court towards it.
But if nobody could be influenced by the rebellious heart of the omega, then it was better for everyone to question why he was no longer tangled in the emperor’s sheets.
However, a rumor becomes reality if everybody starts tale-telling it hard enough. And when the rumor the omega was pregnant started circulating, Yoongi decided that the lessons would be now to be had in the palace itself. Let everybody see the absence of a baby, so nobody can say there’s one.
“Can we skip the reading one? We can do swords fight, I’ll agree to that.”
“No can do, your highness.”
Jungkook rolls his eyes, still playing with the pit in his hand. Yoongi follows him while Jungkook walks the way he knows now by heart, towards the scrolls’ room. The shelves are all filled with them, rolls upon rolls with written texts on them, ancient tales, military strategy, poetry, tax records.
Yoongi waits for Jungkook to sit on the floor, in front of the low table. “Namjoon.”
The scroll keeper looks at them from behind a shelf, his scent spiking up when looking at the omega on the floor. Yoongi can feel it, this close, and surely Jungkook can too, if the small smirk on his face, even when it’s turned to the table, is a good enough indicator. “Yoongi. Your highness.”
“Hi.”
Yoongi is tempted to roll his eyes, but he prefers to clear his throat and stroll down the shelves. “Were you looking for something in particular?”
Namjoon is carefully rolling back a stroll, the paper crackling under his fingers. Yoongi hums, low, in response. “I think we’ll go with some sijo.”
Nodding, Namjoon disappears in between the papers, and Yoongi sits in front of Jungkook, his sword on his crossed legs. Jungkook sits with his back straight, but scoffs at him nonetheless. “Sijo? Really?”
When he doesn’t get any response, he just goes on, playing with the norigae on his hanbok. “I know sijo and I know how to recite them. I don’t need to read them.”
“You need to be able to do it perfectly for the Emperor.”
“I can do it perfectly for the Emperor, but nobody seems to think I can also have fun, while being perfect for the emperor.”
Namjoon puts a couple of strolls on the table, leaving right after when both Jungkook and Yoongi continue their quiet fight, both gracefully looking at the table instead of staring at each other like rabid dogs. “Having fun must be breaking apart the whole of the concubinage, for you.”
Yoongi unravels a stroll, checking the characters in the lines, the twist, the syllables. Jungkook giggles, soft and airy, a sound that should be melodic, but comes out like a screech in Yoongi’s ears.
Jungkook’s soft hand appears from on top of the scroll, delicate and poisonous. There’s a second, a long and grueling second, where their skins meet. And Yoongi expects Jungkook’s skin to feel soft and warm, like the hands of the numerous omegas he has met and taught and perfected for the emperor in the past.
However, on top of his hand, Jungkook’s skin is cold, and even if soft and perfumed by the lotions and oils the emperor gifts him almost daily, Yoongi retracts quickly, like burned.
His eyes end up tangling with Jungkook, and whereas he’d find clarity in a normal omega gaze, the soft buzzing of their nurturing and curious beings, he can only find the darkness of his pupils, a cold shiver up his arms.
“It seems to me you blame my very existence for this court’s cracks in its façade. Unfair, wouldn’t you think”?
And since he smiles sweetly while he says that, eyes already on the paper, Yoongi can't do much more than just reassure his own past self. Because he was, in fact, right. And something’s wrong with this one omega.