Chapter Text
Augus
*
Augus knelt in front of the garden bed and decided that actually, he was old enough to get one of those cushioned pads for his knees. He grunted as he split several of the lemongrass clumps along their roots. Some he’d prepare and freeze, the rest he’d replant. Clive had expressed an interest in taking some of it on, now Augus had proved it would readily grow in the cooler clime of the most south-west corner of Western Australia, where it was decidedly not tropical enough for it to be truly happy.
After Mosk left, Augus had kept it alive mostly to remember the times Mosk wanted to grow all manner of plants that didn’t suit the climate.
The sun was warm overhead, but not biting. He tended his small cottage on the grounds of Hillview Rehabilitation Facility, a home he could never own, on land that would never be his, and technically in retirement now, so the time he had remaining to him here was limited. After all, another alpha companion could be rehabilitating an omega in this cottage. Augus closed his eyes briefly.
The lemongrass leaves were aromatic and citrus-fresh around him, the rosemary added something greener, sharper, but less sour. He felt an urge to let his own pheromones surge, saturate the world with his scent, his power, but he held it back and made a sound of amusement. He didn’t need to do that anymore. There was no one to do it for. He was never going to rehabilitate an omega again; his heart condition wouldn’t allow for it.
He sighed.
Augus’ ears sharpened on the sound of footsteps, and he knew it wasn’t an alpha from the lightness of the steps.
There’d been a bulletin from the Hillview head doctor, Temsen Ohlo Ohlo, that the grounds were to be cleared of all alpha companions and their omegas, because the eccentric, somewhat famous writer and omega – Corbyn Prince – was visiting the grounds to see his nephew on-site. He rarely visited, and Augus had never met him, but Corbyn had never ceased with his demands on every visit and now it had become something of a Hillview talking point among the staff. It was almost like a celebrity with a rider.
Which meant, unless there was an escapee, the footsteps belonged to either a beta or Corbyn Prince.
Augus’ nostrils flared. He scented nothing at all.
He turned slowly, aware of how quickly he would be read as a peak alpha by an omega, once they looked in his eyes and felt the instinct to look away. Augus could keep his pheromones at bay, so he didn’t control the minds of omegas around him, but there was still a level of animal magnetism he couldn’t control, that had nothing to do with his pheromone control and everything to do with genetics.
His first impression was that of a lively, bitter intellect. A wry amusement. A small man who could have passed for a beta, dressed all in black, like a currawong or a raven. Black eyes, pale skin, thick eyebrows, a sharp mouth.
The omega left more than eight feet between them, and he looked somewhere past Augus’ green eyes, instead of concertedly looking away or down like most omegas did.
So he’d noticed. Augus wondered if Corbyn Prince was on the kind of illegal drugs that could block or mask scent from alphas, because Augus should have picked up something by now.
‘I was told all the alpha companions and their omegas would be off the grounds,’ the man said, his voice harsher than Augus expected. ‘Is Hillview becoming lax because this isn’t my first visit?’
Augus stood slowly, couldn’t help the way he assessed the man before him. An older omega, possibly sickly, definitely thinner than the clothing indicated, probably not all that healthy, and not his responsibility or his business anyway.
A lazy smile.
‘This is my cottage, and I have no omega. I’m merely gardening. You walked over to me. Rather dangerous, when you think about it.’
The man looked at a black watch on his wrist, then let his sleeve fall back over it. To Augus’ surprise, he walked closer, then walked straight past Augus, up the two wooden steps onto the verandah, which made him taller than Augus.
He leaned on the wooden railing separating the verandah from the wraparound garden and ran long, clever fingers through the rosemary before holding his fingertips to his nose.
‘So you’re another one of the rapists who gets paid to assault omegas,’ Corbyn Prince said. ‘Like the one who rapes my nephew.’
‘And how is this paying off for you, do you think?’ Augus said, putting aside his analytical, compassionate mind and reminding himself he didn’t have to behave like an alpha companion at all anymore. He could forget his training, say what he actually wanted to say. ‘Walking into the territory of a peak alpha, antagonising him, waiting to see what will happen? This can’t be the first time you’ve pushed your luck.’
‘I squandered all my luck before the age of nineteen,’ Corbyn said, barking out a laugh. ‘I feel like you know who I am.’
‘I’ve heard of you.’ Augus tilted his head. ‘Not simply because you’ve been here before.’
Corbyn raised an eyebrow, his eyes slid briefly to Augus’ and then slid away. He said nothing, and Augus knelt back down once more and planted in the smaller, newly split clumps of lemongrass. He didn’t want them to dry, and he still needed to water them in.
‘You’re not like other peak alphas I’ve met,’ Corbyn said finally.
‘I’m surprised you’ve met any at all.’
‘I certainly wish I hadn’t met a single one of you. Such is life. So it goes. Et cetera.’
‘Are you nervous, coming here? To meet your family member?’
‘The rape victim?’ Corbyn said playfully.
Augus laughed quietly under his breath. He tamped down the soil with his fingers and ran them through the graceful, long leaves, their lovely colour, like the bright pale green of Eucalyptus synandra or torquata leaves.
‘And do you think a peak alpha has ever been raped?’ Corbyn said, tapping the wooden railing a few times.
‘Anything is possible,’ Augus said, feeling a spark of discomfort. That was a pointed question, and Augus thought of his brother, not because Ash had ever raped him, but because Ash certainly would have tried if they hadn’t been raised in the circumstances they’d found themselves in.
‘I feel as though I know you,’ Corbyn said, sighing.
A cold shiver then. Augus was rarely recognised by anyone at all, but Corbyn was perhaps the right age…
Augus didn’t tense and waited to see what else Corbyn would say. With any luck, he’d drop it.
‘You have the look of an actor about you,’ Corbyn said, almost to himself. ‘A very unique face, and eyes, and hair. I have not seen many movies, and of the classics I’ve watched, the ages don’t match. Even given peak alphas living longer, you see.’
Corbyn moved further along the verandah, away from Augus, and then looked back at Augus and stared at him like a scalpel. Strangely, Augus felt as though the judgement of this sharp little poet might actually matter. Ridiculous.
‘I can’t place it,’ Corbyn said finally, frowning in displeasure.
Augus considered him for some time, but Corbyn had already looked away.
Augus had met a single older omega on the grounds of Hillview recently, the one who had become friends with Mosk. Beyond that, he’d only ever met older omegas in the context of meeting the parents of the omegas whom he was contracted to rehabilitate. Corbyn wasn’t even that old, not really, but by omega standards…
Was he in his fifties? Plenty of omegas weren’t lucky enough to live that long, for so many reasons, almost none connected to death by natural causes.
‘And so,’ Corbyn said almost dreamily, eyes sliding sidelong to Augus’, almost sly. ‘Why do you have such a terrible sadness about you? Why do you crouch like a worm in your garden, tending herbs instead of a bank account of billions like the other peak alphas?’
Augus’ lips quirked in a half-smile.
Well, wasn’t that its own kind of captivating? Even though it had been quite the insult, Augus always had patience for wordplay.
‘Is that a serious question? Or am I some novelty to you?’
‘Is that even possible, for a peak alpha to be a novelty?’ Corbyn asked, inspecting his ragged fingernails. ‘How is it, that peak alphas are less than one in a million, and yet there are three working here? I looked up the staff listing. What is this? A vortex of comic-book level villainy? Are you ravishing among the rosemary? Simply a lech among the lemongrass?’
Augus walked up the steps onto his verandah and didn’t stop when he noticed the way Corbyn tensed. His nostrils flared automatically, but there was nearly - nearly - nothing there. What he did smell was concerning. The top note of chemicals, but not ones Augus recognised. Medication? For what? Something almost like ink.
Augus didn’t walk right up to him; he wasn’t that cruel. He leaned against one of the structural wooden posts and looked out towards the forest. Mosk had loved looking in this direction when he lived here.
The sounds of birds in the distance. Augus had never known what they all were, but once he’d helped an omega who wanted more than anything to be an ornithologist, and the young man had educated him. Augus helped him find his way out of abuses inflicted on him by his family and an arranged marriage, and now Augus knew he heard the songs of a willie wagtail male, and a gaggle of New Holland honeyeaters, and the grey wagtail, and the yellow-eyed currawong all out there in the forest right now, calling brightly.
And Augus had loved that omega, and let him go, and carved another piece of his heart away, and told himself it was a renewable resource, it would grow back.
‘You’re like a captain who lost his ship,’ Corbyn said.
‘What’s it like living as a poet?’
‘Tedious,’ Corbyn said. ‘Never quite finding the right sentence, or finding it, and knowing it will be months before you find the next. Publishing imperfect sentences. The dreck of the world telling me they’re perfect anyway.’
‘I don’t think you get to judge that, once your works are out in the world.’
‘I rather think I get to judge whatever I fucking want, thank you.’
Augus’ eyes narrowed. Strange. Of all the banter they’d traded – two strangers within a facility dedicated to trying to educate and heal the most hurt omegas out there – he’d not expected this to be the thing that made Corbyn fall into such sharpness.
Issues around losing control and needing to keep it, an analytical part of his mind observed. If he were mine, I’d be looking for issues with nesting, and radical control-removal followed by reintroduction as a slow protocol. Interesting. Mosk was similar.
But he wasn’t Augus’ omega, and besides, Corbyn also didn’t need an alpha companion. Corbyn was successful, he travelled, he was older, independent, and…striking, easy to look at, tempting to poke and prod until Augus got the reactions he wanted from him.
Even now, Augus felt a mild, satisfied thrill at knocking something so defensive loose, even if he hadn’t expected it.
‘Perhaps you’re so full of ennui because there’s no omega to rape. Am I terribly tempting, standing here?’
‘Yes,’ Augus said, because there was no point in lying. And no one was paying him to be kind to Corbyn.
Corbyn looked at him in shock, like he couldn’t believe Augus dared to admit it.
‘I’m a peak alpha,’ Augus said.
‘You don’t even smell like an alpha,’ Corbyn said, unable to hold eye contact for more than two seconds.
‘And yet…’ Augus said, with a smile.
Corbyn fell into an unhappy, troubled silence, and Augus sighed and looked at the cobwebbed eaves of the cottage. He’d asked the cleaners to stop coming round; he’d been handling it all himself. He rather liked the black house spiders making their funnelled webs up in the corners.
Despite the wry amusement of teasing an omega, Augus turned over Corbyn’s other observations. He hadn’t considered that he was obviously unsettled in disposition, that he looked sad even to a complete stranger, and he wondered what it was that Corbyn noticed.
Perhaps he was an adept cold reader.
‘I have PACS,’ Augus said finally.
Corbyn’s hand tightened on the wooden rail, and he looked down, and from this distance, Augus could see the confusion on his face. It was possible he didn’t know what the acronym stood for. Peak alphas were vanishingly rare, and PACS, therefore, was even rarer.
‘Peak Alpha Cardiac Syndrome,’ Corbyn said to himself, like he was reading faded writing on some weathered stone in his mind. A long pause, and Corbyn sighed. ‘I can’t tell whether to be disgusted or sympathetic.’
Augus waited.
‘Then,’ Corbyn said, with a single syllable of laughter, ‘might it be the case that you are the one who needs an omega companion to heal your sore, underdeveloped heart? Overwhelmed by the simplicity of love? And here you are, trapped in a world with no omega companions at all, because so many of us are ground down under the heels of alphas, and are not allowed even basic employment without lying and risking our lives pretending to be betas.’
It was funny how Augus had never even conceived of something like an omega companion in his life. That reflection was damning. Even after all this time, his changed beliefs, his activism, it still never occurred to him that alphas might also need a version of what they offered to omegas. Professional companionship, healing without permanent attachment, care and love with the promise of freedom at the end.
Augus sighed, and his chest hurt.
Predictable.
‘What do you imagine an omega companion might do, if one existed?’ Augus said softly.
‘I suppose it depends on whether it’s a standardised ORF, or whatever Hillview is pretending to be,’ Corbyn said.
‘Let’s…make-believe that it was a healing role, a caring role.’
‘Playing pretend, are we? Let’s indulge a little fiction, then. Perhaps an omega companion would soothe you, comfort you, invite you into their nest, let you destroy them during their heat, but at the end of it all, they would let you withdraw when you needed to; they would leave, but then come back. They would not force you to give your heart away, yet offer their own, even while they fully understood it was temporary. A pledge. No rape in sight. Well, except for the alpha. We all know what an alpha really needs.’
Augus’ eyebrows raised. Corbyn’s voice wasn’t soft or modulated, but he still spun out something tempting, something Augus wished existed.
‘Plenty of omegas pay extortionate prices, you know, to find alphas to help with their heats,’ Corbyn added. ‘Really, you’d be saving the poor omega companion some money.’
Augus laughed then, because it was obvious Corbyn was making a joke, while still being sincere. Augus found it charming.
‘And?’ Augus said. ‘In this pretend world, what obligations would the alpha have to the omega companion? I’ve been an alpha companion for so long, I can’t say I quite remember how to simply…be.’
‘Then if an omega companion is a healer, allegedly, wouldn’t they care for- Ah, what’s some utopian, inane way of phrasing it? Where’s the government plain language manual when I need it? Wouldn’t they wish to help you remember what your true, beastly, base desires are? And as for obligations, why, nearly none! Discovering your true self, didn’t you know?’
‘You’re delightful,’ Augus said.
Corbyn tensed and took a step sideways, away, and then looked angry not at Augus, but at himself. Augus didn’t make eye contact, but his peripheral vision was good enough to know that the look Corbyn gave him was wary, even fearful.
His alpha companion instincts jangled. An omega who baited, but was scared of true engagement, even praise. Mosk had been like that, too.
Ah, Mosk. I do hope you’re happy. Eran seemed wonderful for you, in the end, even though I still sometimes dream of killing him, simply because he took you from me.
Slowly, Corbyn’s shoulders relaxed, but he didn’t move closer, and the gentle warmth of the moment had faded.
‘Why is your scent masked?’ Augus asked plainly. ‘Scent blockers have a different scent to them.’
‘I’m aware,’ Corbyn said.
A non-answer.
A dull, irritating scratching sound, as Corbyn scraped his nails against the wooden railing, repeatedly, enough that Augus turned fully towards him, stepping away from the post. Corbyn only then seemed to notice what he was doing, and moved his hand away leisurely, as though he’d intended to be annoying.
‘Why is your mien, your everything, not at all like what a peak alpha should be? Is it the PACS?’
‘No,’ Augus said. He was tempted to make it a non-answer in response, but there was no point. He’d been deliberately rattling Corbyn, and he knew all too well how easy it was to play games with omegas. Augus had been crueller than he meant to, because rattling Corbyn felt more satisfying than it did with most other omegas.
‘I have a rare self-control over my pheromones,’ Augus said. ‘I’ve never met another peak alpha who could do it. It’s the only reason you keep control of your thoughts around me.’
‘You could just…turn that off, whenever you wished?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do it,’ Corbyn said. ‘I want to know what beast actually lurks in the hadal zones of your ultra-abyssal, monstrous instincts. I want to know what Lovecraftian nonsense makes you appear seductively human, while hiding something so ugly we’d never dare call it human.’
Augus held his breath because Corbyn revealed something that a lifetime of alpha companionship had hooked into, couldn’t let go of.
Rage, hatred, it was personal.
‘I do not show that side of myself to omegas,’ Augus said finally, his voice measured, even more careful than before. ‘And in that, I find what it is to hold true power as a peak alpha, which – as I’m sure you know – is what we really crave.’
‘I’m so tickled, truly, to niggle at you with ineffective blades of grass, while you pretend all you need to recover from your PACS is a few commitment-free romps with an omega who will let you knot them to your heart’s content, and not a destructive, heartless, pointless need to consume the bodies, souls, minds of as many people you can, all so you can stand at the very top of a pile of flesh and bones, and declare yourself the king of death. Not even a psychopomp, but a pathetic, cruel little lord.’
Augus shrugged.
‘That’s my brother,’ he said finally. ‘Not me.’
‘Your brother’s a peak alpha too?’ Corbyn said in horrified disbelief. ‘No, wait- Two peak alpha brothers, I think I know where I recognise you-’
No.
In that moment, Augus made a liar of himself and released a tiny amount of the full force of his natural power around omegas. Not much, just enough, to nudge sweetly, to make it seem like it was Corbyn’s idea.
‘-If my internal clock is correct,’ Augus said softly, ‘it’s time for you to be meeting up with your nephew soon. After all, if you’re late, you might end up encountering more of the insufferable alpha companions you loathe so much.’
Corbyn closed his mouth and stared at Augus in glazed confusion, the sharpness turned blunt. Augus felt it was in rather poor taste to do this to him, but he was never going to see this man again; he didn’t need a reminder of one of the worst times of his life simply because Corbyn remembered a television show he saw once.
‘Ah…’
Corbyn looked at his watch again and frowned, like he couldn’t recall what he’d been in the middle of saying.
‘You’re correct, of course,’ he said.
‘I am sorry,’ Augus said, meaning it. ‘I’ve enjoyed our chat today, for all I’m sure it didn’t bring you much enjoyment in turn.’
‘You don’t get to be sure of something like that,’ Corbyn said, that cutting note in his voice reappearing. Augus was amazed at how confidently Corbyn walked past him, despite the remnants of Augus’ pheromones lingering in the air. He was either possessed of an unusual amount of willpower, or his ability to thoroughly pick up pheromones had been damaged at some point.
Corbyn paused once he was on the grass and turned to look past Augus’ shoulder.
‘You know, you’re rather fascinating. I don’t think you introduced yourself, and yet it’s clear you know my name.’
‘Just think of me as that sad peak alpha rapist you wasted some time with, once,’ Augus said softly.
‘Think of me as the omega companion then,’ Corbyn said, with a laugh, ‘the next time you daydream about something to cure your sad little heart. Farewell, then. Your lemongrass is a delight.’
Augus lifted his hand in a wave as Corbyn walked off, and Augus wasn’t sure what to do with that encounter, except fold it away somewhere in his mind. He had to water in the lemongrass, after all.
He supposed that’s just what an encounter with a globally known omega poet felt like, in the end.