“You’re spending the heat at my flat.” Sunghoon said. The bathroom fell silent, even Jaeyun looked briefly surprised by how immediate the decision sounded leaving his mouth. You stared at the alpha openly now, heat-hazed eyes widening slightly while your fingers tightened unconsciously against Jaeyun’s shirt again. “Excuse me?”
𝓜 , we love two hot alphas saving an omega in distress so pls be my guest and enjoy this. i lost all progress of editing on my second day writing this due to my fucking ellipsus account bad syncing and gave up editing entirely so forgive me if this is very bad, i drag everything too damn much that's why this is so damn long lolz. jakehoon hot alphas, that's it. this is my life's mission.
17O52 ━━━━━ genre omegaverse enhypen au ━━━━━ pair alpha!jakehoon x omega!reader
spotify hu playlist read on ao3 zrcdd main masterlist helios university masterlist
17O52 warnings jakehoon does NOT know how to handle an omega in distress and is showing, be patient pls this is their first time falling in love okie, sunghoon specially is very bad at feelings on this one, i'm pretty sure i fucked the pacing up by making it too repetitive, SFW, WE DON'T HAVE SMUT IN THIS CHAPTER, let’s pretend they were not trying to make a call inside an elevator in one scene here ok, reader has low self-esteem and is financially unavailable bye.
The first symptom was the itch beneath Sunghoon’s wrists.
Not enough to truly bother him at first. Just a faint irritation beneath the cuff of his dress shirt, somewhere under skin and tendon, subtle enough that he ignored it for almost twenty minutes before realizing he’d been scratching at the same spot through the entire conversation.
The ballroom around them had long since begun emptying out.
Hours ago the Helios Founder’s Cocktail had been unbearably loud — trustees laughing over old money politics, cameras flashing near the donor wall, omegas in silk and diamonds drifting between tables while alpha heirs performed the delicate art of pretending they were still students and not future conglomerate directors. Now the atmosphere had softened into something slower, tired and expensive.
The quartet near the staircase had stopped playing almost half an hour ago, leaving only a low jazz overhead.
Most of the staff had already started quietly dismantling the event around them; empty champagne towers disappearing cart by cart, floral centerpieces being removed one by one. Somewhere behind the ballroom walls he could hear industrial dish carts rolling over marble floors.
9:12PM.
Sunghoon glanced briefly toward the face of his watch before leaning back in his chair again. The afternoon cocktail had bled into evening without any of them noticing. Their table was one of the last still occupied.
Not surprising.
The sons of Helios donors had a tendency to linger after events ended, especially when alcohol and networking were involved.
Across from him, Jaeyun sat lazily reclined with one arm thrown over the back of his chair, necktie loosened, half-finished whiskey balanced carelessly between elegant fingers. Beside him, Yudai was midway through shrugging into his coat while checking messages on his phone.
“You two are actually insane,” the oldest alpha muttered, eyes flicking between them. “It’s over. Go home.”
Jaeyun hummed absently. “You’re leaving because your little sister keeps threatening to block you.”
“She’s right to.”
“She always is,” Jaeyun agreed easily.
Sunghoon barely followed the conversation. His attention kept drifting, the itch beneath his wrists had worsened. Annoying.
He pressed the pad of his thumb against the irritated skin through his sleeve and exhaled quietly through his nose. The ballroom air smelled overwhelmingly sweet now that the crowd had thinned — alcohol, expensive perfumes, lingering omega pheromones soaked into velvet chairs and linen tablecloths.
Sunghoon loosened his grip slightly around the sweating glass in his hand before dragging the pad of his thumb once more against the inside of his wrist beneath the cuff of his shirt.
Across from him, Jaeyun finally looked up from his phone.
His attention lingered for a beat too long.
“You look irritated,” the Sim observed lazily, though there was something sharper underneath the casual tone now, something quietly attentive in the way his eyes tracked Sunghoon’s movements.
Sunghoon dropped his hand immediately, expression flattening. “I am irritated.”
A grin tugged slowly at the corner of the GS Group heir's mouth as he leaned further back into his chair, whiskey turning amber beneath the ballroom lights when he lifted the glass slightly between his fingers. “That’s new.”
Sunghoon said nothing to that. He only brought the glass toward his mouth again, though the champagne had long since lost its taste somewhere between the chairman’s closing speech and Yudai leaving after a twenty minute talk. The sharp dryness lingering at the back of his throat remained stubbornly unsatisfied, and after another pointless sip he set the glass back onto the white linen tablecloth with more force than necessary.
Jaeyun noticed the Park uneasiness and decided to comment on it.
“You sure it’s not the omega perfumes?” he asked after a moment, voice easy. “Half the women here smelled like they bathed in pheromone oils.”
“That’s not it.”
“Hm.”
Jaeyun swirled the remaining whiskey around slowly, watching the amber liquid catch beneath the low gold lighting overhead.
Around them, staff members continued dismantling the ballroom piece by piece with near invisible efficiency. One side of the room had already been stripped of centerpieces entirely, bare white tablecloths left behind like ghosts of the event from earlier.
Sunghoon glanced once more toward his expensive watch.
9:17 PM.
Too fucking late for students to still be working. And yet—
His gaze shifted almost automatically toward the far end of the ballroom again.
You were still there.
The registration tables near the donor wing had become one of the few untouched areas left in the room, stacked with archival boxes, unopened envelopes and scattered gala programs waiting to be organized before morning. Most of the volunteers had disappeared already, but you remained seated behind the long table with your sleeves rolled neatly to your elbows, head lowered over a stack of paperwork while typing something into a university-issued tablet.
You looked exhausted.
Not ordinary tiredness. Not the sleepy sluggishness everyone carried after long events like this. This looked sharper somehow, your movements had slowed noticeably since Sunghoon first spotted you ten minutes ago. Every few moments your hand would pause mid-motion against the papers like your thoughts were briefly disconnecting from your body before forcing themselves back into place again.
Jaeyun followed his line of sight without needing to ask.
“There she is,” the other boy murmured, the amusement returning instantly to his voice now that the subject had shifted somewhere more interesting. “Our missing scholarship prodigy.”
Sunghoon ignored the phrasing, though something unpleasant tightened low in his chest at the sight of you.
Three weeks.
It had been exactly twenty-three days since you last sat with them willingly. Not that Jaeyun counted. Sunghoon absolutely did not count.
At first your disappearance had almost seemed accidental. Missed dinners, delayed replies, excuses about debate preparation and committee obligations, normal enough during midterm season at Helios. But eventually the pattern became too deliberate to ignore.
You stopped studying in the business library entirely. Stopped attending late-night debate practices unless absolutely necessary. Started leaving lectures before crowds formed afterward. And most noticeably of all—you stopped looking at them for too long.
Jaeyun had complained about it constantly.
Sunghoon hadn’t.
Mostly because acknowledging it out loud would have forced him to acknowledge how often he searched for you automatically now.
Across the ballroom, one of the omega coordinators approached your table carrying another stack of folders against her chest. She said something quietly to you that Sunghoon couldn’t hear from this distance, and you immediately straightened in your seat with polite professionalism settling across your face like muscle memory.
Too fast.
Even from here he could tell the movement wasn’t natural. Your smile followed a second later. Small, careful and wrong. The itch beneath his wrist sharpened so suddenly his jaw tightened. Beside him, Jaeyun finally went quiet too.
His fingers stilled around the whiskey glass as his attention lingered more carefully on you now, the easy laziness bleeding subtly out of his posture the longer he watched your slowed movements behind the registration table.
“…she looks awful,” Jaeyun muttered eventually.
Sunghoon didn’t answer immediately.
“Something’s wrong.”
Sunghoon’s gaze remained fixed on you.
“That’s Professor Kim’s coordinator, isn’t it?” Jaeyun asked after another moment, though his attention never left you either. “The omega from the fellowship office.”
Sunghoon gave a short nod.
“She’s still working her?”
“Y/N probably volunteered.”
Jaeyun let out a disbelieving breath through his nose. “Of course she did.”
There was no real mockery in it, just familiarity.
The three of you had known each other long enough now that some things no longer required explanation. You volunteered for everything: debate events, faculty mixers, alumni forums, scholarship committees, student outreach programs... Every prestigious academic function Helios offered somehow ended with your name attached to it somewhere.
At first the Sim used to joke that you were trying to singlehandedly run the university, then eventually he realized the bitter truth.
You weren’t ambitious in the same way heirs at Helios were ambitious… You didn’t move through opportunities expecting safety beneath failure, everything you did carried consequence. Real life consequence. That difference had unsettled both of them more than they ever admitted aloud.
Across the ballroom, the coordinator said something else quietly before resting a hand against your arm again, gentler this time.
You froze.
Sunghoon’s jaw locked instantly. The reaction inside him was so immediate and irrational it almost startled him. The irritated thought slammed through his head hard enough that his fingers tightened automatically against the stem of the champagne glass.
Beside him, Jaeyun slowly turned his head, their eyes met briefly across the table. Jaeyun had known something was wrong with Sunghoon for months now. Ever since the debate finals last semester, probably.
Back when you’d stood in front of an auditorium full of Helios trustees and dismantled the opposing international policy team so thoroughly that even the faculty looked stunned afterward. Jaeyun had fallen for you quickly after that — openly, predictably, with all the shameless confidence that came naturally to him.
Sunghoon’s situation had been worse.
Because it happened quietly. In pieces.
A late-night study session here. Walking you back from the law building during rainstorms. Watching you fall asleep over economic journals in the library while pretending he wasn’t staring.
None of it dramatic enough to notice individually. Until suddenly you existed everywhere inside his head.
Jaeyun leaned back slowly in his chair again, studying Sunghoon now instead of you. “You know,” he said lightly, though there was something deliberate beneath the casualness now, “for someone who claims he doesn’t like clingy people, you’ve been glaring at her for ten straight minutes.”
Sunghoon looked away from you at last, irritation immediately surfacing. “I’m not glaring.”
“You absolutely are.”
“I’m observing.”
“That sounds even creepier.”
Sunghoon ignored him.
A grin tugged briefly at Jaeyun’s mouth again, softer this time. Less teasing. “She missed your presentation last month and you looked homicidal for two days afterward.”
“Shut up, Sim.”
Jaeyun’s mouth twitched immediately at that, the kind of restrained amusement that only really appeared around people he knew well enough not to perform for. He leaned further back into the velvet chair, one ankle hooking loosely over the opposite knee while the melting ice shifted softly inside his whiskey glass.
“Sure,” Jaeyun said mildly, clearly unconvinced. “And I’m sure the reason you nearly bit Minhyuk’s head off during the policy mixer had absolutely nothing to do with him flirting with her for twenty straight minutes.”
Sunghoon finally looked at him properly then, expression flattening beneath the warm lighting. “Minhyuk flirts with anything that breathes.”
“True,” Jaeyun admitted easily, lifting the glass toward his mouth before pausing again halfway there. “But you looked like you wanted him publicly executed.”
“He’s irritating.”
“You say that about everyone.”
“Because most people are irritating.”
Jaeyun huffed out a quiet laugh beneath his breath before letting the whiskey settle briefly against his tongue, gaze drifting lazily back toward the ballroom.
At a glance the GS heir looked entirely relaxed again, all effortless charm and expensive ease stretched comfortably across velvet seating while the last remains of the gala dissolved quietly around them. Most people stopped looking too deeply once Jaeyun smiled at them, that was part of what made the alpha dangerous.
But Sunghoon knew him too well to miss the shift in his attention.
There were very few things in the world capable of holding Jaeyun’s interest for long. Even fewer capable of making him observant. Jaeyun liked people easily, flirted easily, charmed easily, but genuine fascination was rare for him. Usually once the novelty wore off, so did the attention.
That had not happened with you.
If anything, the problem had only worsened.
At first Sunghoon thought Jaeyun’s interest was predictable enough. You were beautiful in a way Helios rarely produced naturally — not polished and curated like the daughters of politicians and chaebol families drifting around the ballroom tonight, but sharp, expressive, almost severe beneath all that relentless professionalism. You carried yourself like someone who’d built every inch of herself deliberately, and at Helios that alone drew attention. Then there was the debate circuit. The scholarship omega humiliating legacy students every other weekend had become campus gossip almost embarrassingly fast.
Jaeyun loved things that challenged him. Beautiful things even more.
But what truly doomed him, Sunghoon thought, was the age difference.
Tiny enough to barely matter in their context. Three mere years. But Jaeyun had looked genuinely delighted when he discovered it.
Sunghoon still remembered the conversation because he’d never seen someone become more interested so quickly over something so stupid.
You had mentioned it absentmindedly one evening after debate practice while correcting Jaeyun’s citation formatting on his laptop. He’d been leaning lazily across the library table beside you at the time, tie loosened, completely unserious about the assignment until you frowned faintly at one of his references and muttered, “You’re younger than me, shouldn’t I be teaching you this properly?”
Jaeyun had blinked and then slowly looked up from the screen. “You’re older than me?”
You had immediately looked regretful for saying it aloud at all. “Barely.” And somehow that made it worse.
Sunghoon remembered the exact grin spreading across Jaeyun’s face afterward — pleased in a way that instantly made him insufferable for weeks.
“She’s older than me,” he’d repeated later that night like the information had fundamentally altered his understanding of the universe. “That explains everything.”
“It explains literally nothing.” Sunghoon had said.
“You don’t understand,” Jaeyun had said solemnly while Sunghoon attempted to finish reading financial reports beside him. “This is exactly my type.”
“You say that about every omega who ignores you.”
“No,” Jaeyun corrected immediately. “I say that about older women who ignore me.”
And unfortunately, he’d been telling the truth.
You never indulged him properly. Never acted impressed by his family name or reputation or effortless charisma the way most people eventually did. Half the time you treated him like an irritating classmate you’d somehow accidentally become responsible for.
Jaeyun adored it.
The memory lingered pleasantly in Sunghoon’s chest as he watched you across the ballroom now, shoulders tense beneath the black volunteer uniform while your phone continued vibrating softly against the registration table.
Jaeyun’s contact photo lit the screen once.
Twice.
Then disappeared.
Ignored.
Jaeyun stared at the unanswered call for a moment before exhaling quietly through his nose and locking the phone again. “Unbelievable,” he muttered, though the irritation in his voice sounded thinner than usual now, worn down by too many weeks of the same cycle. “She’s still doing this.”
Across the room, you’d already pushed the phone face down beside the stack of folders as though simply refusing to acknowledge it would somehow erase the problem altogether. The omega coordinator beside you said something else softly, concern still visible in the tilt of her posture, but your attention kept drifting unfocused toward the ballroom exits instead.
Like you wanted out.
Fast.
The sight made something restless tighten low beneath Sunghoon’s ribs.
“She’s been ignoring you too, right?” Beside him, Jaeyun dragged one hand slowly down his face before leaning back into the chair again, though this time the movement lacked all the earlier ease.
The question itself wasn’t new. They’d already had this conversation two nights ago outside the business tower after the semifinals results were announced. Then again last week in Jaeyun’s car after you left campus early without attending the celebration dinner your entire debate team showed up for. But there was something different about the way Jaeyun asked it now — quieter, more frustrated than teasing.
Because your disappearance had stopped feeling temporary.
“She’s been busy,” Sunghoon answered flatly.
Jaeyun looked at him like he was insane.
“She won the biggest academic fellowship Helios offers and disappeared immediately afterward,” he said. “That’s not normal behavior.”
“She’s probably exhausted.”
“She’s been exhausted since February, Sunghoon.”
He couldn’t exactly argue that.
The debate circuit alone had been brutal this semester. Endless preparation meetings. Policy reviews. Public forums. Guest lectures. He’d lost count of how many times he found you asleep somewhere on campus over the last few months — curled over economics textbooks in empty classrooms, head resting against library tables at three in the morning, still wearing debate credentials around your neck because you’d been too tired to remove them.
Every single time, you insisted you were fine afterward.
Every single time, neither of them believed you.
Jaeyun loosened his tie further with one sharp tug before glancing toward you again. “I thought she’d come tonight.”
“She is here.”
“You know what I mean.”
Sunghoon did.
After the debate victory earlier that afternoon, most people expected you to fall naturally back into orbit around them again. That had become your routine over the last few months whether you admitted it aloud or not. You disappeared when pressure built too high, isolated yourself for days or weeks at a time trying to survive Helios alone, and eventually Jaeyun would force his way back into your life through sheer persistence while Sunghoon quietly waited nearby pretending he wasn’t waiting at all.
But tonight should’ve been different.
You won.
And yet the second the debate ended, you vanished again. No dinner. No celebration. No responding to messages. Nothing, just silence.
Across the ballroom, your hand slipped against the edge of the registration table again before catching yourself harder this time. The folders scattered slightly sideways and the omega coordinator immediately reached toward you once more, concern obvious now in the hurried movement. Again.
You stepped back too quickly, making Jaeyun’s expression over the table change immediately.
“Okay, no,” he said under his breath, already pushing his chair backward against the marble floor. “I’m going over there.”
Sunghoon’s hand closed automatically around the edge of the table before he could stop himself. “Don’t.”
Jaeyun paused halfway upright. “Why not?”
“Because she clearly doesn’t want us over there.”
“That’s never stopped you before.”
Sunghoon’s jaw tightened slightly. He knew his friend wasn’t entirely wrong.
He knew your presence had simply embedded itself into their lives so naturally neither alpha fully noticed it happening until other people started pointing it out first.
He knew you practically lived in his flat during midterms. He knew your things kept appearing there; hair ties abandoned beside his bathroom sink, debate notes scattered permanently across his dining table, the oversized gray hoodie Jaeyun bought you after catching you shivering outside the economics building at two in the morning currently folded over the back of Sunghoon’s couch like it belonged there.
Sunghoon knew his best friend had become incapable of walking past your favorite bakery near campus without buying something for you out of reflex alone. He knew both of them had spent an embarrassing amount of time arguing over your living situation after finding out your dorm building security barely functioned past midnight, Jaeyun insisting you should move into his family’s east-side vacant residence while Sunghoon offered one of the guest rooms at his flat with enough casual certainty it startled even Jaeyun for a moment.
You had rejected both offers immediately, obviously.
Then accepted a copy of Sunghoon’s passcode anyway three weeks later after getting locked outside your building during a thunderstorm.
That probably should have told him something.
Regardless, Sunghoon knew that going after you publicly now — especially while you were already distressed — would corner you.
And you hated feeling cornered.
Gosh, you could be so stubborn sometimes. Sunghoon learned that the hard way sometime around early winter, when he made the catastrophic mistake of half-confessing his feelings to you during a three a.m. study session only for you to stare at him over your laptop and sincerely ask whether he was “having an unusually emotional alpha moment.”
Jaeyun laughed so hard he almost choked on ramen the day Sunghoon told him about it.
Sunghoon genuinely considered killing both of you that night.
Then, three weeks later, you showed up at his apartment shaking with exhaustion after a twenty-hour debate prep cycle, crawled directly into his bed wearing one of his hoodies without asking permission, and fell asleep against his shoulder while mumbling that his place “felt quiet in a nice way.”
The next morning, you acted like none of that had happened.
Sunghoon still had not recovered psychologically. Honestly, neither had Jaeyun.
The two of them had finally spoken about it properly after that night, mostly because pretending the situation wasn’t becoming increasingly dangerous stopped working. The conversation itself had been humiliating enough already — two lifelong best friends sitting in Sunghoon’s kitchen at one in the morning admitting they were both apparently obsessed with the same omega.
Jaeyun handled it first, obviously.
“Okay,” he said after staring at Sunghoon for thirty seconds too long. “So we’re both insane.”
Sunghoon remembered looking away immediately after that. Not because he denied it. Because he couldn’t.
The embarrassing part was how quickly they recovered from the revelation afterward. No dramatic fallout. No possessive alpha bullshit. Just the quiet mutual understanding that neither of them seemed capable of staying away from you anymore, and somehow losing proximity entirely sounded worse than sharing the problem.
Which, in hindsight, probably said deeply concerning things about all three of you.
The realization lingered unpleasantly in Sunghoon’s mind now while the ballroom lights reflected dimly across half-empty champagne glasses and abandoned dessert plates around them. Somewhere behind the registration tables, staff members had already started dismantling flower arrangements for the night, the gala slowly collapsing into quiet cleanup conversations and rolling service carts.
Across the ballroom, you nearly dropped another stack of donor folders before catching them clumsily against your chest at the last second. The omega coordinator said something else to you — too far away for either alpha to hear properly — and this time even from a distance Sunghoon could tell your smile looked wrong.
Jaeyun seemed to reach the same conclusion a second later because he sank slowly back into the chair with visible reluctance, fingers drumming once against the tablecloth before stilling again. “I hate this,” he muttered eventually.
Sunghoon’s eyes remained fixed on you across the ballroom. “I know.”
For a while neither of them spoke.
The jazz overhead faded into another softer song while staff continued clearing tables around them. Somewhere near the ballroom entrance, one of the event managers thanked the remaining volunteers quietly before disappearing through the west corridor.
Jaeyun exhaled slowly through his nose before finally dragging his attention away from you and reaching for the abandoned suit jacket hanging from the back of his chair. “Come on,” he muttered, standing at last. “If we keep staring at her like psychopaths she’s going to disappear for another month.”
Sunghoon stood abruptly enough that Jaeyun glanced toward him once before smoothing his jacket over his shoulders. Neither alpha said anything while moving away from the table, shoes echoing softly against polished marble floors as they crossed the ballroom toward the donor corridor near the west wing exit.
Jaeyun noticed immediately.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re literally texting her.”
Sunghoon ignored him, thumb already moving across the screen.
You still backstage?
A pause.
Then, after a second longer than necessary:
Do you need a ride home?
He stared at the last message he sent you — two nights ago, sometime after midnight when he finally gave up waiting for you to answer during the day.
Want me to bring something to the debate rehearsal?
And before that:
Did you eat
You still awake?
Jaeyun says you’ve been in the library since eight
All seen.
Never answered.
The typing cursor blinked quietly beneath the words.
Jaeyun leaned against the corridor wall beside him, arms folding across his chest while watching with poorly concealed interest. “That’s somehow more embarrassing than if you’d just confessed feelings outright.”
Sunghoon closed the app without reacting.
“Shut up".
They continued further down the donor corridor after that, eventually joining a small cluster of lingering faculty and university sponsors near the executive lounge overlooking the lower courtyard. Most of the remaining guests belonged to the same social circles their families had occupied for decades — investment directors, law partners, board members, old-money alumni who still treated Helios less like a university and more like inherited territory.
Professor Hwang stood near the bar discussing international acquisitions with two trustees when they approached, silver-haired and visibly tired beneath the ballroom lighting. He greeted them both with the easy familiarity reserved for students whose surnames appeared on campus buildings.
“Still here?” the older alpha asked mildly.
Jaeyun accepted the offered glass of bourbon from one of the attendants nearby before answering. “Unfortunately. Apparently adulthood is just networking until death.”
Professor Hwang laughed quietly at that before turning toward Sunghoon instead. “Your father called earlier.”
Of course he did.
Sunghoon suppressed the immediate irritation threatening to surface again and loosened his grip slightly around his phone inside his pocket. “About the Singapore expansion?”
The conversation shifted naturally after that into business, the familiar language of heirs raised inside boardrooms instead of ordinary households. Market expansion. Investor hesitation. Political instability overseas. Jaeyun slipped easily into the discussion beside him despite earlier distraction, posture relaxed once more while debating projected partnership risks with the kind of effortless confidence people spent entire careers trying to imitate.
Normally Sunghoon found conversations like this grounding, predictable, clean. Numbers behaved logically, people did not. Tonight, though, concentration kept slipping strangely through his fingers.
Every few minutes his attention drifted instinctively back toward the ballroom entrance beyond the executive corridor. Toward the distant possibility of catching another glimpse of the omega his alpha can't seem to stop thinking about moving between tables. Toward the persistent awareness prickling unpleasantly beneath his skin.
The itch along his wrists had become dull before coming back ten times worse during the conversation.
He pressed his thumb harder against the irritated skin beneath his cuff while Professor Hwang continued speaking about projected policy changes overseas. The sensation only intensified, heat curling strangely beneath the surface until even the collar of his shirt suddenly felt too restrictive against his throat.
Across from him, Jaeyun babbled uncomfortably. For the first time all evening, Sunghoon noticed his best friend was almost as bad as him.
His bourbon glass sat trapped too tightly between his fingers, amber liquid shifting sharply every time his grip unconsciously tightened around the crystal. He had bitten the inside of his lower lip enough throughout the conversation that the skin looked faintly reddened beneath the ballroom lighting now. Worse than that, his scent had changed.
Subtly.
But enough.
The suppressant patches lining the inside of Jaeyun’s collar should have neutralized most of it already — mandatory during formal university functions for wolf hybrids — yet traces still bled stubbornly through the blockers anyway. Restlessness. Agitation. Protective instinct sharpening too close to the surface.
Sunghoon recognized it immediately because his own alpha smelled dangerously similar right now.
Professor Hwang continued speaking beside them completely oblivious, discussing projected investor movement through Southeast Asia while Jaeyun nodded at appropriate intervals. Externally, the Sim still looked perfectly composed. Beautifully dressed heir, relaxed posture, easy social smile appearing automatically whenever one of the trustees addressed him directly. But Sunghoon caught the exact second Jaeyun’s attention drifted again toward the ballroom entrance.
Toward you.
The realization settled heavily inside his chest.
This wasn’t just ordinary concern anymore. Something biological had started reacting beneath both their skins hours ago, sharpening every instinct until the distance separating them from you suddenly felt physically wrong. Sunghoon still didn’t fully understand it himself. He only knew the irritation beneath his body kept worsening every minute you remained out of sight.
Across from him, Jaeyun finally looked over when Professor Hwang got busy with one of the alumni guests. For one brief second, neither alpha spoke.
Then quietly:
“You smell it too, right?” Jaeyun leaned over his best friend shoulder just so he could hear.
The Park's grip tightened inside his pockets.
“Yes.”
Professor Hwang was midway through explaining a private equity restructuring proposal when one of the senior event staff finally approached their group carefully, exhaustion visible beneath her professional smile.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, gentlemen” she said politely, hands folded neatly in front of her black blazer, “but we’ll be closing the ballroom level in about fifteen minutes.”
Professor Hwang blinked once before glancing toward his watch, genuine surprise flickering briefly across his expression.
“Well,” he sighed lightly, adjusting the cuff of his coat with quiet amusement, “I suppose that’s our reminder we’ve overstayed our welcome.”
A few restrained laughs circled softly through the remaining group.
The older alpha waved goodbye not long after that, gathering the dark wool coat draped behind a stool while the trustees beside him began exchanging final handshakes and closing remarks between themselves. Even tired, the entire interaction still carried that polished old-money diplomacy Helios functions always dissolved into eventually — relaxed smiles, promises of future meetings, careful mentions of family names and upcoming board dinners woven naturally through conversation.
Now that the evening had finally begun dissolving around them, Sunghoon realized just how wrong the atmosphere still felt beneath his skin.
Beside him, Jaeyun straightened slowly from where he’d been leaning against the counter, the movement oddly tense beneath all his usual composure. “Did she answer you?”
Sunghoon reached automatically for his phone again.
Still nothing. Not even read.
“No.”
Jaeyun rubbed tiredly at the back of his neck before finally exhaling through his nose. “We should go.”
Sunghoon didn’t answer immediately.
His attention lingered toward the ballroom entrance one final time before forcing himself to look away altogether. Rationally, there was nothing left to do. You’d ignored both their calls. The gala had ended nearly an hour ago. Most likely you’d already left through one of the staff exits specifically to avoid them finding you lingering alone afterward.
The thought irritated him more than it should have, so eventually he gave a short nod and pushed himself away from the counter at last.
The elevator ride downstairs passed mostly in silence. Not uncomfortable at all, but restless.
Jaeyun scrolled absently through emails on his phone while Sunghoon stood beside him with one hand shoved into the pocket of his slacks, thumb repeatedly dragging against the inside of his wrist again before he consciously stopped himself.
The itch had become unbearable.
By the time they reached the lower lobby, Sim Jaeyun looked strained beneath all his usual composure.
“You smell that?” he asked suddenly.
Sunghoon frowned slightly.
The scent lingering through the lobby was faint beneath cleaning chemicals and polished stone — sweet omega perfume residue left over from the gala crowd upstairs. But underneath it— there was something sharper, almost familiar.
Jaeyun looked unsettled now. “Okay. I officially hate this feeling.”
“Then stop acting weird.”
“I’m not acting weird. You’ve been scratching your wrists for the last hour like you have fleas.”
Sunghoon’s jaw tightened.
The valet attendant approached them a second later with practiced politeness, asking if they wanted their cars brought around front. Jaeyun reached automatically into the pocket of his coat—
Then stopped. A pause.
“…you’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What.” Sunghoon glanced at his stressed bestfriend.
“My keys.”
Sunghoon stared at him flatly. “The one time I agree to come with you, you lose your goddamn keys.”
“I didn’t lose them.” Jaeyun already turned back toward the elevator again, irritation surfacing properly now. “They're probably upstairs.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“Stop whining and let's go pick it, Park.”
Sunghoon muttered something deeply unfriendly under his breath before following him back toward the elevators.
By the time the elevator doors slid shut behind them again, the restless irritation from earlier had sharpened into something more palpable. The enclosed space suddenly felt too warm despite the aggressive air conditioning running through the building after hours, polished steel walls reflecting both of them back in fractured gold from the dim overhead lighting.
Jaeyun pressed the button for the ballroom level harder than necessary before immediately pulling his phone back out again.
Still nothing from you.
Jaeyun swore quietly under his breath before trying your number again, lifting the phone toward his ear while one hand dragged restlessly through his hair.
Whatever ease both alphas managed to hold onto throughout the night had vanished entirely now, stripped away by instinct and exhaustion until even their voices sounded tighter around the edges.
“Come on,” Jake muttered when the ringing continued unanswered. “Pick up.”
Sunghoon leaned back briefly against the elevator wall, thumb pressing hard against the inside of his wrist again. The elevator climbed another floor. Jaeyun lowered the phone again with visible frustration. “Nothing.”
“She probably left already.” The words sounded hollow even to him.
Jaeyun looked over immediately, fume coming out of his ears. “You don’t even believe that.”
By the time the elevator doors slid open onto the ballroom level again, the entire floor had transformed into something unrecognizable from the polished gala space they’d occupied earlier that evening.
The lights had already been shut off, leaving only the dim amber glow of after-hours wall sconces stretching across long sections of marble corridor. Without music or conversation to soften the space, every sound carried unnaturally far now — the distant mechanical hum of industrial cleaners somewhere below, the rolling clatter of service carts being pushed toward freight elevators, the muted echo of their own footsteps crossing polished floors too quickly.
Jaeyun moved ahead first the moment they stepped out, already pulling his phone back again while cutting sharply toward the executive lounge where he’d apparently abandoned his keys. “If they’re not still there I’m actually going to lose my mind,” he muttered, distracted enough now that the words barely sounded directed at Sunghoon at all.
Sunghoon followed automatically a few steps behind him, though his attention had stopped settling properly on anything around them.
Ahead of him, Jaeyun pushed open the executive lounge doors with visible impatience before immediately scanning the marble counter near the bar. “There,” he breathed, spotting the keys almost instantly beneath the abandoned bourbon glass from earlier.
Relief barely had time to settle before something metallic crashed somewhere deeper down the hallway.
The sound wasn’t loud. But in the near-empty silence of the upper floor, it cut sharply through the corridor anyway.
Both alphas froze at once.
Jaeyun’s hand stopped halfway toward the keys.
He looked over first, and for the first time all evening Sunghoon saw something dangerously close to genuine alarm cut cleanly through his best friend’s composure.
“That came from backstage.”
Sunghoon was already moving before the Sim finished speaking.
The urgency hit both of them at the exact same time, instinct bypassing rational thought so quickly neither bothered pretending otherwise anymore. Jaeyun abandoned the keys entirely on the marble counter while pulling his phone up toward his ear again, dialing your number for what had to be the fifth or sixth time that night as they crossed the darkened ballroom corridor at a pace just short of running.
The farther they moved past the ballroom itself, the emptier the building became.
Somewhere beneath the lingering smell of cleaning chemicals and stale champagne, Sunghoon caught something different.
Sweetness.
His entire body reacted violently. He stopped so abruptly that Jaeyun nearly collided into him from the side. Not perfume. Not residual scent trapped in the ballroom from hours earlier.
Fresh.
A faint, but unmistakably fresh scent of omega distress.
Sunghoon felt something deep in his chest pull tight enough to hurt.
Beside him, Jaeyun lowered the phone slowly from his ear, expression shifting almost visibly as the scent reached him too. All the remaining color drained out of his face at once while his alpha surged so sharply beneath the surface that even the atmosphere around him seemed to change.
“Jesus Christ,” he said quietly, breathing harder now. “That’s her.”
The words barely finished leaving his mouth before another sound echoed faintly through the backstage hallway ahead of them — uneven movement, followed immediately by what sounded unmistakably like someone trying to catch themselves against furniture.
And then silence again.
You had a difficult time accepting nice things into your life, that much you knew.
Not because you were ungrateful. People liked assuming that sometimes — that scholarship students carried some kind of bitterness toward wealth, toward ease, toward people born into lives softer than theirs. But that had never really been your problem.
Your problem was permanence.
Nice things rarely stayed long around people like you at Helios University. Opportunities disappeared. Funding disappeared. People disappeared the second maintaining proximity stopped being convenient. Somewhere during freshman year you had learned the safest way to survive the institution was to never hold onto anything expensive too tightly — internships, recognition, attention, friendships.
Especially friendships with alphas like Park Sunghoon and Sim Jaeyun.
The thought alone almost made you laugh now. Because honestly? You had been pretty sure Sim Jaeyun wanted to get into your pants since the second week of sophomore year. He had never exactly been subtle.
He flirted the way rich people donated to university buildings — generously, publicly, and with alarming confidence no one would tell him no. The first month he started inserting himself into your life, you genuinely assumed it was some elaborate joke the Helios business department played on unsuspecting omegas for entertainment.
Then he kept showing up.
Study sessions, debate afterparties, coffee left on your desk before eight a.m. lectures, text messages asking whether you’d eaten delivered with enough persistence to become psychologically invasive after a while.
And somehow, worse than Jaeyun himself, was the fact Park Sunghoon always appeared eventually too. Because, yes, the two alphas heirs were basically a combo.
It all felt unfair considering your crush towards the Park heir had existed long before Jaeyun decided forcibly integrating himself into your life was a reasonable hobby.
You blamed freshman year for that. More specifically, you blamed one particular Wednesday afternoon during your first semester at Helios University when Park Sunghoon had quietly ruined your life forever by doing something catastrophically simple.
You had been sitting alone outside the old law building after class trying not to cry over a scholarship review email and at some point your coffee had gone cold beside you. At some point it also had started raining. And at some point Park Sunghoon had walked out of the building with three other business majors trailing behind him before stopping directly in front of your bench.
You still remembered thinking he probably wanted the seat. Instead, he had looked down at your untouched coffee for two seconds before quietly setting his umbrella beside you. Then he left.
No weird sympathy, no conversation, no awkward attempt at charity. He simply walked back into the rain himself while one of his friends asked what the fuck he was doing. That was it. Which, in hindsight, said deeply concerning things about your psychological state at twenty-two. An unmated omega entering an elite educational system later than the others.
Still, after growing up around people who treated help like currency, the gesture had lodged itself somewhere embarrassingly permanent in your chest. Park Sunghoon had acted like your existence inconvenienced him so little it never even occurred to him to make the moment embarrassing.
And unfortunately for you, that tiny interaction had created a very dangerous thought during freshman year: maybe you could survive being around people like him after all.
Unfortunately, the crush probably would’ve stayed safely buried in the humiliating corner of your psyche reserved for 'unattainable rich alphas' if Sim Jaeyun hadn’t decided during sophomore year that you apparently belonged to him now.
To this day, you still weren’t entirely sure how it happened.
One successful debate season somehow turned into Jaeyun appearing beside your table after class. Then lunches. Then study sessions. Then him casually dragging you into private student lounges you technically did not have card access to while greeting security guards by first name.
The transition happened so gradually you barely noticed it until people around campus started noticing for you.
Which they absolutely did.
Helios omegas looked at you strangely sometimes now. Not openly hostile — Helios students were generally too well-trained socially for obvious cruelty — but with the particular kind of polished confusion wealthy people reserved for situations that disrupted the natural order of things.
Because objectively speaking, it did not make sense for Sim Jaeyun to orbit you this aggressively. He was rich in the terrifying old-money way where entire academic buildings quietly carried his family name somewhere on campus. Beautiful. Extroverted. Socially effortless. The kind of alpha older professors accidentally flirted with during networking dinners.
And yet somehow he kept choosing to spend most of his free time sprawled across Sunghoon’s apartment couch with you eating convenience store ramen while complaining about macroeconomics.
Looking back, maybe that should’ve terrified you more than it did.
Because somewhere between sophomore year and now, the line separating “occasional friendship” from whatever this had become disappeared almost entirely.
Jaeyun texted you like he expected answers, Sunghoon silently kept extra electrolyte drinks in his kitchen because he once overheard you complaining about caffeine headaches during finals, they saved you seats at class without asking whether you were coming first.
And, perhaps most dangerously of all, the company of both alphas had started feeling normal to your omega.
That was probably why you spent the last three weeks avoiding both of them.
The realization hit you properly about a month before fellowship season started, during one of the many “study sessions” at Sunghoon’s apartment that had long ago stopped resembling anything academically productive after midnight. Jaeyun had been half asleep beside you on the couch answering emails between complaints about corporate finance while you highlighted case law readings you would later realize you never actually absorbed.
At some point, Sunghoon texted the groupchat.
Gone for a few days.
Father wants me at the east residence.
You remembered staring at the message longer than necessary, then feeling strangely upset afterward. Not disappointed exactly. Not even surprised. Wealthy alpha heirs disappeared for family obligations all the time at Helios. Rationally, you understood that perfectly.
Your omega, unfortunately, did not seem interested in behaving rationally that evening.
The flat suddenly felt wrong without him there somehow. Too quiet. Too empty in ways that irritated you almost immediately because what the fuck did you mean empty? It was Park Sunghoon, your friend, one-third of your increasingly codependent academic disaster trio. Nothing more.
You spent almost forty minutes trying to convince yourself of that before Jaeyun’s phone rang.
He answered lazily at first, still reading something over your shoulder while murmuring distracted responses into the speaker. Then his posture shifted slightly.
“You triggered early?” he asked quietly.
Your highlighter stopped moving instantly. Silence stretched for a few seconds afterward while Jaeyun listened again, expression softening into something strangely familiar and instinctive.
“No, don’t leave the estate yet,” he muttered eventually. “Just stay there until it passes properly this time.”
The words lodged somewhere deep beneath your ribs because suddenly the situation stopped sounding abstract.
Rut. Sunghoon was in rut.
Your stomach twisted so sharply afterward it genuinely startled you.
Not because alphas entering rut was unusual. Helios practically functioned around rut and heat schedules every semester. You’d grown up around enough hybrid dynamics to understand the biology behind it.
But Park Sunghoon had somehow never felt biological to you before, not in that way.
Not until that exact moment.
Something ugly bloomed beneath your skin afterward, hot and irrational and embarrassingly possessive. You hated the immediate mental images your omega supplied against your will. Hated the realization that somewhere out there, hidden safely inside his family estate, Sunghoon was currently vulnerable in ways you had never even considered before.
Worse than that, you hated how deeply the thought affected you.
That was the moment you realized distance had become necessary. Because whatever existed between the three of you had stopped feeling safely platonic a long time ago, and your omega was beginning to notice it before the rest of you caught up.
At first, the changes looked small enough that maybe neither alpha noticed immediately. You stopped accepting Jaeyun’s last-minute invitations to private donor dinners and off-campus gatherings where everyone smelled painfully rich and expensive and mated. You stopped leaving your gym bag at Sunghoon’s apartment just because the campus athletic center felt too alpha-heavy during evening hours and his private building gym had always been easier on your omega.
You stopped staying over after midnight. Stopped falling asleep between them during movie nights. Stopped letting Jaeyun casually tug you into his side whenever crowded spaces overwhelmed you. Stopped looking too long whenever Sunghoon absentmindedly handed you things like you already belonged inside his routines naturally.
The worst part was that neither alpha pushed.
That same month, Sunghoon came back from the east residence seven days later. He looked calmer, broader somehow, alpha scent heavier beneath expensive cologne in ways your omega noticed immediately despite your best efforts.
Jaeyun resumed dragging himself across your life exactly the same as before. Study sessions. Coffee runs. Complaints about business faculty politics sent at unreasonable hours of the night.
And still you kept pulling away, because the fantasy had finally started crumbling beneath reality.
It turned out falling quietly in love with two powerful alpha heirs felt significantly less romantic when you were simultaneously calculating whether you had enough money left in your account to survive your next heat safely.
Your cycle had been scheduled almost perfectly against fellowship week this semester.
Of course it had.
Which meant regular suppressants were no longer enough. Stress always worsened your heats, and fellowship season had already destroyed your hormone stability before debate rounds even officially began. You knew from experience what would happen if you tried surviving onset with cheaper medication again — fever spikes, scent leakage, hormonal crashes violent enough to leave you bedridden for days afterward.
You needed the stronger suppressants this time. The expensive ones.
Unfortunately, Helios University did not care whether scholarship omegas required medically necessary medication while surviving academically suicidal workloads. So you picked up extra night shifts instead.
Quietly.
Embarrassingly.
A hostess position three districts away from campus where nobody recognized your name and wealthy alumni from Helios wouldn’t accidentally spot you carrying drinks through dim private lounges at midnight. You told nobody. Not your roommates. Definitely not the boys.
Because something about those two discovering you were skipping meals to afford heat medication felt more humiliating than the job itself.
That became the final straw eventually. The more time you spent around them afterward, the sicker the guilt inside your stomach started feeling. Jaeyun bought you meals without thinking twice about it. Sunghoon silently replaced things around his flat to accommodate your omega before you even asked. They cared for you so naturally it almost hurt.
And meanwhile you were hiding second jobs and rationing suppressants like some pathetic cautionary tale about class differences inside elite universities. So you disappeared instead.
Because honestly? Why would alphas like Park Sunghoon and Sim Jaeyun ever truly want someone who couldn’t even afford to survive a natural part of life properly?
You threw yourself so aggressively into fellowship season afterward that exhaustion eventually became easier to manage than whatever complicated thing your omega kept feeling around the two of them. If you stayed busy enough, maybe the ache inside your chest every time Jaeyun sent another unanswered text would eventually disappear too. Maybe Park Sunghoon would stop lingering so heavily in your thoughts every time you laid awake calculating medication costs at three in the morning.
Unfortunately, your body chose that exact moment to start falling apart instead.
By seven-thirty that Friday morning, you already knew the day was going to become a problem.
Not because of the fellowship debate — you had prepared too obsessively for that to scare you anymore —, the problem was your body. More specifically, the fact your suppressants were sitting wrong in your stomach barely twenty minutes after taking them.
Which was deeply, deeply inconvenient timing considering the day ahead of you included:
the most important debate round of your academic career,
a mandatory donor gala immediately afterward,
and approximately twelve consecutive hours of pretending you were not biologically approaching disaster.
You stared at your reflection in the tiny apartment bathroom mirror while waiting for the nausea to pass, fingers braced against the sink beneath flickering fluorescent lighting that your landlord still hadn’t fixed despite three separate maintenance requests.
The stupidly expensive suppressants you bought last week should have stabilized already. You had followed the dosage schedule exactly, timed every intake correctly, even forced yourself to sleep more than usual leading up to fellowship week because you knew stress could destabilize your cycle if you weren’t careful, and yet your stomach still felt hot and unsettled barely twenty minutes after taking them. This had never happened before.
Behind the bathroom door, your omega roommate yelled something incomprehensible at a video game before immediately following it with, “Are you throwing up yet? Do you want me to go run to the store?”
“I’m not throwing up.” Yet. Your brain added without your consent.
“You looked spiritually unwell this morning, bae.” Soojin replied.
"I'm good."
You reached automatically for the suppressant bottle beside the sink again before stopping yourself halfway through the motion. No. Absolutely not. You already took the emergency-adjusted dose earlier than scheduled because you knew the debate stress would spike your pre-heat symptoms faster. Taking more now would only make you dizzy during qualifiers, and if you lost focus today after preparing for almost three months straight, you would genuinely never forgive yourself.
So instead you splashed cold water against your wrists and forced yourself upright again.
Manageable. Everything was still manageable. Your pre-heat technically wasn’t due until tomorrow evening anyway. The timeline remained functional as long as your body cooperated for another twenty-four hours. Which, admittedly, was becoming an increasingly ambitious request.
Your phone buzzed against the bathroom counter right as you reached for concealer.
Sim Jaeyun [7:42 AM]
Day 83th of reaching out to my omega friend. Are you alive, baby?
If you ignore me again I’m reporting you missing to campus security btw
Despite yourself, the corner of your mouth twitched faintly.
Then another message appeared beneath it.
Park Sunghoon [7:43 AM]
Saw you at the theatre yesterday.
Did you eat yet?
You stared at their texts for a second longer than necessary. That didn't change the fact that you ignored them for the rest of the day just like how you've been doing for the last couple of weeks, by the way.
By noon, the suppressant nausea still hadn’t gone away.
By one-thirty, you started lying to yourself about it.
Not intentionally. More in the academically delusional way high-achieving students developed during survival situations. The cramps twisting low in your stomach every twenty minutes became dehydration. The overheating became stress. The faint dizziness every time you stood up too quickly became lack of sleep.
Perfectly manageable problems. Totally normal problems. Absolutely not signs your body was beginning to force itself into pre-heat nearly a full day early.
You repeated those thoughts to yourself with increasing desperation while standing in the law building bathroom forty minutes before the fellowship finals, one hand gripping the marble sink hard enough your knuckles had started aching beneath the fluorescent lights overhead.
The debate uniform suddenly felt unbearable against your skin.
The fitted blouse clung wrong at the waist now, heat crawling unpleasantly beneath the expensive fabric while another cramp twisted sharply enough through your lower stomach that you actually had to brace yourself harder against the sink to stay upright.
“Fuck,” you whispered under your breath, panic finally flickering properly through you then.
Your pre-heat was not supposed to hit until tomorrow evening. You had calculated the schedule down to the hour specifically to avoid exactly this situation. Debate today. Gala tonight. Heat leave submitted tomorrow morning. Isolation by tomorrow afternoon.
Manageable. Planned. Controlled.
Another cramp hit harder this time, making your eyes squeeze shut briefly.
Okay. Not controlled. But maybe still salvageable.
You forced yourself to breathe slowly while staring at your own reflection again, trying to assess the damage objectively instead of emotionally. Your pupils looked slightly blown already. A faint flush had started creeping along the underside of your throat despite the aggressively cold bathroom air. Worse than that, your scent blockers were fading too fast underneath the stress response surging through your body.
You pressed both hands flat against the sink and lowered your head for a second, forcing your thoughts back into order before they could spiral properly. You did not have time for this right now. You had spent almost three months preparing for this debate round. One successful fellowship placement would solve nearly every financial problem currently dismantling your life.
You could survive one bad day.
You had survived worse.
“Get it together,” you muttered quietly toward your reflection. “You are not losing your academic career because your hormones decided to become theatrical.”
The pep talk sounded more convincing in your head than aloud.
Still, it worked enough that you straightened again a few seconds later and reached automatically toward your bag sitting beside the sink. Your fingers hesitated briefly over the emergency suppressant packet hidden inside one of the side pockets.
You should not take another dose. Logically, you knew that immediately.
That part had been written very clearly inside the instruction pamphlet you obsessively read three separate times last week after buying the medication. The suppressants were specifically designed for severe heat regulation — stronger, faster acting, significantly more stable than the cheaper brands you usually survived on during semesters. Emergency doses were technically permitted under extreme hormonal stress conditions, but only within carefully spaced intervals unless you wanted rebound symptoms later once the medication metabolized too aggressively through your system.
You had already adjusted your suppressant schedule once this morning. Doubling too early would almost definitely trigger rebound symptoms later once your metabolism burned through both doses at the same time.
But the alternative was walking into the most important debate of your life while actively cramping through pre-heat onset.
Not happening.
“Temporary problem,” you whispered to yourself while tearing the packet open anyway. “Future me can suffer later.”
Which, in hindsight, turned out to be a deeply unfortunate mindset.
The second dose hit your system almost too well at first.
Within twenty minutes the cramps dulled significantly. Your temperature stabilized enough that you stopped feeling vaguely feverish. Even your head cleared slightly as the suppressant blockers forced your hormones back under temporary control again.
By the time you stepped into the debate chamber, you almost believed you’d fixed the problem entirely.
Which was adorable, really.
The fellowship finals occupied one of Helios’ older auditoriums — dark wood paneling, elevated seating, donor plaques lining the walls beside framed portraits of men who had definitely ruined at least three economies each. The atmosphere inside always felt oppressively formal during major competitions, packed with faculty members and alumni pretending the event was purely academic while quietly scouting which students looked profitable enough to sponsor later.
Normally you loved that environment, loved the pressure, loved the performance of it. Debate was one of the few places at Helios where people stopped seeing scholarship status first and started paying attention once you opened your mouth. Intelligence disrupted hierarchy in interesting ways when displayed publicly enough.
Unfortunately, your body seemed determined to sabotage that experience today.
By the middle of the second round, the suppressant crash had started creeping back subtly beneath your skin again. Not enough to alarm you immediately, just small things.
Your blouse collar suddenly felt too tight while responding to cross-examination. Your pulse kept spiking strangely every time the auditorium overheated beneath stage lighting. The scent blockers layered beneath your perfume felt thinner now too, fading in uneven waves whenever stress sent another rush of hormones through your bloodstream.
Still manageable, you thought.
You kept telling yourself that repeatedly while dismantling a third-year law major’s economic policy argument in front of half the faculty board. At some point during rebuttals, you caught sight of Jaeyun near the back row, which was honestly irritating.
Not because his presence surprised you — Jaeyun treated your debate schedule with the same terrifying level of commitment other people reserved for professional sports teams — but because he looked entirely too relaxed for someone watching you psychologically disintegrate in real time.
He sat sprawled lazily across one of the auditorium chairs with his suit jacket folded beside him, expression easy while listening to the panel discussion like he didn’t already know you were about to win.
By the time the judges announced the fellowship results, your body already felt dangerously overstimulated beneath the surface — nerves too sharp, skin too warm, every sound inside the crowded auditorium slightly too loud. When your name was called first, applause erupted loudly enough around the room that you actually flinched before catching yourself.
For a moment you genuinely just stared at it: Winner — International Fellowship Division.
The words blurred slightly before sharpening again beneath the bright stage lighting while conversations immediately exploded throughout the room around you. Faculty members leaned toward one another speaking in low impressed voices. Students across the front rows already looked vaguely murderous. Somewhere behind the judges’ panel, cameras flashed briefly while one of the coordinators hurried toward the stage entrance preparing for photographs and donor introductions.
You had won. Actually won.
Relief crashed through your system so hard your knees almost gave out beneath you. Which was unfortunately the exact moment your suppressants finally started losing the fight entirely.
Pain twisted sharply through your stomach without warning, violent enough this time that your breath caught visibly in your throat before you managed to recover. You lowered your head immediately under the excuse of gathering debate materials from the podium, one hand gripping the edge hard enough to steady yourself while the room tilted unpleasantly for half a second.
Not now.
Please not now.
A fresh wave of heat rolled through your body immediately afterward, hotter than before, your pulse suddenly loud enough to hear beneath the auditorium noise.
Fuck.
You forced yourself upright before anyone noticed the stumble and accepted the fellowship certificate from one of the faculty coordinators with what you hoped resembled a functioning human smile.
More applause followed. Somebody congratulated you. Another professor started talking about networking opportunities overseas next semester.
If you were being honest, you had completely forgotten about the donor gala in that moment. You were just focusing on picking the certificate and fleeing home for the rest of the week. Submitting your heat leave officially could be done by morning when your body went through the first wave of pre-heat symptoms and you felt more like yourself again.
You suddenly wanted to die.
Instead, you smiled through another congratulations, accepted three business cards you absolutely would not remember receiving later, and escaped the auditorium the second faculty attention shifted elsewhere.
The hallway outside felt colder, quieter too.
By the time you reached the donor ballroom level forty minutes later, you were already starting to understand just how catastrophic the rest of the evening was about to become. Unfortunately, understanding that fact and being able to leave were two very different things.
The Helios Fellowship Gala happened every winter after the final debate rounds, designed specifically so wealthy alumni could parade high-performing students around expensive ballroom spaces while pretending the networking opportunities justified the institution’s obsession with unpaid academic labor. Scholarship students volunteered almost every year because refusing “community participation opportunities” tended to look mysteriously terrible during renewal evaluations later.
Which meant despite actively approaching pre-heat, you still found yourself checking in beside the ballroom registration desk at six-thirty in the evening wearing heels that suddenly felt medically offensive.
“Congratulations again, sweetheart.”
The omega coordinator overseeing the volunteer staff smiled warmly the second you approached the check-in station, her silver clipboard tucked beneath one arm while assistants hurried behind her carrying floral arrangements toward the main ballroom entrance.
Kim Yejin worked full-time under Helios student affairs managing donor events and scholarship galas, and over the last two years you’d developed enough mutual exhaustion together that she occasionally smuggled leftover pastries into your hands during late-night networking functions.
“You survived Professor Han’s judging panel,” she continued while scanning your name off the volunteer list. “Honestly, you deserve financial compensation for emotional trauma alone.”
You almost laughed. Almost.
“Can I collect that before or after the gala?”
“After. We need you alive first.”
Alive felt increasingly ambitious at the moment.
Yejin either didn’t notice or politely chose not to comment on the fact you looked vaguely feverish beneath the harsh ballroom lighting. Instead she handed you the volunteer identification lanyard alongside the standard coordinator uniform for omega representatives — fitted cream blouse, black pencil skirt, gold Helios insignia stitched subtly along the collar.
“We’re rotating you between registration and backstage donor coordination tonight,” she explained quickly while glancing over the growing ballroom crowd nearby. “Nothing complicated. Smile politely, hand rich people their name cards, and stop stupid alphas from stealing champagne glasses off passing trays again if possible.”
“That sounds impossible actually.”
“It probably is.”
Another coordinator called her name from across the ballroom before she could continue, and Yejin squeezed your shoulder briefly on the way past. “Staff briefing in ten minutes. Change fast.”
You nodded automatically before heading toward the volunteer dressing rooms tucked behind the west ballroom corridor, heels clicking too loudly against marble floors while another wave of nausea rolled unpleasantly through your stomach.
For the first time since leaving the debate auditorium, silence finally settled around you properly. No applause, no donor conversations, no faculty questions, just fluorescent lights humming softly overhead beside rows of garment racks and abandoned makeup kits scattered across long preparation counters.
Your hands were trembling now.
“Unbelievable,” you muttered under your breath while reaching automatically toward the side pocket of your purse containing your suppressants. “You literally had one job today.”
Your pulse spiked hard enough to hurt. That was bad. Not mildly inconvenient bad either, actually dangerous.
Suppressant rebound symptoms became unpredictable once you started overdosing inconsistent cycles under stress, especially for omegas already prone to severe heats.
And judging by the cramps still twisting sharply through your stomach every five minutes, your body was already rejecting the schedule entirely.
For one horrible second, genuine fear surged through you properly. Not embarrassment, not stress, but fear. Because suddenly the timeline looked very different. You were nowhere near home. Nowhere near isolated. And potentially only a few hours away from onset.
“Okay,” you whispered quickly to yourself before the panic could spiral further. “Okay. Fine.”
Not fine. Absolutely not fine. Still, your fingers reached automatically toward the last suppressant remaining inside the bottle anyway because at that point what other choice did you realistically have? You couldn’t leave. You couldn’t disappear after winning the fellowship final. You definitely could not start pre-heat in the middle of a donor gala full of unmated alphas and wealthy social predators.
So instead you swallowed the final dose dry beside the dressing room mirror and prayed your body would survive the consequences long enough for you to make it home later. Future you could deal with the hormonal catastrophe afterward. Present you simply needed to function another few hours.
When you stepped back into the backstage coordination hall ten minutes later, Kim Yejin already stood near the volunteer briefing table organizing name cards into alphabetical stacks while several omegas and beta staff gathered around her holding clipboards.
After that, the evening dissolved strangely.
Later, when you tried reconstructing the timeline inside your head, most of the gala existed only in fragments — chandelier lighting reflecting gold against champagne glasses, donor surnames repeated too many times, the constant low hum of wealthy conversation blending into one indistinguishable noise inside the ballroom.
You remembered working. That part remained clear.
Your body had apparently switched fully into survival mode somewhere around the beginning of the second donor rotation, because despite everything happening internally, you still performed the role expected from you almost perfectly.
Smile politely, check invitation lists, escort guests toward reserved tables, refill registration folders, redirect drunk finance majors away from important alumni before they embarrassed themselves publicly.
By eight-thirty, you had layered so many neutral scent patches beneath your uniform collarbones and wrists that your skin had started itching angrily underneath the adhesive. The blockers barely helped anymore, but they dulled the sharpest edges enough that nobody around you reacted visibly. Every time you passed backstage storage rooms, you reapplied another strip mechanically before returning to the ballroom floor pretending nothing was wrong.
Most importantly, you avoided alphas entirely whenever possible.
At some point, Yejin asked whether you wanted one of the catering staff to bring you food. You said no.
At another point, one of the younger omegas helping with registration complained jokingly that the ballroom felt too warm tonight. You nearly laughed from the sheer psychological violence of that understatement.
By nine forty, the suppressant crash had become impossible to ignore anymore.
Everything felt wrong suddenly.
Your body ached with the deep exhausting heaviness that usually arrived right before full onset, heat curling constantly beneath your skin while your scent blockers struggled harder every minute to suppress what your hormones were trying desperately to force outward. Even your hearing had started dulling strangely around the edges, ballroom conversations blending together beneath the persistent rush of blood pounding inside your ears.
The ballroom had mostly emptied by the time your shift finally ended. Most donors disappeared toward private afterparties or executive lounges upstairs, leaving behind only a handful of lingering guests scattered across the remaining occupied tables beneath dimmed chandelier lighting. Staff members had already started dismantling sections of the registration area by then, floral centerpieces disappearing onto rolling carts while waiters quietly cleared untouched dessert trays from abandoned tables.
When Kim Yejin approached you near the registration counter to dismiss the remaining volunteers for the night, you didn’t even recognize her immediately.
“Sweetheart?”
You blinked slowly. Yejin’s face sharpened back into focus a second later, concern already pulling visibly across her expression while she reached instinctively toward your arm.
“You okay?” she asked carefully.
Your mouth moved automatically before your brain caught up. “Yeah.”
The answer sounded delayed even to yourself. Yejin frowned harder. “You look feverish.”
“I’m fine,” you repeated quickly, the words slurring together slightly around the edges now. “Just tired.”
Not technically a lie. Your ears felt full suddenly, pressure building strangely beneath the constant pounding of your pulse while another wave of heat rolled violently through your body hard enough that you had to grip the edge of the registration table for half a second before your knees steadied again.
Yejin noticed that too. “Hey,” she said more softly now. “Do you need me to call someone?”
Panic surged instantly through the haze clouding your thoughts. “No.”
Too fast.
Too sharp.
Both of you froze briefly afterward. Then, thankfully, another staff member called Yejin’s name from across the ballroom before she could push further into the question. Her attention flickered uncertainly between you and the volunteer carts still waiting near the west entrance.
“You should go home,” she said finally, still sounding unconvinced. “Seriously.”
You nodded quickly, then waved goodbye with what you hoped resembled normal human coordination before immediately turning toward the backstage corridor the second she looked away.
The moment the ballroom doors shut behind you, your composure shattered almost instantly.
Your heel caught unevenly against the marble floor hard enough that you nearly tripped outright before catching yourself against the hallway wall with a quiet curse. Heat surged violently through your body all at once now that you were finally away from people, the abrupt isolation tearing through whatever fragile control the suppressants had still been holding together.
Fuck.
The backstage corridors had mostly emptied already by then, only a few lingering beta staff members crossing through the administrative hallways carrying storage boxes toward service elevators. None of them paid attention to you beyond polite exhausted nods while passing by.
You made it another twenty feet before realizing you physically were not going to survive the walk home like this.
The staff bathroom near the volunteer lounge stood empty when you pushed through the door. You barely managed to lock yourself inside one of the stalls before your body gave out completely.
The floor hit hard beneath your knees first.
Then everything blurred.
For a few long minutes, you honestly weren’t sure whether you had passed out fully or simply stopped functioning enough to distinguish consciousness properly anymore. Heat crashed violently through your system in uneven waves now that the suppressants had finally burned out completely, your body trembling against the cold tile while every nerve ending felt painfully overstimulated all at once.
Too hot. Everything felt too hot.
You pressed your forehead weakly against the bathroom floor and tried focusing on breathing through it instead of panicking. That part mattered. Panic made onset worse. Stress accelerated hormonal response.
Somewhere beyond the fog clogging your thoughts, a tiny practical part of your brain finally realized something important.
The door.
You needed to lock the bathroom door.
The thought repeated sluggishly inside your head for several seconds before your body obeyed it. Later, you wouldn’t even remember actually standing. One moment you were curled half-conscious against freezing tile, and the next you were gripping the sink counter near the entrance while fumbling clumsily with the bathroom lock using shaking fingers.
Click.
Safe.
Or safe enough.
You stood there breathing hard for another few seconds afterward, forehead resting weakly against the metal door while another brutal wave rolled through your body hard enough to make your knees threaten collapsing again.
This was bad. Not catastrophic maybe, but bad.
You had survived every other heat mostly alone already. One pre-heat wave trapped inside an unfamiliar bathroom wasn’t ideal, but it also wasn’t the end of the world. Once the worst of the hormonal spike passed, you could call a ride home. Maybe text Soojin if things became genuinely unmanageable. She’d complained about you isolating during heats before, but she would still come get you if necessary.
You just needed to wait this out first. An hour maybe, two at worst.
Then home.
Your body seemed satisfied with that plan too because once your mind settled around it, the desperate panic underneath your instincts softened slightly into exhausted resignation instead. Another cramp twisted sharply through your stomach while you slid slowly back down against the wall beside the sinks, knees pulling weakly toward your chest afterward.
Cold tile pressed soothingly against your overheated skin.
Your ears still rang faintly from the ballroom noise lingering inside your head, but at least the bathroom remained quiet now. Empty. Isolated. Safe from alpha scent and crowded spaces and humiliating public disasters.
At some point during the wave, you remembered your phone existed.
The realization surfaced sluggishly through the haze clouding your thoughts while you sat curled against the bathroom wall, one cheek pressed weakly against cool tile beneath the sinks. Your purse had fallen sideways nearby sometime earlier, contents half spilled across the floor beside you.
You stared at it for several seconds before finally leaning forward enough to grab your phone with clumsy fingers.
The brightness of the screen immediately made you regret being alive. Too bright. Too loud somehow too, despite the fact phones obviously did not produce physical noise strong enough to hurt. Your entire body felt oversensitive now — skin, scent, sound, temperature — every sensation dragging roughly against nerves already overloaded beyond tolerance.
Still, you forced yourself to focus enough to unlock the screen. An embarrassing number of notifications greeted you instantly.
Missed calls. Unread texts. Multiple messages stacked aggressively on top of each other from group chats you absolutely did not have the emotional stability required to process right now. And, as expected, far too many notifications from your two alpha friends.
Jaeyun’s messages looked exactly like Jaeyun himself — excessive, rapid-fire, increasingly dramatic the longer you ignored him. He had called you a number of times as well.
Sunghoon’s messages were worse somehow because there were fewer of them. Which meant he was worried.
Your stomach twisted unpleasantly at the thought while you scrolled weakly through the newest notifications. You let your head fall weakly back against the wall afterward and closed your eyes for a second, phone still loose in your hand while guilt crawled slowly beneath the exhaustion weighing down your limbs.
You weren’t entirely sure how much time passed after that.
You looked terrible. Eyes glassy. Pupils blown. Cheeks visibly flushed beneath ballroom makeup now starting to separate slightly around the edges from heat and exhaustion.
You forced yourself upright enough to unlock your phone again, thumb hovering uncertainly over Jaeyun’s contact this time. Maybe texting him wasn’t the worst idea anymore. Not because you wanted help — absolutely not — but because if you disappeared entirely, he genuinely might start looking for you himself.
And honestly? The idea of Sim Jaeyun roaming Helios at midnight asking strangers whether they’d seen you sounded psychologically exhausting for everyone involved.
You had just barely managed to type: alive. going home soon. when footsteps echoed faintly down the corridor outside.
Not unusual at first. Staff members had been passing through the administrative halls all night. Still, something about these footsteps immediately felt different somehow. Slower. Heavier. Familiar enough that instinct reacted before your brain fully processed why.
Your body went still automatically.
The footsteps stopped briefly. Then continued again, closer this time.
You frowned faintly at the bathroom door while your pulse abruptly started climbing for entirely different reasons now. Through the lingering haze clogging your thoughts, another realization surfaced sluggishly a second later.
Voices, low and muffled through the hallway walls. One sharper and faster. The other quieter.
Your stomach dropped instantly.
You were sure your omega was being genuinely delusional now.
Maybe overdosing suppressants really did start causing auditory hallucinations after a certain point, because there was absolutely no reasonable explanation for why your body suddenly reacted to those voices like this. Every nerve ending beneath your skin seemed to spark violently awake all at once, instincts surging toward the sound hard enough that you physically had to press yourself harder against the bathroom wall to stay still.
Ridiculous. Actually ridiculous.
There were thousands of men inside Helios University. Your heat-addled brain did not get to start assigning familiar voices to random hallway conversations simply because you spent too much time psychologically obsessing over Sim Jaeyun and Park Sunghoon.
You squeezed your eyes shut briefly and tried focusing on literally anything else. The cold tile beneath your palms, the fluorescent lights overhead, your breathing.
Outside, the footsteps stopped again.
You stared at the locked bathroom door in actual horror now while your thoughts scrambled uselessly against one another. How had they even found this floor? Why were they still here? Had Yejin said something? Did they know something was wrong already?
God, no. Could it be…?
No, it can't be.
Your scent.
Sunghoon didn’t remember deciding to move.
One second he stood frozen beneath the dim ballroom lighting with his heartbeat hammering violently against his ribs, and the next both of them were crossing the corridor fast enough now that restraint finally stopped mattering altogether. Jaeyun called your name the moment they crossed into the backstage corridor, his voice echoing sharply off concrete walls and metal service doors before disappearing deeper into the administrative wing.
No answer came back.
The space beyond the ballroom looked nothing like the polished Helios University presented publicly upstairs. The deeper they moved into the staff-only hallways, the more the illusion of wealth and prestige peeled away into something functional and strangely intimate.
Gone were the marble floors and gold lighting and carefully curated donor architecture. Back here the ceilings lowered visibly, exposed pipes running overhead beside fluorescent maintenance lights that buzzed faintly in uneven intervals. Rolling garment racks crowded one side of the corridor beside stacked catering crates and folded banquet tables waiting to be wheeled into storage by morning staff.
The door slammed lightly against the wall when Jaeyun pushed it open, both of them stepping instinctively into the narrow staff lounge beyond before immediately stopping again.
Empty. At first glance, completely empty.
But your scent saturated the air so heavily now that it hit both alphas immediately. Not perfume anymore, not subtle, full on omega distress.
Every irrational part of them had already started building images faster than logic could stop them — you alone back here for who knew how long, trying to suppress pre-heat symptoms by yourself while the entire university celebrated upstairs completely unaware.
Or worse. Aware and ignoring it.
Jaeyun swore quietly under his breath while turning sharply toward the second door near the back of the lounge. “Bathroom.”
Even with decades of mandatory high-grade suppressants and scent patches drilled into every elite alpha since puberty, nothing could fully blunt the raw pull of an omega in pre-heat distress. It wasn’t just smell—it was instinct screaming through the bloodstream: warm rain on sun-baked asphalt, sharp ozone after lightning, threaded with something sweeter and more vulnerable that made the alpha hindbrain sit up and snarl protect, claim, fix.
Jake’s throat tightened, a low involuntary rumble building in his chest that he had to physically swallow down. Sunghoon’s jaw flexed beside him, fingers curling into fists at his sides. In Helios, where every scent was supposed to be civilized and controlled, this kind of unfiltered potency was rare, almost illegal in how it bypassed every social filter. It didn’t beg. It simply existed—honest, overwhelming, and impossible to ignore.
The pull of your scent only grew stronger as they crossed the small lounge, thick enough to coat the back of their throats and make every instinct bristle. Jaeyun moved on pure reflex now, drawn straight to the closed door at the far end like a compass needle snapping north. He reached the bathroom first.
Locked.
“Fuck.” His voice dropped lower immediately, gentler this time despite the urgency bleeding underneath it. “Hey. Baby?” No response came from inside. Sunghoon’s pulse spiked hard enough to ache. Jaeyun knocked again, sharper now. “Y/N, it’s us. Open the door.”
Still nothing. But then—movement. Small. A weak sound from inside that didn’t quite resemble words. Sunghoon stepped forward immediately. “Move.”
Jaeyun shifted aside without argument while Sunghoon grabbed the handle hard enough that the old lock snapped almost instantly beneath the force. The door jerked open violently against tile.
And there you were. Curled tightly against the wall between the sinks and the last bathroom stall like you’d tried to make yourself physically smaller somehow. One of the volunteer blazers had fallen half beneath you across the tile floor while your fingers remained clenched tightly around your phone against your chest, knuckles pale from pressure.
For one terrible second neither alpha moved.
You looked wrecked. Your hair had started coming loose completely now, makeup smudged faintly beneath exhausted eyes gone glassy and unfocused beneath harsh fluorescent lighting. Your breathing sounded uneven in the too-small bathroom, shoulders trembling faintly every few seconds despite the obvious effort you were making to stay still.
And the second the door opened wider, your entire body reacted instinctively.
You recoiled sharply against the wall.
“Don't—” The word came out rough. Your eyes lifted toward them immediately but didn’t fully recognize either of them at first, pupils blown wide enough that instinct clearly outweighed rational thought now.
The scent flooding the tiny bathroom intensified all at once — sweet, overheated, terrified.
You shook your head almost immediately after, movement frantic despite how weak you looked. “Please— don’t come any closer—”
The fear in your voice wasn’t fear of them, it was fear for them. Fear of what your heat could do to them. You’d locked yourself alone inside a staff bathroom rather than risk exposing anyone else to it. The realization hit both of them hard enough that their composure nearly fractured entirely.
“How long have you been here?” Jaeyun asked softly, crouching instinctively near the doorway without fully approaching you yet. Every movement he made had gone careful and controlled despite the visible tension running beneath his skin. “Y/N, look at me.”
Your gaze flickered toward him briefly before darting away again almost immediately. “Fuck— Why are you here? Jaeyun, you shouldn't be here.”
“Too late for that.”
“Jaeyun?", you hiccuped, "I’m serious—”
Your wrists were rubbed raw beneath the sleeves of the volunteer uniform where you’d clearly been scratching at your skin trying to ground yourself through the instinctive discomfort. Empty suppressant packaging sat crumpled near the trashcan beside you. Your phone screen still displayed unanswered messages and missed calls beneath trembling fingers.
Sunghoon took one step forward before he could stop himself. That immediately made your eyes snap toward the taller alpha.
“Sunghoon,” you whispered. “Please don’t come any closer.”
“Hey,” Jaeyun said softly, voice dropping lower in the careful way people used around frightened animals. “Look at me for a second.”
You didn’t. Your eyes stayed fixed stubbornly somewhere near the floor instead while your fingers tightened harder around the phone against your chest. “I’m fine,” you managed weakly. “Just need a minute.”
That made Sunghoon, who still stood closer to the door, almost lose his mind. The anger hit him instantly and irrationally, hot enough to cut clean through the panic clawing inside his chest.
Not anger at you. Never really at you. But at the image in front of him instead — you locked inside a staff bathroom at nearly ten at night trying to ride out pre-heat symptoms alone because you genuinely believed this was preferable to asking them for help.
“You are very obviously not fine, Y/N.”
Your shoulders flinched hard at the sound of his voice.
Jaeyun shot him a look immediately, warning flashing across his expression before turning back toward you again. “Sweetheart,” he said quickly, softer now. “We're just worried because you've been ignoring our calls all night.”
Another wave hit you before you could properly respond. A tiny sound escaped you before you could stop it, quiet enough it almost didn’t register at all. Except both alphas reacted instantly.
Your omega whining in distress shattered whatever remaining distance existed inside that bathroom.
Jaeyun swore softly under his breath.
Because fuck, you looked horrified afterward, eyes squeezing shut while your head dropped against the wall behind you. “God— fuck, I’m sorry—”
Sunghoon muttered under his breath. “No need to apologize, sweetheart.” he looked at you. “You locked yourself inside a staff bathroom alone instead of calling someone, that's dangerous, Y/N.” He couldn't help but point.
“There wasn’t anyone to call.” Your answer came too fast and too honest, making the two alphas fall in silence. The atmosphere dropped heavily through the room.
Sunghoon stared at you at your response with the same intensity as Jaeyun. The second realization crossed your face — the moment you understood what you’d admitted aloud — you immediately tried looking away again.
Too late.
Somewhere inside your exhausted, heat-addled brain, you genuinely hadn’t considered either of them an option.
“Baby,” Jaeyun said quietly, all teasing gone from his voice now. “That’s not true.”
You shook your head weakly. “Jaeyun—”
“Y/N.”
“No, you don’t understand—”
The Sim's expression softened almost painfully despite the tension still visible around his jaw. He interrupted you and moved carefully this time, lowering himself fully onto one knee against the tile so he looked less imposing.
“Hey,” he said gently. “Baby, can I touch you?”
Your entire body reacted to the words.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” Jaeyun murmured softly, noticing the trembling in your hands the longer you tried forcing yourself smaller against the tiled wall. “We can take you somewhere safe. Don’t you want that?”
Your expression tightened immediately. Both of them watched embarrassment flash across your face faster than instinct, humiliation settling visibly beneath the feverish haze clouding your eyes while you shook your head again.
“I can manage,” you whispered weakly, though the sentence barely sounded convincing to yourself anymore. “I just need— I just need this to pass a little.”
Jaeyun’s face did something painful at that.
Not pity.
Worse.
Understanding.
Because suddenly the entire situation looked horrifyingly clear. You weren’t fighting them because you didn’t trust them. You were fighting because somewhere inside your head this still counted as dignity. Sitting alone on a freezing bathroom floor while your suppressants failed felt less humiliating to you than letting two of your friends alphas see you vulnerable like this.
The realization seemed to hit Jaeyun just as hard as it hit Sunghoon.
“Baby,” he said carefully, keeping his voice impossibly gentle despite the tension running through every inch of his body now, “look at me.”
Your gaze lifted toward him through heavy lashes before darting away almost immediately again, heat and distress thickening your scent so heavily now the tiny bathroom barely felt breathable anymore.
“What’s wrong?” he asked softly. “Talk to us.”
For a second it looked like you wouldn’t answer, then your fingers tightened harder around your phone against your chest and your face twisted faintly with something dangerously close to panic.
“I swear I thought I could make it,” you whispered after a moment, exhaustion finally bleeding visibly into your voice now that the fight inside you had started slipping. “My pre-heat was supposed to start tomorrow, I just needed to get through today and then I was going to take leave for the week.”
Sunghoon rubbed one hand slowly down his face.
Tomorrow.
You’d calculated this down to the hour, of course you had. And somehow that made the entire situation even more devastating.
Jaeyun swore softly under his breath before leaning forward slightly again, voice gentler this time. “Baby,” he murmured, “can I touch you now?”
Sunghoon watched the conflict move visibly across your face — embarrassment warring violently against instinct while your omega practically screamed beneath the surface for comfort. Another wave hit you hard enough that your breathing stuttered sharply afterward.
Then finally, a tiny nod.
Jaeyun moved immediately after that, careful and slow despite the obvious urgency beneath his skin now. He crossed the remaining distance between you carefully enough not to startle you, one hand lifting toward your arm—
The second he touched you, your entire body reacted. You latched onto him so fast it almost startled all three of you.
A broken sound escaped your throat while your hands grabbed fistfuls of the Sim's dress shirt and pulled yourself directly against his neck, breathing him in like you’d been deprived of oxygen for hours.
Jaeyun froze. Completely froze. “Oh,” he breathed instinctively, arms catching around you automatically before you slid sideways against the tile. “Does that help, baby?” he asked quietly.
Your answer came as the smallest nod imaginable against his neck.
Sunghoon had to physically look away for a second because something about the sight hit too hard.
Jaeyun adjusted you more securely against him while glancing up toward his bestfriend again. “Okay,” he said quietly, practical despite the way his hands tightened protectively around your waist. “We need to get her out of here before someone comes back.”
You reacted immediately. “Wait.” Both alphas looked down at you. “Just take me home,” you insisted weakly against Jaeyun’s collar despite the fact you were still visibly clinging to him. “You can leave me there. It's okay.”
The silence afterward felt almost dangerous. Jaeyun stared at you like you’d lost your mind.
He actually let out a short disbelieving laugh. “Absolutely not, baby.”
“I can't take a cab right now, Jaeyun, please just leave me there.”
The words came out muffled against Jaeyun’s throat, weakened further by the fact you still hadn’t let go of him even slightly. One of your hands remained twisted tightly into the fabric of his dress shirt while your breathing slowly steadied against the warm line of his neck, body reacting almost embarrassingly fast to the comfort of an alpha despite the stubbornness still visible all over your face.
Jaeyun looked down at you like you were completely insane.
“We can’t just drop you off and call it a day, princess,” he said, voice low but firm.
You blinked up at him, exhaustion weighing heavy on your shoulders. “What do you mean? I just need to get home and sleep.”
Sunghoon cut in immediately, stepping closer so both alphas were crowding the narrow space in that overwhelming way they had. His jaw was tight, eyes sharp with worry he didn’t bother hiding.
“You’re not sleeping through this,” he said, the words leaving no room for argument.
You finally lifted your head slightly at that, expression exhausted and overheated beneath the harsh fluorescent bathroom lights. Your pupils remained blown wide, lashes damp at the corners from strain while the sweet scent of distressed omega still saturated the cramped room heavily enough that both alphas looked perpetually on edge.
Still, stubbornness burned underneath it all.
“I have suppressants at home,” you argued weakly.
“You already burned through the emergency dose,” Sunghoon replied flatly, eyes flicking briefly toward the empty packaging discarded near the trash can beside you. “And they barely worked.”
Your jaw tightened immediately.
Jaeyun sighed quietly beneath his breath before shifting you more comfortably against him, one hand moving slowly up and down your back in absentminded calming motions that made your shoulders loosen despite yourself. “Do you live alone?”
A long pause stretched between you. You felt the steady rise and fall of his chest as he waited.
“No,” you finally murmured.
Sunghoon’s frown deepened instantly, his sharp eyes narrowing with concern. He stepped a little closer, voice dropping.
“Roommates?”
You nodded once against Jaeyun’s shoulder, the movement small and tired. “Two.”
“What are their designations, Y/N?” Sunghoon asked, the question coming out sharper and more immediate than before. You lifted your head just enough to look up at him, confusion flickering across your face at the intensity behind his words.
“One omega. One alpha.”Sunghoon went completely still. Jaeyun cursed softly under his breath, the two reactions hitting at the exact same second.
Your eyes narrowed faintly, suspicion cutting through the haze. “What?”
“You go through heats with an alpha at home, baby?” Jaeyun asked carefully, his voice low and measured, though his hand had stopped its soothing motion on your back.
“He’s barely there,” you answered.
“That’s not the point.”
“He works nights most of the week,” you continued quickly, the words rushing out like you’d had this argument a dozen times before. “And he’s not—we’re not close or anything.”
Sunghoon stared at you for a long second, his expression unreadable. The silence stretched, heavy and tense.
“No.” The single word cut through the room like a blade, leaving no space for negotiation.
You blinked at him. “No what.”
“No, I'm not letting you go back there.”
Your expression shifted instantly from exhausted embarrassment to disbelief. “Sunghoon—”
“You’re spending the heat at my flat.” The bathroom fell silent. Even Jaeyun looked briefly surprised by how immediate the decision sounded leaving his mouth.
You stared at him openly now, heat-hazed eyes widening slightly while your fingers tightened unconsciously against Jaeyun’s shirt again. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” Sunghoon replied, calm and unyielding.
Your voice came out sharper than you intended, heat making your cheeks burn as you glared up at him. “You can’t just decide that. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, I can.”
“No, the fuck you can’t,” you snapped, the words tumbling out sharper than you meant, your fingers twisting tighter into Jaeyun’s shirt.
Sunghoon leaned forward slightly then, frustration and protective instinct finally bleeding fully together beneath his skin after spending the last hour watching you try to rationalize dangerous situations like they were minor inconveniences.
“You are not spending a heat in an apartment with a random alpha roommate,” he said firmly.
“He’s not random,” you insisted, voice muffled against Jaeyun’s shirt.
“I don’t care,” Sunghoon shot back without missing a beat, his tone flat and final.
“He’s barely even home,” you tried again, the words coming out weaker this time, exhaustion and heat making your argument feel flimsy even to your own ears.
“Y/N.”
Sunghoon’s voice was low and careful as he said your name, a quiet warning wrapped in concern. Jaeyun's hand resumed its slow, soothing path along your back, but his body had gone tense beneath you.
Your face flushed hotter instantly, equal parts embarrassment and irritation now. “Do you even hear yourself right now, Sunghoon?”
“Yes.”
“You sound insane.”
“You’re in pre-heat,” Sunghoon snapped back immediately. “Your suppressants failed, your emergency coverage expired, and you locked yourself inside a staff bathroom alone instead of asking for help. Forgive me if I’m past pretending this is a reasonable situation, sweetheart.”
The anger in his voice startled you enough that your omega reacted instantly, another distressed sound escaping your throat before you buried your face hard back against Jaeyun’s neck in humiliation.
“I’m not yelling,” Sunghoon replied, voice still edged with frustration.
“You literally sound like someone’s angry husband,” Jaeyun muttered, half-exasperated, half-amused despite the tension.
Sunghoon ignored him completely, his sharp gaze staying locked on you, unwavering.
Because now that the reality of your living situation settled properly inside his head, the idea of you going back there genuinely made something primal and furious rise beneath his skin. An unmated omega in full heat trapped in an apartment with an unrelated alpha? No stabilizing support? No scent management? No one monitoring suppressant crashes?
Fucking impossible.
“You need somewhere controlled,” he said more evenly this time, though tension still tightened visibly along his jaw. “Somewhere people aren’t going to lose their minds because your heat scent leaks through an apartment wall.”
You slowly lifted your head again and for the first time since they found you, genuine surprise cut cleanly through the haze clouding your expression. “You really mean that.”
Sunghoon frowned slightly. “Yes, princess. It's obvious that I mean it.”
Your eyes searched his face like you genuinely couldn’t tell whether he understood what he was offering.
“Sunghoon,” you said carefully now, voice rough with exhaustion and disbelief all tangled together, “do you actually know what the fuck you’re talking about?”
Jaeyun glanced between both of you quietly, already understanding exactly where your mind had gone.
Because yes. Everyone did know what it meant.
An alpha offering his home to an omega during heat wasn’t casual. Especially not an unmated omega. Especially not one both of them clearly wanted badly enough the tension practically filled the room around them.
Sunghoon held your stare evenly anyway. “I know exactly what I’m talking about, sweetheart.”
Your breathing caught faintly. “You’ve never even taken care of someone through heat before. This might be too much for you guys.”
The words came out quieter this time, stripped of some of the earlier defensiveness now that exhaustion had started overtaking your ability to fight them properly.
Sunghoon held your gaze steadily anyway, jaw tightening slightly before he answered. “No,” he admitted flatly. “I haven’t.”
The honesty seemed to surprise you more than the admission itself.
Beside you, Jaeyun shifted carefully against the bathroom wall while still holding you loosely against his chest, one hand resting warm and grounding against the middle of your back. Unlike Sunghoon, he looked completely unsurprised by the conversation unfolding in front of him.
Probably because Jaeyun already knew him too well.
“But Jaeyun has,” Sunghoon continued before you could retreat into your own head again. “And he’ll be there. He'll know how to help you.”
Your eyes flicked automatically toward Jaeyun.
Jaeyun gave a small shrug despite the obvious tension still visible around his shoulders. “I used to date an omega years ago,” he explained quietly. “Her heats were rough when we were together.”
Something in your expression softened faintly at that.
Not fully trust.
But understanding.
Sunghoon pushed forward immediately while he still had your attention. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, baby,” he said, voice lower now, steadier than before despite the instinctive tension still clawing constantly beneath his skin. “No one’s saying we’re dragging you home to lock you in a bedroom and lose control.”
Your face burned instantly at the phrasing.
Sunghoon ignored your reaction, eyes still fixed on you. “We can help with scent stabilization. Keep your temperature down. Make sure you eat. Make sure you don’t hurt yourself trying to ride it out alone.” His jaw flexed slightly before he added more quietly, “And if you don’t want sex involved, then it won’t be involved.”
The words settled heavily between all three of you.
Because again — you all knew what this meant.
Two unmated alphas offering to spend an omega’s heat with her wasn’t neutral no matter how clinical Sunghoon tried making it sound. Not when your scent already flooded the tiny bathroom thick enough to make both their instincts visibly frayed around the edges. Not when you were currently curled half in Jaeyun’s lap breathing him in like your body already recognized comfort there instinctively.
Still, Sunghoon looked completely serious.
“I just want you safe,” he said finally, quieter now in a way that almost sounded frustrated with himself. “Because after seeing this tonight, if you go back to that apartment alone I genuinely don’t think I’ll sleep for the next week.”
The confession slipped out rougher than he probably intended. Not polished, not controlled. Honest enough that the entire room fell silent afterward. You stared at him.
Jaeyun stared at him too, though there was something knowing hidden beneath the softer look crossing his face now.
Because there it was.
Care.
Raw enough that even Sunghoon himself looked faintly irritated by the fact it had become visible.
Your fingers tightened unconsciously against Jaeyun’s shirt again while your gaze stayed locked on Sunghoon a second too long this time. The heat still clouded your expression heavily, but beneath it he could practically see the moment your walls started cracking apart around the edges.
“You’d really just…” You swallowed once, visibly struggling to finish the thought through exhaustion and embarrassment both. “Take care of me?”
Sunghoon looked almost offended by the question.
“Yes.”
Like it was obvious.
Like there had never been another option in his mind the second he found you sitting alone on a bathroom floor.
"The two of you?" Your fingers tightened unconsciously against Jaeyun’s shirt. The heat still clouded your expression heavily, but beneath it he could practically see the moment your walls started cracking apart around the edges. Not enough to disappear completely, just enough that the real question finally slipped through.
Your gaze drifted between them slowly. Two unmated alphas. One omega approaching heat. One apartment. One week.
Even through the haze clouding your thoughts, the situation sounded insane.
The city lights blurred past the windows as Jaeyun drove. In the backseat, you had curled into Sunghoon without asking, face pressed against his chest, one hand loosely fisted in his shirt. Your breathing had gone shallow and uneven, dozing in fits between waves. Every bump in the road pulled a small whimper from you, and Sunghoon’s arm tightened around your shoulders automatically.
He stared out the window, trying to ignore how right it felt. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He wasn’t the type to get pulled into something messy like this. He liked distance. Clarity. Not an omega in pre-heat clinging to him like he was the only stable thing left. Yet here he was, thumb brushing absently over your arm, body angled to shield you from the AC vent.
It’s just biology, he told himself. She needs an alpha’s presence. Any alpha. Doesn’t mean anything deeper.
But the itch under his wrists had finally stopped. The restless edge that had followed him all night was gone, replaced by something quieter. He didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to hand you off to Jaeyun or drop you anywhere else. The flat was fifteen minutes away. His bed was made, spare blankets in the closet, fridge stocked from last week. Practical. That’s all.
Jaeyun glanced at the rearview mirror. “She okay back there?”
Sunghoon grunted. “Sleeping. Sort of.” His voice came out lower than intended. He adjusted the way your head rested against him, careful not to wake you fully. Your scent was everywhere now—sweet, fevered, undeniable. It should have been overwhelming, instead it settled something in his chest he refused to name.
He wasn’t in love. That was ridiculous. This was responsibility. Friendship. The same instinct that made him leave the umbrella that rainy afternoon years ago. Nothing had changed. You were still the stubborn scholarship student who disappeared when things got too close. He was still the Park heir who didn’t do complications.
And yet he kept his arm around you the entire drive, letting you cling. When another wave made you shift restlessly, he murmured something low and wordless against your hair, barely audible. Not romantic. Just… necessary.
Jaeyun didn’t say much from the front, but Sunghoon caught the occasional glance. They had already gone over this months ago in the kitchen after you’d crashed on the couch—one too many late nights, one too many times watching you pull away. No big confessions, just mutual acknowledgment that pretending they didn’t both want you around was getting exhausting. Sharing the problem felt easier than losing proximity.
Sunghoon exhaled slowly. The denial sat there, familiar and comforting. He wasn’t accepting anything permanent. This was one heat. One week. You’d recover, go back to avoiding them, and they’d go back to pretending they weren’t watching for you in every lecture hall.
But right now, with your weight warm and trusting against him, the city passing quietly outside, he didn’t want to be anywhere else. The thought annoyed him. He pushed it down.
Temporary, he reminded himself. Just get her through this.
Still, his hand stayed on your back, steady. The flat lights were already visible up ahead. Jaeyun slowed the car. Sunghoon didn’t loosen his hold.
author's note — no reader hate will be tolerated ok. love you guys, forgive me if this is bad (ik is dragging af). guys bully me into writing the second part of this because i swear i tried so many times but the smut isn't smutting AND IT'S BEEN A MONTH SINCE I STARTED WRITING IT. I'M GOING TO CRASH OUT I SWEAR.RRRR
ellievsbear
tangentwithtanner
