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Apollo was curious, and had been since he was old enough to understand that there were more than two genders in the world. As a child growing up in a prudish country, he'd asked questions and gotten nothing meaningful in return. At best, he'd be given religious explanations which read like poetry but provided no insight on the physics of things. At worst, he'd be swatted and shooed away, with nothing to show for his trouble but a welt that made him unable to sit down.
If a question ever became so heavy that it rested in the pit of his stomach like a stone to loathsome to speak of, Dhurke was always around. He gave the straightforward answers that Apollo craved, but not without some dialogue first. Why did an eight-year-old want to know heats worked? Why was he interested in learning how a knot formed? It'd mortified Apollo, well-meaning as it might have been, and he'd made sure to ask every other adult at his disposal before turning to Dhurke.
Now sixteen and American, Apollo's window to present was shrinking. Alphas could present as late as nineteen, but omegas skewed younger. He'd already given up hope for that, yet he continued to paw at his nest anyway.
It might not have been his gender, but it felt nice to gather his blankets and arrange them. Clay did the same thing overhead on his top bunk. Apollo heard him fidgeting around up there, struggling to get his pillows to lay just right. They’d shared a room for so long that Apollo recognized the low sighs of frustration for what they were: growls.
“Easy Alpha, you’re scaring the hell out of those bedsheets,” Apollo raised his hand up and hit on the underside of Clay’s mattress. Traditionally, calling an alpha by their gender was reserved for couples. It was a pet name, and a rather forward one at that. Apollo got away with it by virtue of being the lone member of Clay’s pack, but from anyone else it would have been seen as a spirited request to fuck.
“Yeah, well maybe they’ll finally fall in the right spot, then,” Clay said. He collapsed down on his stomach, and the frame of the bunk bed jangled. “This nesting voodoo is stressing me out.”
“Well, duh. It’s not for alphas. You’re supposed to be invited into nests, you don’t make them yourself.”
“Says the beta,” Clay said, and Apollo ignored the pin that pricked his heart. If he could snap and swap their genders, he would have done it yesterday.
“They say that alphas are supposed to lose their nesting instincts within their first year, and I’m not ready for mine to go. I like my nests, but they’re getting so damn hard to make.”
“So find someone at school to make one for you,” Apollo said as he tied off two of his blankets together. He was feeling a little experimental.
“No, I want my own,” Clay said, drawing out the vowel on the last word. “How come you nest so well? You don’t even do anything in them.”
“Neither do you, asshole.”
“You know what I mean. You don’t rut.”
“Might as well. I’m here enough,” Apollo said, skirting the unspoken alliance that’d developed over the six months since Clay had presented. It was inhumane to move a fledgling alpha out of his nest while he was still growing accustomed to rutting, but Apollo had needs too. If there were any place else in the apartment to go and carve out some privacy, they would have each had their own rooms with their own doors and their own beds.
They'd learned to sleep with their earbuds in and a willingness to accept that any rattling that came from the bedposts was the byproduct of living on a fault line. It was gross and pinch perverted, but when the alternative was sneaking across the living room where Clay's dad slept to make use of only bathroom at odd hours of the night, they made do.
"How do you even know where to put things?" Clay hung his head over the railing to where he was looking at Apollo upside down. When they were still the same size, he'd been able to flip himself over and summersault onto Apollo's mattress from there. He'd lost the dexterity for it in one of his growth spurts.
"I swear you were a girl in your previous life, 'Pollo. Omegas don't make nests as frilly as that."
"It's organized," Apollo said as he gestured to all four corners of his bed. "Cottons there, polyesters there, clothes there, miscellaneous there. I can lay it out, I just can't weave it."
Clay was still waiting for his alpha teeth to come all the way out. Apollo could see his bottom canines from this angle, present and sharp, but his upper ones were being stubborn. The two gaps gave his grin a childlike innocence, despite enduring both puberty and presentation.
It reminded Apollo of when they'd first met. As badly as Clay needed those canines to (eventually) claim a mate, Apollo liked the look on him. It was cute. He kept the thought to himself.
"Oh, I can do that. If you go up there and fix mine, I'll braid yours for you," Clay said.
"What happened to wanting a nest of your own?"
"You're my pack. You're basically just another one of me. C'mon, let's swap."
Apollo's chest went warm at that. Their pack bond couldn't be helped. They lived in too close a proximity, and they'd spent too many years watching over each other's shoulders. It was a familial sort of tether that looped them together, although Apollo found it strange that Clay didn't seem to consider his father as part of the same unit. They were all crammed into the same one-bedroom sardine can they called home, but the only packmate Clay ever felt like drawing attention to was Apollo.
It must have had something to do with the fact that they were both alphas. Apollo refused to acknowledge any other possibilities, although they would meander into his dreams from time to time.
"Sure, Alpha. We can switch," Apollo said. Their paths crossed as Apollo climbed up and Clay jumped down. Their bunk bed had a ladder, not that it saw any use. It was easier just to scale the thing from the edge, rather than walk all the way around to climb five steps. Plus, it was fun.
"How do you want me to lay it?" Apollo asked once he was in the center of Clay's chaos. There were pillows crammed into weird spots and scrunched bath towels lining all the way across the top sheet, and Apollo began to suspect that Clay really had lost his nesting instinct.
"Just like yours," Clay said, with sounds of fabric whisping emerging from down below. The noise of weaving a nest. "As close to one of yours as possible."
"Frills and all?"
"Especially the frills."
It took longer for Apollo to organize Clay's mess than it did for Clay to wrap Apollo's blankets together. When he got his feet back on the carpet, Clay was at ease, laying on his back in the middle of Apollo's newly constructed nest. After a full evening of worrying the fabric on his own bunk into tatters, Apollo was tempted to leave him alone and let him sleep like that.
"How'd I do?" Clay asked, rolling his head to the side to look at him.
"Beautifully," The word escaped Apollo's mouth before he'd had the chance to murder it, and he quickly shook his head. "Fine."
"Which one is it?" Clay smiled, and Apollo once again found himself drawn to two black spaces in-between his teeth.
"I…"
"It's cool. Nesting turns everyone dumb. You may present as something yet."
"Do you want to sleep there tonight?" Apollo asked, for the sake of saying anything. "You did more work on it than I did, in the end. You can take it for the night."
While Clay pondered on it, Apollo already had his fingers tight on the railing. He was about to make the leap up when three words slaughtered his momentum.
"Stay with me."
It was all Apollo could do to stare. It wasn't the first time Clay had asked that of him, but they'd been children then. Broken children, terrified of waking up alone.
"Did your nightmares come back?" Apollo asked. It was another perk of being packmates that Clay didn't attempt to put on airs of bravado. They could be vulnerable around each other and not lose face, a rarity for a couple of sixteen-year-old boys. Clay nodded.
"Not the same ones. Different ones. Worse ones."
"You know we can't get caught. It was bad the last time, and that was before…all this," Apollo gestured his hands in circles around both their nests. "If your dad walks in, I've got nowhere else to go."
"We'll be out on the street together then. I wouldn't leave you."
Clay was a people pleaser. Had been since he was small. Apollo had seen it in the confident way he strode through the school hallways, like he had a set of keys and leather-bound book full of locker combinations. He'd seen it in how he approached other students as if he'd known them all his life, even though their graduating class had nearly a thousand kids in it. Clay wanted to be liked. If that meant faking interests and lying to someone's face, he'd have no reservations.
For reasons that Apollo couldn't pinpoint just yet, he could always tell when Clay was talking to him vs. anybody else. For the hours they were together, his posture would relax, his involuntary twitching would subside, and he'd smile with his whole mouth instead of raising a single corner of his lips.
For Apollo, Clay spoke nothing but the truth.
"Scoot over, then," Apollo said, and Clay did. The idea of being kicked out didn't seem as dire when his alpha would be following behind him. It sounded kind of adventurous, really. Romantic.
No, not romantic. Rebellious. That was the word Apollo had meant to think up. Rebellious.