Chapter Text
Dean has never been alone.
In the forest, he’s terrified.
It’s dark. He’s in the forest. And he’s alone.
His shirt and pants are thin, his shoes designed for carpet and varnished wood. Out here, everything is sharp and hard and cold. Dean shivers. Branches prickle and scratch but he pushes further into them anyway; a small animal trying to hide.
He is alone. And he’s never been alone, never ever ever.
The other omegas would say he was wrong. They’d say he was often alone, before a new resident showed up or after they left. But that wasn’t being alone, not like this.
Back in the apartment, even when he didn’t have a resident to cater for, there were always sounds from above or below, or from the corridor. He could always hear the other omegas; someone vacuuming, someone welcoming a new arrival, someone having sex. There was always noise and life.
Out here there is noise and life too, but none of it is human. None of it is friendly.
And it isn’t just the cold or the strange sounds that make him shudder and startle again and again; it’s the air. The scents are overwhelming - damp leaves, dark earth, mouldy wood, tiny things creeping and larger things as well, crawling, scuttling, leaving their scent hanging in the air as clear as jet trails. Dean can see nothing with his eyes, but his nose tells him everything about the creatures of the forest and the night.
He wants the apartment. He wants the smell of fresh laundry in his nose, the bland air-conditioned air, the floral hint of the polish he uses on the smooth wooden surfaces. It’s been years - years - since he had fresh air in his lungs and he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it.
He can’t see. He’s not used to complete darkness either. Even in the bedroom with the blinds shut there was still the green light from the smoke alarm and the red one from the TV on the wall. Even in Dean’s little cubbyhole nest, there was light from around the door frame, and the little plug-in night light when he wanted it.
He should thank the darkness. It hides him, if not by scent at least by sight. In fact, it hides him from the pick-up driver completely, because he’s a beta and no beta is going to sniff Dean out, not if he keeps quiet and still. The guy doesn’t have a hope, even if he bothers to look for Dean. It isn’t his job to track down a runaway omega. Why should he bother?
Runaway. The word makes him shudder as much as the cold. Because that’s what Dean is now. A runaway. And he doesn’t even want to be one. He wants to be home, back in the apartment that isn’t his, but his to look after; his to clean and keep neat and tidy, his to stock with groceries and all the things a new resident could want or need, whether they’re staying for just one night or for a few months.
He wants to be home, in his little cubbyhole nest or even in the big bedroom, being fucked by a strange alpha or beta. Mostly they aren’t so bad, the residents, even when they take their pleasure from him. They don't hurt him. They don't. Not normally. And at least he’d be home, doing his job, earning his living. He’d have a place and be in it, instead of out here, alone in the dark.
Dean’s feet are so cold they’ve gone numb. The mushy, rotting leaves had soaked through his thin soles straight away, as soon as he'd scrambled away from the asphalt and hurtled into the trees.
He'd been dozing, lulled by the pick-up’s rumbling engine. Vaguely, he'd heard the driver talking on his phone. And Dean had thought, it’ll be nothing; his mate, or the people he works for, getting remote cabins ready for weekend parties. But then the pick-up had slowed and pulled over and Dean had nearly passed out with panic.
The alphas. They were on his trail. The driver would check the back of his truck and find Dean, curled up beneath the ragged tarp.
So Dean had run.
Something scuttles over his toes but Dean's flinch is hidden in shivers. His clothes - what’s left of them - are soaked through and he’s shivering so hard it hurts, muscles spasming and twitching and his teeth chattering so that he keeps biting his lip.
What should he do? Where should he go? Not back to the cabin. He can’t go there.
A cabin, they’d called it, but it wasn’t that. Or it wasn’t Dean’s idea of what a cabin in the woods might be, anyway. It was huge, made more of glass than wood. When he was hauled out of the trunk of the alphas’ black SUV, Dean had looked up at the place and hoped they wouldn’t want him to clean all that glass. But as it turned out, they hadn’t wanted that. They hadn’t wanted him to cook or clean at all.
Something cries in the darkness, harsh and raw and Dean whimpers, pressing into the scratchy lower branches of the pine tree. It smells like pine at least. He can’t see the tree, but it smells a bit like the Christmas tree he’d put up in the apartment last year, when that grey-haired old alpha had stayed for two weeks.
I’ve no family to go home to, he’d told Dean. And they’ll pay me well to stay at this time of year. A nice fat, consultation fee to add to my pension fund.
And then he’d held out his arms and Dean had had to go to him and sit on his knee and… do all those other things.
A Sandover omega is a willing omega, that’s what they’d been told over and over again during the induction training. Willing to cook, to clean, to entertain, to make the residents as comfortable and welcome as possible for the whole duration of their stay. After all, Sandover didn’t get to be a global mega-corporation by not making visiting clients feel welcome, and if using Dean’s body was what it took to make them feel welcome, well, that was just another part of his job.
Dean was a small, but essential part of the whole, a tiny cog in a huge ticking clock. He imagined it sometimes, that clock, stretching up and up like a skyscraper, its great round face telling the time way up in the clouds.
Anyway, Dean would sit on a hundred old alpha’s knees if only he could be warm and dry and safe. He’d let them do what they wanted. He’d smile and make noises like he was enjoying it. It would be easy, compared to this.
The thing cries again - bird, animal, monster. Dean doesn’t know. A scent tickles his nostrils - no, a stink, strong and rank and telling of blood and claws. Dean cowers against the prickly branches and shivers. He had run from the alphas that would have hurt him, but there were predators out here too.
The rain stops. Dean is still freezing cold but slowly he begins to make out shapes around him, black against darker black, and then some greys and, higher up in the trees, leaves are edged in silver. The clouds have cleared and the moon has come out.
His heart rate picks up and he twitches, his head darting one way and then the other. If he can see, that means he can be seen.
And the great, black bank looming on his left is the drop-off right next to the road.
Can he be seen from the road? What if the alphas come? What if they realise he’d hidden in the back of the caretaker’s pick-up?
Like the thought had summoned them, Dean sees two beams of light swerving and dipping wildly along the narrow mountain road.
They’re coming. They’re coming fast. They want him back.
Dean doesn’t think. He runs.
He crashes into branches and trips over roots. He skids and falls, scrambles up and then falls further, rolling over to smack into a tree trunk, straight away scrabbling at the soft earth until he regains his footing. He runs and climbs and scrambles as fast as he can, away, away, away from the road where the alphas are looking for him.
They’ll kill him if they find him. An omega, running from a pack of alphas, running through the woods like a hunted animal–they won’t hold back. They'll tear him to pieces.
As soon as they catch his scent he'll hear them, baying and snarling like hounds.
Yes, there it is. A cry goes up, eager and terrifying. And Dean swerves, instinct guiding him, toward the foul scent that had carried through the forest, toward the claws and teeth of the wild wood.
Behind him, other cries join the first. Dean skids on something soft and the smell of faeces assaults him. Good. He runs along the furrow of land until the animal's scent is strong all around, until he thinks he'll feel the bite of its teeth or the scratch of its claws. Then he dives off course, scrambling up a steep slope, turning away from the creature's den.
Please let it be enough. Please.
They’d track him that far easily. Would they lose his trail in the stink from the predator's den?
Please. Please.
Dean’s breath comes in tearing gasps, searing his lungs with cold and strain. He climbs, grasping branches and briars either side of him, pulling himself higher and higher, up and up.
The cries are below him now.
At last the ground levels out. He forces himself to a limping run, along a less densely covered ridge. He falls again and, as he hauls himself to his feet, he glances over his shoulder.
Far below, there are headlights shining out from the road, lighting up the forest. There are lights in the trees too, flashlights playing this way and that, searching, searching.
They won’t see him down there. Will they scent him?
The lights flicker. They turn back toward the road. They’re not coming. They've given up. Dean is safe.
His burning lungs convulse in a heaving sob. Safe? He is alone in the wilderness. There is nothing safe about that.
He can never go back. He can’t go anywhere. He is a runaway.
It’s not his fault. It’s not his fault. He didn’t want this.
What can he do? Where can he go?
Nowhere.
He wipes his eyes with the back of one dirty, bloody hand.
If the only place he can go is nowhere, he’d better go there then, hadn’t he?
Dean turns away from the dwindling flashlights.
The moonlight is grey and soft on the slowly rising ridge of land, like it’s showing him the path he should take - the path to lose himself in the wilderness.
One foot in front of another, Dean takes the path.
The lone alpha’s sleep is restless.
From across the stream the old owl cries to his mate, and the little cabin creaks like usual, talking to the alpha of night breezes, telling him he needs to make some more chinking out of moss and mud and fill up a gap here and there. But tonight those sounds aren’t comforting. There’s something off about their familiar voices.
The stream rushes its constant white noise, the bare branches rattle and squeak. These are the only voices he ever hears–the voices of the wilderness, wood and water, feather and fur. He rarely replies. He came here to get away from things like that, from having to talk and to listen, to join in.
But tonight he listens. Lying on his straw mattress, beneath his worn blankets, he listens. He listens to what all the forest voices tell him.
They tell him that something is coming.