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Robert Robertson the II carried the ghost of his dead wife as if she was the trophy of his grief. She was the mantle that weighed on his shoulders. She was the shake in his fingers fumbling around his bolts and his wrenches. Her specter danced in the dark corners of his workshop where the blue glow of his visor couldn’t reach. Her words stood stark against the white pages of her book, hanging heavily between his palms.
Even now, as he sat slumped over his workbench watching his fourteen-year-old omega son bury himself elbow-deep into his suit, Robbie could feel her beside him. She was whispering about their son’s diagnosis as if it was something fascinating.
Feral.
Attachment-adverse, she reminded him again.
He slammed her book shut. The hardcover made a satisfying boom in the quiet room. The omega nearby grew too quiet for a long moment before returning to his tinkering.
Robbie stared at the cover:
“The Omega’s Guide to the Feral World” By Jeannie Kim
The words were etched gold on red. She used her maiden name the same way she did on all her professional work. Always pragmatic. Robbie had never questioned why she never wanted to be associated with him.
He knew if he opened the book again, he'd find on the inside a written letter for little Robert. Her sharp handwriting would barely be legible even to someone who'd spent decades reading it.
Instead of searching for the cure for her own illness, America’s leading super genetics researcher spent the last of her days reading, interviewing, and compiling decades of numbers into a guide for her feral omega son. Robbie wished she'd stayed alive long enough to teach little Robert what was inside it herself.
He wished she'd stayed alive.
“Careful, Bobby.” Robbie groused. He heaved from the bench. Picking his way across the room, the alpha made sure to stay in the omega’s line of sight. He’d gotten into a habit of wearing his keys on his belt after the first incident that nearly scared his son to murder. Robbie hadn’t realized he was a light walker. A side-effect of his profession he supposed.
His son swung around. Robert’s movements were sharper than a normal kid’s. His eyes tracked Robbie across the room, keen and narrow. Unnatural. His nostrils flared before he grinned. His canines were out more often than in. Not normal at all.
Hyper-vigilance, Jeannie whispered. You have to make sure he knows he’s safe.
Robbie cleared his throat before crouching beside his son, angling his head to squint at the front panel. He tried to appear unthreatening while his alpha instincts bared its teeth. “What you got going on here, kid?”
Robert hesitated before pointing with a gangly limb towards the mess jutting from the open latch. Jeannie had put little Robert in every martial arts class they could imagine. To temper his aggression and to teach him mindfulness. His son won tournaments and trophies, yet somehow stayed as wiry as a wild rooster. “The connection between the controls and the thrusters kept stalling in your last fight. I thought maybe it had something to do with the electrical output.”
He was right, of course. Robbie had meant to fix it when he’d had the time. These days it felt like he had no time at all.
The hero forced a smile. “Who taught you that?”
Robert scoffed. “You did, dad.” He faltered, his face screwed up around his mouth. It seemed he finally noticed his canines.
“That I did.” Robbie clapped a big hand over Robert’s shoulder, pretending not to notice his son’s flinch like all the other times before. “You’ll be a great engineer one day.”
“I don't want to be an engineer.” Robert ducked back into the hull. “I’ll make my own suit so we’ll be two Mecha Mans. Mecha Men? Mecha Mecha Man Man?” He giggled to himself. “Twice as dangerous and twice as effective! Nothing will stop us.”
An emotion he couldn’t name lodged in Robbie’s throat. He’d thought he would die in that suit just like his father and the name of “Mecha Man” would die with him. He’d never even considered the fact that Robert would want to be Mecha Man. He didn’t even know he wanted to be a hero.
“Dad?” Robert peered up at him, cautious. The downside of a feral omega child was how easy he could taste the change of his feelings in the air.
Heightened survival instincts, Jeannie sighed.
Covered in grease and sweat, Robert’s stained “Shroud” t-shirt was two sizes too big for him. His jeans were torn at his knees. Jeannie’s freckles were scatter plots graphed across his cheeks. His own eyes stared back at him, full of hope and trust.
Maybe Robbie hadn’t thought of himself as a father, or even a good one. But in that moment he realized Robert had never known the difference.
“You hungry?” Robbie bit out. He heaved himself up from the concrete floor of his cold workshop.
“A little…”
“You need to eat more.” High metabolism. “Come up in ten.”
Robbie didn’t stay to know whether Robert had agreed or not, already jogging up their basement stairway.
The ghost of his wife haunted Robbie’s house too. She smiled at him from their family photos. She was the specter in the skylight of their kitchen and the ghoul lounging at their dining table. She was the poltergeist that left behind the notes on the fridge and her books on the shelves. Her footsteps were muffled behind him on the carpet she’d lovingly installed herself.
Her handprints pressed deep in Robbie’s chest. He couldn’t breathe until he spoke her name three times and even then sometimes it wasn’t enough.
The memory of her found him collapsed outside his workshop door with no way to hold her close. Not even the smell of her had stayed with him. His family’s nest was as sterile as the day they’d moved in. An empty shell. The powerful air filters were the first thing Jeannie had installed after their son’s diagnosis.
His extreme sensitivity to scents will make it difficult for him. We’ll build his immunity when he gets older, but for now-
Robbie slammed his hand against the door and squeezed his eyes shut. He hit the door until it rattled. He pounded at it until he was sure it splintered and it wasn’t going to open the same way again.
She only ever whispered about Robert. She wouldn’t stop talking to him about their damn son, as if he was all that made them. He was all that she’d loved.
He breathed but he got nothing but air. He heaved out the wetness in his lungs. There was a high-pitched whine coming from somewhere. To his own horror he realized it was himself.
Distantly, he could hear the front door open and close. Another omega entered his territory. Vulnerability had him growling deep in his chest even as his logical mind told him that only one other person had the key to his house.
Chase rounded the corner in a rush. That kid never knew how to slow down. His sour aggression had Robbie baring his teeth until they were both squaring-off across Jeannie’s periwinkle hallway.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Chase snapped. His canines were long and sharp. Something about his stance was primitive in a way that had nothing to do with super powers. Robbie knew in a fight he’d win, but he would probably lose a few working limbs in the process.
Robbie swallowed. He tried to beat down the part of him wanting to rip the pride from this omega’s face and pin him to the floor. “What are you doing here?” Robbie tasted iron. He’d cut his tongue on his teeth.
Chase must’ve sensed Robbie’s efforts to make peace, and shut his lips around his snarl. His narrowed eyes flit from Robbie to the door behind him. Robbie could hear Jeannie telling him about how child marks worked with familial bonds.
It’ll fade over time. She smiled. Wistful. Robbie didn’t yearn to know what she meant. But I’ll always know where his heart beats.
“I wanted to see Robert.” Chase shifted. Robbie could faintly smell the oily burgers where the omega had dropped the bag at the home entrance in a rush. “Thought we could have lunch.”
Grunting, Robbie heaved to his feet. He looked down at his hands, calloused and empty. They built rockets and saved lives. His feet looked too bare and not his own, stuck in the white fibers of the carpet. He remembered he was supposed to be making food for his son. That was supposed to be Jeannie’s job.
“You look like shit.” Chase wasn’t going to jump him anymore, though he was clearly anxious.
In the loose nape of Chase’s t-shirt, Robbie saw the mark on his neck where little Robert had chosen Chase and not his own father. Distinctly lighter against Chase’s dark skin, it glistened beneath the weak afternoon light that cast through the sheer curtains. Robbie huffed. “Make yourself at home. I’m … I’ll be back.”
“Robbie-”
He didn’t give Chase a chance to stop him. Lumbering into his bedroom, he slammed Jeannie’s office door close and punched a hole into the bedroom wall right next to his dead wife’s bookshelf. It rattled but held strong.
Here was where she’d left behind her soul. Between the notes of scientific journals and diaries full of thoughts and lists of numbers that spoke to her the truths of the universe, Robbie reached for her. Whatever she could give him, he would take. If he closed his eyes tight enough she might whisper to him the meaning of super powers and genetic mutations. She’d crack open the truth of human experimentations versus unregulated government biological warfare on their own people.
Attachment-adverse omegas are a lot more common than we realize-
Robbie fell to his knees, burying his head in his hands. “What am I supposed to do, Jeannie?”
He’ll be fine, Robbie. We’ll figure it out.
“No…” He groaned. He knew he was crying again. Somewhere in his house was a kid he was not prepared to raise and all Jeannie had left behind was her voice in his head and a New York Times Best Seller.
He’s strong like you, alpha. If anyone can learn to live a fulfilling life, it’ll be our son. We can give that to him. Help me give that to him, please?
Robbie’s ghost was heavy. She weighed on his shoulders. She buckled his knees. Jeannie kept him there, huddled in the room that held his wife until time moved too fast and too slow for him to wonder if he’d been the ghost all along…
+++
Robert knew the smell of sorrow. His father carried it constantly and left the fingerprints of it in every room to linger. Grief was holding love too close and then letting it slice you apart from the inside. It was the scent of someone long passed sneaking up on the living from every corner. It was the soft shuffle of memories breathing loudly in your ear when you were alone.
While his father pounded on the basement door, Robert’s heart raced. He scuttled into the depths of his father’s suit, letting the smell of him there settle his panic the best it could. Behind the controls of the machine that gave him power, his father was calm and assured. Robert closed his eyes and breathed the way his mother had taught him.
Your immune system will weaken over time from the prolonged exposure to your fight-or-flight response. Do as I do.
He imagined his mother’s study and the soft music she played from her radio. She stayed in that room so often, her books were imprinted with her memory. She smelled like new paper and fresh ink.
Robert pretended to let her settle over his skin, feeling the pounding of his heart lessen with her soft voice in his ear. He didn’t know how long he was curled up in the suit and didn't try to move until he sensed another presence.
This person was someone that loved him. Robert gazed through the shelves of the workshop full of tools and spare parts. The lit corners comforted him a bit. The steps coming down the stairs were sharp and sure.
“Hey, Robert! You hungry?”
Robert registered Chase’s smell before his voice. The effect was instant. “What’d you bring?” He smirked, peeking from the open cockpit.
His brother grinned back. He had both his hands out of his pockets, doing deliberate motions towards the stairway. “Come on up and find out!”
Robert practically skipped to Chase’s side. “Dad said he was going to make something.” Robert pretended not to know his father hadn’t made him a meal since his mom died.
“I beat him to it.” Chase winked, letting Robert cling to his side. “You telling me you don’t want Smoke’s Burgers?”
Robert shoved, laughing. He felt weightless. Life felt easier with Chase around. They reached the top of the basement. Robert ignored the indent in the door and the odd bend in the hinges.
His mom loved letting the sun into their home. Robert felt her with him in the warm light that cast itself along her pastel walls. Rainbows shattered through her stained glass windows onto soft woolen carpets. In the kitchen she'd built were his favorite burgers. Beside him was his brother, content and steady.
His father was somewhere else in the house. He was a twisted ball of pain that was becoming too familiar. But this too, was a part of Robert’s home.
He looked at Chase who was already watching him, one eyebrow raised.
His brother punched him lightly in his shoulder. It ached. “You good, kid?”
“Yeah.” Robert punched him back. It felt like hitting a brick wall. They both laughed. “I’m good.”