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Inho flinched at every soft notification from his phone. His nerves worn so thin that by the time the message from the clinic finally arrived with the test results, he had already exhausted his ability to respond to any sound at all, and the tension dulled into something heavy and sluggish that settled in his chest and refused to lift.
He did not feel pregnant, not in any way he could name, and the test had shown the absence of a second line no matter how long he stared at it, no matter how he angled it toward the light, as if persistence alone might alter what was already decided. What he did feel was tired, a deep, clinging fatigue that pulled him toward sleep at odd hours, and left a steady ache in his lower back that never quite sharpened yet never fully receded. Everything around him grated on his nerves, like small noises, the way objects sat on surfaces, the faintest disruptions to routine. Still, somewhere beneath all that, buried under layers of dull certainty, he understood that this was not it, and even so the small and insistent hope lingered, that treacherous "what if" that refused to be reasoned away.
His eyes caught on the number 26 in the results, and for a moment he could not make sense of it, the figure standing out too clearly against everything else. The air in his lungs felt suddenly excessive, as though he had taken in more than his body could manage, and his head spun lightly, a hollow, unsteady sensation that made the edges of his vision waver. Then he shifted his gaze slightly to the left and saw it, the quiet betrayal of placement, the number sitting not beside hCG but in the row marked progesterone.
hCG at 0.2, a value that corresponded to a non-pregnant omega. The 26 under progesterone indicating that the heat could have been fertile.
His hands continued to tremble, the movement small but persistent, and there were no tears left in his eyes, only a dry, strained pressure that made blinking feel pointless.
He tried to steady his breathing, drawing it in slowly, holding it, letting it out with care, while nearby Gihun set the table for them, the quiet sounds of plates and utensils placed in their usual positions filling the space in a way that felt both familiar and distant.
"What is it?" Gihun asked, a slight frown settling on his face, his voice carrying that edge of concern that came from noticing more than was said, from sensing the disturbance in Inho without needing it spelled out.
"I... It's nothing," Inho managed, forcing a smile that felt thin and ill-fitting, his thumb already pressing the screen dark as he locked the phone, lifting his gaze to meet the alpha's.
Gihun looked at him for a couple of seconds, long enough to make it clear that he saw the inconsistency, that he registered the strain beneath the surface, but he did not press further, at least not now, and for that restraint, for that small, deliberate choice to leave it untouched, Inho felt a quiet, immediate gratitude that settled somewhere low and tight inside him.
On the table sat his favourite chicken with cola, the way Gihun made it, following his own recipe with a care that had long ago become habitual, surrounded by an assortment of small side dishes arranged in uneven little clusters. They ate to the low murmur of some forgettable show playing on the television, something bright and insistent in tone, its forced cheerfulness bleeding into the room without ever settling. The rhythm of their chewing was almost mechanical, detached from any real appetite. The show was clearly meant to be amusing, something that invited commentary, and Inho would usually fill the space with idle remarks, small observations, but today there was neither the inclination nor the patience for that, only enough stubbornness to keep moving his jaw, to swallow, to continue.
The thick and faintly oppressive atmosphere pressed in clinging to the edges of the room. Gihun kept glancing at him, again and again, the looks brief but persistent, as if testing whether the moment had shifted enough to allow words. Each time it seemed like he might say something, his mouth parting slightly, his attention sharpening, and each time he stopped himself at the last second, retreating into silence that felt more deliberate than natural.
"I don’t feel well, I think I’ll go to bed," Inho said, setting his chopsticks down after finishing no more than half of what he would normally eat, the food already sitting too heavily in his stomach.
"O-okay," Gihun answered, a small hesitation catching in his voice as he looked directly at him, holding his gaze a moment longer than usual, as if weighing something, and then finally pushing past whatever had been holding him back. "Youngil, I saw the tests in the trash. Can we talk?"
Oh.
Inho lowered himself back into his seat, the movement slower than necessary, and gave a short nod.
"Maybe we should go to the hospital...?" Gihun drew in a quiet breath through his nose, the motion subtle but unmistakable, clearly trying to catch his scent, to read something from it that words had not provided. There was a nervousness in him that felt misplaced against their age, something awkward and uncertain, as if they were fifteen instead of somewhere near fifty. "The lines were faint..."
"There weren’t any lines, Gihun-ssi," Inho said, sharper than he intended, the edge in his voice cutting through the air before he could soften it, and he immediately followed, quieter, the words coming out with a trace of apology he could not fully suppress. "I’m not pregnant, it’s fine."
"But there were lines. Barely visible," Gihun faltered, his composure slipping as embarrassment crept in, his gaze dropping as if he could not quite hold it steady. Inho tried not to think about the fact that he must have gone through the trash because he hid those used tests well. "Eunji had the same before Gayeong, and I’ve gotten pretty good at reading those tests."
"You have to read those tests right away, after some time the reagent shows up," Inho lifts an eyebrow as he looks at the alpha, holding his gaze with a steadiness that feels almost deliberate, as if the explanation itself needs to be anchored somewhere outside the restless churn under his ribs. "And after sixteen days past heat the lines would have been clear on a test that sensitive."
"Oh." Gihun somehow manages to look both lighter and more deflated at once, the shift flickering across his face in a way that makes it hard to settle on a single reading, relief and disappointment threading through each other without resolving. "Oh."
"Oh-oh," Inho echoes, a faint edge slipping into his voice, the hint of something dry and almost caustic tugging at the corner of his mouth, restrained before it can fully take shape.
"Do you want children?" Gihun asks, tilting his head slightly to the side, his eyes searching Inho’s face with an attentiveness that feels too direct, too patient, as if he intends to wait through whatever silence follows.
Inho wanted children. The thought sits there, simple in wording and heavy in everything it drags along with it, pressing inward in a way that tightens his chest. He is forty-nine years old, his body carrying the quiet, constant reminders of its limits, one kidney doing the work of two, his liver unreliable, his mind worn thin in ways that never quite stabilize. And his partner is a fifty-year-old alpha who smokes like a locomotive, the smell of it clinging to him even when he tries to wash it away, who has taken to drinking more often lately, the sharp trace of alcohol settling more often than not, and whose mental fractures run deeper, less contained, than Inho’s own.
He never fed himself the illusion that everything would be fine after the island was destroyed. The idea had always felt too neat, too clean for what they carried out of that place, yet he had expected something else, that he would manage, that he would endure it and, through that endurance, arrive at something resembling stability. He managed to erase his previous identity, to strip it away piece by piece until there was nothing left that could be easily traced back. He managed not to be exposed thanks to Junho’s intervention, the timely way he had played along when it mattered, and managed to remain beside the one person who had stirred something faintly bright in him, something that had not been entirely rotted out of his already corrupted, exhausted self.
He thought it would be better than this, that things would gradually align into something more liveable, that he would adapt, that the sharp edges would wear down with time. Sometimes it even seemed like they did. That the sourness of alcohol on Gihun’s breath no longer irritated him as much, even though the amount he drank was somewhat small and yet somehow more noticeable, that the rasp in his voice, rough and uneven, soothed him in a way that did not make immediate sense, occasionally betraying that its owner had not read anything more complicated than recipes in years, and that he had already grown accustomed to the slow, lingering weight of the name Youngil.
It had seemed, at first, that their similarity might offer some kind of path toward healing, that the shared fractures would align in a way that made them easier to carry, but Inho, who had forced himself into a role that never quite settled onto him, who kept performing something ill-defined and exhausting simply to remain where he was, could not allow himself to acknowledge that he had endured more, that the weight he carried had a different shape and depth. The admission hovered somewhere close, abrasive and insistent, and he kept it down through habit, through a kind of internal discipline that left him hollowed out. He learned to exhale slowly, to let those barbed, faintly condescending remarks pass through him without lodging, the ones that came sharpest when Gihun had been drinking, when his voice thickened and his control slipped, "Youngil, you think you understand, but you really don’t know what I’ve been through," and then, in the morning, to accept the apologies that followed once sobriety returned, to nod, to smooth over the edges as if nothing had shifted.
He could have left, the option existed in a simple, practical sense, always somewhere within reach, and yet solitude carried its own kind of degradation, something that spread inward and made everything feel worse in ways that were difficult to name. Here, at least, Inho could still locate a purpose, as thin and fragile as it was, in keeping Gihun from collapsing completely now that there was nothing left to anchor him, no goal to lean toward. They had each other, the fact of it steady and unspoken, even though neither of them ever named it, never placed a label that might fix it into something too defined. Gihun did not press him about the wife Inho had said died of illness on Halloween, did not circle back to it or probe for details. Inho, in turn, did not ask about the former wife and his daughter, though sometimes Gihun would offer pieces on his own, fragments that surfaced without prompting and then settled back into silence.
At times, within the small routines of living together, they managed to forget what had happened, or something close enough to forgetting that it felt almost real. There were moments when they opened the curtains and sunlight filled the apartment, and for a while the old awareness of being watched receded, thinned to the point where it no longer pressed against his skin. There were instances in crowded places when Gihun did not falter, did not tense as though expecting something to break, and times when Inho found himself reacting calmly to careless, incidental touches on the street, bodies brushing past without intention, his own body holding steady, almost forgetting that night when he had been surrounded by sleeping alphas, with their dense and suffocating presence, when he had barely fought them off beforehand.
Sometimes it seemed that not everything was lost yet, that something could still fall into place the way it had once existed in the soft, untested constructions of childhood, in those vague and persistent fantasies where a tall alpha looked at you with an almost reverent tenderness, as if you were something untouched, something that had remained intact long enough to deserve love without condition. The image surfaced with an uncomfortable clarity, too clean, too distant from what he knew himself to be, and still Inho felt himself yielding to it in small, involuntary ways, his body responding before thought could intervene, something buried deep inside him murmuring that there was still a life ahead that would be better, easier, shaped by something other than endurance.
Yet more than a year had already passed, and every heat had ended the same way, empty, leaving behind only the dull physical aftermath and the quiet, accumulating sense of failure that settled deeper each time. Inho never tried to get pregnant deliberately, even though he understood perfectly well that at their age the likelihood approached impossibility, a statistical edge so thin it barely held. For some reason it had always felt as though it would happen anyway, as if the outcome existed independently of effort, waiting for the right moment to assert itself.
It did not happen. The first failure had felt obvious, expected in a way that made it easier to absorb. The second time he had already begun taking vitamins, swallowing them with a kind of quiet insistence that bordered on ritual. By the third, he had been certain, a heavy and convincing certainty that had settled low in his body only for the unchanged state of his cervical mucus to contradict it with a blunt, physical clarity that left no room for reinterpretation and negative test after he decided to take one to be sure. After that came the wishes, formed without structure, the occasional prayers that felt foreign even as he shaped them, and the strange, almost embarrassing rituals he found scattered across forums, things he followed through with in private, as if consistency alone could bend probability.
Gihun, for his part, was almost unnervingly ready each time, his body responding without hesitation, without the need for discussion, as though this, at least, required no negotiation between them.
"Just... if you want, we could try things like IVF?" Gihun takes his hand, the contact warm, steady, familiar in a way that settles somewhere under Inho’s skin despite everything. "I have a daughter, and I... we’re not young anymore, and if you want a biological child, we should probably start being more proactive."
"My genetics are a mess, Gihun-ssi," Inho says with a crooked, uneven smile, easing his hand free from the other man’s grasp, the movement small yet cautious, as if even that brief contact had begun to weigh too much. Gihun watches him, and there is something open in the way he does it, something unguarded that carries through even in his scent, a sincerity that settles in the air between them, faint but unmistakable. Beneath it, Inho senses a familiar undertone, a quiet echo of the way Gihun once clung to the island, how he had held onto it as if it could resolve everything, and now that same restless fixation has found a new shape, a different idea taking root in his mind with that same stubborn brightness.
It would be false to say Inho had never thought about it himself.
Still, he does not want IVF. The thought of it sits wrong in his body, heavy in a way that feels intrusive, as if it would require him to hand over something he cannot quite define. If it happens, then it will happen on its own, his body either holding or refusing, carrying or failing, and if it does not, then there is no sense in forcing it, no reason to strain what is already fragile, no justification for dragging another life into existence only to bind it to two people who have barely managed to survive to this point, who have scraped their way forward without any clear understanding of how.
He would not be able to handle a child, and perhaps he no longer even wants one. The realization forms slowly, unevenly, and Gihun looks at him with that same steady attentiveness, then nods, understanding settling over his features in a way that feels both gentle and distant, allowing Inho to take his hand back without resistance.
Maybe he does not need a child. He has already spent too long inside those quiet illusions, assigning names to something that never arrived, running through imagined problems, rehearsing solutions for situations that remained far ahead, deferred into a future that never came closer.
He almost manages to convince himself that he does not want a child.
And then, at night, Gihun wraps himself around him from behind, the warmth of his body pressing close, an arm settling across Inho’s waist with a familiarity that feels both grounding and inescapable, his breath warm against the back of Inho’s neck as he murmurs something soft, indistinct, words that blur together into something barely comprehensible, leaving only their general meaning behind, something tender, something meant only for him. Inho feels himself soften in the alpha’s hold, his body responding in ways he does not fully control, tension loosening, something inside him giving way.
For a moment it feels as though that quiet, fragile sweetness might finally tip into something more, that it is almost within reach, close enough to touch.
And then, after another heat passes, Inho finds himself holding yet another negative test in hands that will not steady, the plastic cold and unyielding against his skin, and the thought comes with a dull, final weight that this time must have been the last.
Yet it all begins again, the cycle returning with a persistence that feels almost cruel, while Gihun strokes his back in slow, calming motions.