Chapter Text
The night it was born it rained harder than Jimin had ever known. Floodgates unleashing torrents of tears to soak Seoul's concrete soul. A sorrowful sky, crying uncomforted, as the omega paced and braced his way through a desolate, solitary labour.
He just wanted it out.
But the closer Jimin groaned to banishing it from his body at last, the tighter it seemed to cling to his insides; Did it sense that those would be their last moments together?
Until - after endless hours of screaming into a pillow, biting down on his own leather belt clenched between throbbing jaws - concerned apartment building neighbours had dialled 119 emergency services, and the omega had been forcibly escorted to the nearest state delivery suite.
Wheeled at speed through clinical corridors on a stretcher trolley, clad in nothing but a crimson-soaked dressing gown, legs trembling incessantly as wet tendrils of faded pink hair clung to flushed cheeks of a similar hue.
"You’ve lost a lot of blood, but we’re going to help you and your baby, omega", stated a female alpha doctor with an authoritative voice beyond her years. Yet she stuttered uncertainly on meeting his croaked reply:
"Just...get it out"
Transferred onto a hospital bed - legs thrust awkwardly back into stirrups - Jimin stared blankly, pointedly, up at the ceiling above as the world moved around him in nauseating, blurred rotation.
"There there, it'll all be over soon", soothed a beta midwife, "I know the forceps look scary, but they'll just help baby on the way since you're getting tired after all your hard work at home. Why ever didn’t your alpha bring you into hospital sooner, you silly things?..."
Tutted disapproval. Never realising between rambled reassurances that it wasn't the metal instruments of childbirth that the omega couldn't look at, but his own bare belly, exposed by the hastily hitched up gown.
It hadn't been so bad in the early months, when a loose-fitting, floaty shirt on a spring day, had been enough to all but forget what lay beneath.
But as the sun's flight soared into summertime, week by week Jimin had grown. Stomach stretching and swelling into something unnameable - until one day, it moved.
And then there was no denying it anymore. The life beginning inside of him...
Wholly uninvited.
He was an omega in an alpha's world. Hips sculpted wider to bear their pups, and bodily curves in all the right places to make sure he would get them there. Biology’s master plan - after some sticky night of slick and knot, that hollow waiting in his middle as nature's greatest architectural design: a womb to call home.
All he had to do was submit. Submit to his own fore written fate.
-But he didn't.
“Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck youuu!”, he had hurled out, howled with his whole being until chest ached. Until his voice was hoarse and his eyes strained bloodshot. Until he was silenced by a heavy blow to the head from the rut-crazed alpha on top of him.
And then he couldn’t move.
Just lay there on the hard stone floor of the wine cellar of the bar he part-timed at. Palms and fingers outspread to feel the grounding coldness below - however unforgiving - and know that he was still alive, somehow.
Survival instinct, not a matter of choice.
It was the distinct moment - scent of cheap prosecco from the smashed bottle beside him momentarily fizzing nostrils before being overwhelmed by relentless droves of dominant, peppery pheromone from above to choke the omega’s shallow breath - that Jimin became…an unnatural, inhospitable environment.
He rejected it.
He rejected everything.
With all of his heart and his torn up soul.
And as the parasite belly had bloomed, its host had withered in cruel causality. Turned in on himself like he was the foetus. Plump cheeks hollowing, eyes sinking, into a slight, shadowy presence who rarely left his apartment unless by the moon.
Seeing fists and feet and elbows kicking and punching out from within, experienced and endured like nothing short of an alien possession. So much so that he would vomit bitter bile every time.
But there and then, at last, were blunt forceps inside of him, twisting and tugging to extract that thing from his core.
Jimin's eyes still fixed on the ceiling, and a lacy-winged white moth that had left behind the beauty of a starlit, stormy sky, to flutter in through a cracked vent, and ram itself repeatedly into the room's fluorescent strip light.
Echoes of a Sunday School choir hymn from one of adolescence’s foster homes tinkling piano keys across his mind with taunting joie de vivre:
All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things wild and wonderful
The Lord God made them all
Even as the moth scorched itself on the artificial allure of the bright bulb's dark magic, and fell to the ground, dead.
Wasn't life pathetic? Really, pathetic.
Silent tears streamed down the omega's face - all the way to the bleached floor in rivets and drips - too exhausted to make a sound, even as final contractions assaulted to tighten his body in agony's vice grip. Back arching violently up from the bed as a head crowned below.
He could hear their voices. The neatly-uniformed maternity unit personnel who thought he had an alpha mate who cherished him. A tangled babble of noise and medical bleeps and business-like bustle.
Whimpering. Squeezing eyes shut. Shaking his head to make it all go away until...
"Push, omega. One last push"
It was a man's voice. Just one. Gentle, soft, yet somehow still clearer than all the rest. As if he spoke only for Jimin to hear.
And the omega was so tired - so, so tired - that he did just as the voice said.
Pulling his knees back to his chest and heaving, with every last aching atom of himself. Bearing down, down, down, until - in a rush of fluids and clenched forceps - he felt it leave his body.
Emptiness. Oh fuck, the emptiness.
Then...dark dulling his senses as Jimin succumbed without struggle to bone-deep exhaustion. His only lingering thought, as he drifted aimlessly away from bitter consciousness...
‘It didn't cry’