Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Despite all the seats still empty and how they usually stayed glued to Vytia’s side whenever they could, Dmitri decided to steer the omega right by where everyone knew Osip sat. He stood there, reassuring as he set his hands on Slick’s shoulder. He looked like he always did—a paragon of elegance and strength, his face firm, his eyes warm, and when Osip finished making the table and sat, Dmitri gave Slick one little squeeze. Osip watched the gesture. He thought oh, well.

“Slick here,” Dmitri told him, “is going to be on kitchen duty from now on. Just some help with the dirty dishes during the afternoon rush. You can show them around, I trust.”

The omega was a terrible sight to behold.

The too-small belly that was sure to mean a too-small baby. The scarred, ruined hands; scarred, skinny pulses; scarred, thin arms. The protruding bones. Sunken eyes. When they’d first come, their face had been black and blue, and Hennish had spent a good time in the kitchen late that night, holding onto a warm teacup and trembling next to Osip, shocked to the core by the wounds he’d had to treat. Too-old scars. Still-open welts. Cuts and bruises. Remnants of more rapes than their good doctor could even count. You looked at them, and there was no forgetting what had been done to them.

Osip tried to catch their eyes, but they didn’t stop staring at the table, their shoulders slumped. They dug their teeth into their bitten-raw lips, dotted red where they almost broke skin.

He looked at Dmitri. Dmitri shook his head, wordless, and Osip only said, feeling some dull pang in his chest, “Of course, sir.”

-

He’d never met anyone as hard-working or as slow as Slick.

Dmitri had warned all of them privately about being mindful of the omega’s left ear, which Dmitri was sure they couldn’t hear anything from. Likely, it was true. Vytia had tried calling them from far away while they worked outside and reported that they didn’t even budge, not until he walked a bit closer, and then they’d reacted with a slight tilt of their head, as if they weren’t sure they’d heard something and didn’t want to give it away. As it was, if they stayed by their left side talking, they turned their head completely, watching intently as if they needed their eyes to parse out the words being said. All fine enough. It wasn’t the half-deafness that worried Osip. It was that damn slowness.

“Too many kicks to the head,” Hennish told him in a whisper, giving his temple a little tap with his finger. “Kicks, Osip. Not even hits. I almost can’t believe how their brain still works at all, from what they told me.”

Every time they finished washing one of the dishes, they just stood there for a beat, the water dripping down their wrist, splashing into their sleeves, before they seemed to remember how and where to put it down. When their name was called, they didn’t turn, not until it was called a couple of times more, and when something was handed to them, they didn’t react at first. They stretched their remaining fingers, a look of slight panic in their eyes, before finally taking it, startled by the understanding that was what they should do. Vytia said they still got lost in the house. They still forgot their tasks all the time, if they weren’t gently reminded, and still tried getting out of their room naked every morning, no matter how many times Dmitri told them they should dress themself.

Osip felt so old around those people. Five decades were nothing, in the grand scheme of things, but he worked for a twenty-three-year-old college student who acted as if he was the oldest alpha to have ever lived and a barely twenty-eight omega who had indeed survived more than any alpha alive and came out of it with old, sharp eyes. Not to talk about Slick. Not to think about how young that little one was. It was enough to drive an old man mad. 

Watching Slick broke his heart, every day, no matter what. They were barely grown and yet, the torture had started so long ago. They’d been just a kid, just a pup, and some beta had cracked their head so terribly they were half-lost all the time, and would continue to be for all their life. He couldn’t bear to think about how many times they’d been punished for being slow by the same master that had made them so.

And yet, they worked.

Osip had been a brute of a boy. A cheat, like most of the betas Lord Pyotr picked from local jails or bought from the hands of paid-for guards, and a criminal, like all of the others were in one way or the other. At fifteen, he’d lost his job as a kitchen boy at a wealthy merchant’s house because three bottles of wine had disappeared. They’d never discovered who had stolen it, which was why no one had been jailed, but all the servants had been flogged to see if someone would speak, and when no one did, a lot of cuts had been made, he included. It had been his first and last honest work, before the Fradkov. He’d been a thief and a smuggler for all the years after, and he’d done well for himself in underground markets and dangerous dealings. He had thought of himself as hard-working at the time. A dubiously moral person, but diligent, willing, tireless. 

Nineteen-year-old him wouldn’t have thought so, if he knew Slick.

The first time a panicked Vytia took Slick to the kitchen in the middle of the day, Osip didn’t quite understand what he was seeing, even as Vytia showed him their palms, bloody and torn up. Slick, too, didn’t seem to understand the problem, although they shook in fear of punishment.

Hennish was the one to patch them up, but Osip stayed all the same. They worked as a team, as they often did—Osip convinced Slick to sit, all the while promising them Dmitri wouldn’t be mad that they were resting in the middle of the day, and Hennish kneeled in front of them to quietly spread a soothing cream on their hands.

“You have a lot of healing to still do, kid,” Osip told them, going to the oven to heat some soup, looking over his shoulder. Slick ducked their head. “You got a lot of old scars in those little hands of yours. A bunch of cuts that didn’t even got to be scars yet, besides the blisters. You have to be mindful when working with them. It doesn’t matter how diligently you scrub the floors or do the laundry, if you’re just going to smear blood on it after.”

Hennish had the gentlest hands Osip had ever known to exist. They were slow, rubbing the cream both in between Slick’s fingers and on the stumps of those that were missing. Slick couldn’t make themselves any smaller, nor pull their shoulders forward any further. Osip watched a shiver run down their back.

“Do you remember,” Hennish said, voice low, lips pulling, “when you dropped a pan of hot oil on your leg?”, and he looked up to Osip.

“Lord Fradkov scared me,” he agreed. “That was what, seven years ago?”

“Nine,” corrected Hennish. “The Lord had just had his fourteenth birthday.” His eyes flashed with just the tiniest hint of amusement. “You were still afraid of him at the time.”

“I’m still afraid today,” said Osip, only half of a joke.

“You were more afraid, then.”

“He used to appear everywhere,” he remembered, an honest surge of fondness in his voice. “Like some haunting. Like some cat. Like the ghost of some black cat.” Hennish snorted. “You’d just turn and bah, there he was. Completely silent, completely still, just watching. Would make you shit your pants and then look at you like you were dumb for being surprised when he was obviously just waiting for you to turn so he could say something. I would’ve burned myself less badly if I had stepped into a fireplace, that time.”

The corner of Hennish’s lips tugged up.

“That is some exaggeration,” he said, “but it was bad, yes. He gave you a week to heal, if I remember correctly.”

“Two,” Osip said, knowing for sure that Hennish already knew that. “Damn good weeks, those were.” He tilted his head towards Slick, just a bit, even though the omega still wasn’t looking at anyone. “Got to lie in bed and be served like a pampered alpha by the good doctor himself, Slick.” 

Hard to tell how much they were hearing of the conversation. No one knew how bad their hearing truly was, nor how much of the problem was because of their brain and not their ears at all, in which case they might be hearing most of it and just not understanding a word. They twitched a bit at their name, so at least some of it was finding them.

“I cared for you as I would any patient. I didn’t serve you like an alpha.”

“Don’t know, I felt served plenty.” Osip grinned. It was an insincere gesture, when he still felt nauseous at the sight of Slick‘s hands. “It made me understand just how alphas get their egos.” 

That was the kind of thing they always joked about downstairs, where every one of them had once been marked for death, all for committing even the silliest of slights against a better. Osip had forgotten himself. At the comment, which had clearly been too much for Slick, they startled, and then flinched violently at having messed with Hennish's work, bracing for a hit.

Hennish softened.

“I will wrap you up now, alright?” he told them softly, as he reached for his purse to do so. Slick twitched, an almost nod. Hennish unwrapped the linen. “You know,” he cut a good bit of it, “if I talked to Dmitri, he would give you a couple of weeks too.”

Every muscle of Slick’s body startled to attention. “No,” came out of them, simple, desperate. “No, sir, please—”

“It would be alright,” Osip promised. Slick turned their head to him.

“This hole can’t,” they said. “Please, it—it can’t.”

They looked ready to burst into tears, breath hitching.

“Alright,” said Hennish. “But you need to take more pauses, you hear me? Your body is not as healed as I would like it to be, yet. Those piercings had given you a nasty infection on top of everything else, omega. You weren’t in a place to fight it off, and I don’t think you are even now.” He finished wrapping their left hand, before quietly going to the right one. Told them, firm, “I want you resting in between tasks and stopping before you tear any old scar. It’s not an alpha’s order, but it is a doctor’s.”

“And I,” said Osip, dumping the heated soup into a bowl for them and bringing it to their side, “want you to put on some weight, laddie. Malnutrition doesn’t help fighting off illnesses either.”

Even after that conversation, if it was up to Slick, Osip still thought the omega would only stop working if the blood was coming from between their legs and meant their baby was in danger. Anything else, they’d take it silently and resume. Bloody hands. Bloody knees. Aching muscles. They were too used to all of it to see it as a warning to stop.

They worked around it. Dmitri gave Vytia half an hour of resting between each of his tasks and Vytia forced Slick to take them with him. He probably thought he was very casual and subtle about it, but knowing the kid, forced would be the best word for it. Every late afternoon, Dmitri had them keep an eye on Pavel while he practiced his letters or his drawings in his room, which was more of a way of getting Slick to sit after a long day than a real job. When Dmitri felt like drinking tea on his balcony, he asked Slick to come with him, to get them to rest and get some sun.

Osip had an extra filling of some thin bone broth set aside for them every supper, just in case it would be one of those days when they couldn’t stomach anything more solid. And Hennish, although he still left every meeting shaken and all the more traumatized, checked their scars every three days to see how they were healing. It was the best they could do.

By the third time Vytia brought Slick into the kitchen bleeding, Osip had come to expect it. Last, they had knelt over glass to clean a fallen vase, and after, sat still as a doll as Hennish carefully plucked the shards out of their knees and palms. With them, Hennish didn’t even need to use those soft, soothing bedside manners of his—trying just made them all the colder. That next time, it was a simple nosebleed. Osip convinced them to sit, which was easy, and then convinced Vytia that he didn’t need to call Hennish, which wasn’t as much.

“My sister suffered the same during her second pregnancy,” he assured, handing Slick one of the kitchen’s dishcloths. “So did my brother’s wife during her first. They told me it’s perfectly normal, kid.” Vytia continued staring at the dried blood on Slick’s chin as they tilted their head back, looking pale and faint. Osip sighed. “What were you two doing, huh?”

“The laundry, but—”

“No buts,” he cut. “Slick can stay here helping me make the boss his afternoon tea. Go back to your task, kid.” He didn’t want to. With his eyes still in the omega, he stood on his ground, which would’ve been heartwarming if his obvious anxiety didn’t just make Slick all the more anxious themself. “Let me guess, some of the blood splattered onto the clothes you were washing, no? You better take care of it before it dries.” A low blow, which only made Slick shake, but it was true. Once Vytia had darted off, Osip turned to Slick. “Did it stop?” They nodded, silent, as they took the soiled cloth away. “Good. I wasn’t lying about my sister. It’s probably a good sign if your body is doing the same things as hers did. She had a huge, healthy baby.”

It was the right thing to say. Osip was suddenly hit by the fact that he had never said the right thing to Slick, not going by the look on their face right then, and how he’d never been on the receiving end of such a soft, hopeful expression. He took the cloth from them and wet it slightly, watching over them as they cleaned their face and their hands. They asked, looking up, “What should this hole help you with, Sir?”

Osip paused. He would’ve been fine just leaving them sitting for some time, but he knew they wouldn’t take that well.

“Mikhail,” he called instead, turning. There were odd sounds from inside the pantry—some banging, some cursing—before the young man stuck his head out, his cheeks slightly pink and his hair so muffled that Osip had the slight suspicion he might have been napping instead of organizing again. He narrowed his eyes. Mikhail’s awkward grin was enough of an answer. Osip simply sighed. There was some apprehension in the other man, because he knew Osip hated slackers, but not enough apprehension, because he knew Osip wasn’t going to scream like he usually did around Slick. He frowned. “Take the day to rest, will you? But be back for supper.”

“Don’t need to tell me twice, boss,” he said, scratching the back of his neck. As he passed the omega, he whispered, “Hi, Slick.”

They lowered their head, but their eyes followed the man as he got out. 

Dmitri’s afternoon tea was a small little affair, only the boss and his kid and sometimes Sasha, if Sasha wasn’t too busy that day. As it was, the beta had matters to attend to in town and, so, it was just a matter of brewing some tea and making something sweet for Pavel: Osip liked taking care of it himself and, at most, had Mikhail help while the rest of the household made themselves more useful somewhere else. Alone with him, Slick stared at their hands.

He touched their shoulder, and they looked at him.

“Will you use this hole, beta?” Their voice was so small and shaky. It didn’t matter what they tried to tell him: they just didn’t sound like they wanted it. They sounded like being told yes would break them.

Osip brushed their hair away, giving them a sad smile.

“Don’t think I will, laddie.” 

Slick fiddled with their sleeves. Their shirt was too big, but all their clothes were slightly too big, when they were too thin for anything to fit correctly, and even the suggestion of being fitted made them have a panicked fit. It tugged at Osip’s heart. He tilted his head to catch their eyes. 

“Do you want to learn how to make a pie?”

It didn’t matter if they wanted. They nodded anyway, as Osip had to admit he knew they would no matter what.

“The Lord doesn’t have a favorite food he looks forward to,” he told the omega as they watched him, scooping the flour onto one of his bigger wooden bowls without needing to weigh it or even properly count the scoops. By then, he knew when it was right just by looking. “Can you hand me the sugar, kid? Just so. The Lord—see, a cup too, please. There. Here’s the thing. The Lord was never refused food. ‘Course not. He doesn’t know real starvation, when you got no choice ‘cause there’s nothing even a little edible around. Me and my sister, ha.” He huffed, cutting the cold butter and dumping it into their mix. “We starved when we were young. During those shitty times where war and winter got together to fuck everyone, you know.” And how old he felt, talking about the war like those old men who screamed from the corners of streets. “Made soup with flour and nothing else, and then boiled leather straps to make broth when even the flour became a luxury. Hennish knows that trick, too. But that little alpha of ours, oh, he has a specific set of meals he eats, all simple and bland, and that’s just when Dmitri calls him. Leave him to it, and he forgets even to stop to have his meals. Never had to fear he would be left starving if he wasn’t fast enough. Uhm. Come here. Try rubbing the butter into the flour for me. Use both hands. All—all the fingers you still got, I s’ppose.”

He got the egg and the milk while Slick did that. They did their best, but they were far too cautious, their hands clumsy, filled with apprehension as if they feared even the flour. Osip finished it for him, rubbing all the ingredients together and kneading the dough until it looked right, and he tried not to preen as Slick stared at what his hands were doing as if it was the most unbelievable magic. He let it rest to the side as they cut the apples.

They couldn’t hold the knife right. Osip stared at their fingers for a beat too long, unsure himself of how he could teach them with their hand being so.

“Why don’t you try sitting down first?” he suggested, grimacing. “Grab the chair, come on. I think it would make you steadier.” They pulled a chair. Osip did it too, after grabbing a cutting board. He sat right by their side, his hands carefully touching theirs as he went through the motions of cutting the apple. Their hand was smaller and, somehow, rougher, and he felt them following his movements. They did it two times, before he felt confident to let them do it alone, and then, he still watched them.

They cut twice as slow as Osip, if not more. They stared at the apple as if it was a very complicated, life-or-death problem they needed to solve, their eyebrows furrowed and face all scrunched up, and it made Osip want to laugh, a little. It made him think of his nephew, so many decades before.

Their shoulders curled. When they spoke, it was in a small voice.

“An alpha should never know hunger, sir.”

Osip snorted. “Gods, no,” he agreed. “It would just end up turning back on us. The Lord—our Lord, he likes apples. Apples and cinnamon. I think it’s just because it’s Dmitri’s favorite, but that’s something. This is his favorite recipe. Dmitri’s, I mean. The only one the Lord ever asked me to make directly. I try to make it once a week these days. Even when he isn’t, it has become a bit of a tradition by now, and I know Pavel expects it.”

Slick looked up. Bravely, they got their eyes all the way to his beard, despite not daring to look at Osip’s eyes directly.

“Cinnamon?”

“Your old house didn’t have that, I imagine.” He gesticulated with the knife a bit. “It’s the only truly expensive luxury Pyotr never lets us go short of.”

“Because it’s Mister Dmitri's favorite?”

“Just that.”

It was silly. Osip was their head cook and had free access to both the pantry and their weekly budget for it, and he was sure what they spent in mere seven days of spices was more than what Pyotr had paid for all of poor, ugly little Slick. He wouldn’t ever complain about the chance of cooking and tasting so much, but it was still a bit of a shock every time he caught up with the numbers. Pyotr had bought saffron just so Dmitri could taste it, after he had tried it in a meeting with the Prime Minister. That one even Sasha hadn’t believed when they received the order.

In the end, they had six apples cut into even, equal slices, and two sliced into awkward, uneven pieces, but it was all well enough. Slick tried out rolling the dough and did fine, even if their attempt at braiding it over the apple filling was disastrously amusing to watch. Osip let them try, and fixed what they didn’t do right, and by the end, they had a pretty, sweet-smelling pie for Dmitri and Pavel, big enough that there would be a couple of slices for the betas, too. There always was.

Slick still seemed unsure when Osip told them they should taste it before letting the boss eat it, but they didn’t argue. Of course.

They sat awkwardly. They brought the fork to their mouth and closed their remaining teeth around it with such care that it looked ridiculous without the proper context, the boy making the oddest little image as they had to work around the ones that were missing and the ones that were still tender, still aching sometimes. They ate their piece of pie, and drank their cup of tea, and told him, voice small when prompted, “It was perfect, sir.”

“Those hands of yours helped make it,” he told them and was rewarded with a stunned look.

Osip smiled down at them as he went to get some sugar and milk for their tea.

-

Osip’s family was his biggest shame. 

It was like that for a lot of them. Sure, he’d killed people. It was part of the job when the job was illegal, and being ratted out to an alpha would mean a fate much worse than death. He got rid of the rats. He got rid of the liabilities, and the unlucky ones who got in the way, and there were always some innocent ones caught in the crossfire here and there. He wasn’t proud of it anymore, but he had learned to live with the blood, the same way he had learned to live with the memory of having his eye gorged out. His family was a different kind of beast: it was the first pack he’d got, and the one he’d so betrayed.

His sister had kept a roof over his head for years, and when her husband had finally gotten fed up and kicked him to the curb, he had been furious at her for letting him—but truth was, Alesya had four young kids to take care of, and keeping her criminal of a little brother around them wasn’t a fair thing to ask of her. He’d put them in danger and he’d done it knowingly. He’d come to her home with bloody hands and used them to ruffle her kid’s hair, and wondered furiously why he wasn’t welcomed.

When he’d been kicked out, he’d stolen a good deal of shit from the house, just because of his anger, and that had been perhaps the one thing to make her not even think twice about looking for him again. He’d stolen his nephew’s baby blanket, for heaven's sake! That wasn’t worth anything. He’d only done that to hurt her, even if those days he kept it to remember them. He’d been the worst kind of scum possible. 

It wasn’t like Slick looked like his sister or anything. The differences were just what struck him when he looked at them: their belly was so much smaller than hers when she’d been at that point in her pregnancy. They were just the age she was when she got married, after that bum of hers got a child in her, and they sure wouldn’t ever expect to be respected like that. To be married and taken care of by the one who fucked them, that wouldn’t happen to them. It couldn’t even happen, legally speaking.

They made him think of the kids, too. They were older than Sick, those days, and no one would have ever hurt them as much as Slick had been hurt—the bum would’ve killed anyone who tried, and so would’ve his sister.

He wondered what they looked like, now. Little Anya’s hair had been growing in that same dull, not-quite-blonde, not-quite-brown as Slick. When she was out working, did she like braiding it to keep it away from her face the way they did, or did she put it up some other way? Ruslan had a gap in between his front teeth, an enormous source of fondness to Osip, just like Slick. Did he still have it? Or had it closed after his milk teeth fell? He was no little boy, after all. She was no little girl. They had all grown, far away from his eyes and his crimes and his bad influence.

Hennish told him, once, that if he was so plagued by it, he should just go after them. Dmitri would give him the time he needed if it were to find his family.

But he couldn’t, and he wouldn’t, not ever.

He would like to remember his sister as a kind, caring woman who had done her best to raise him. He would like to remember her as firm, and strong, but fair, loving him even when she had to make him leave for the good of her own children. He would remember his brother as a more distant man, a lot older, living far away with his family, but still visiting when he could, still protecting them when they needed it. He would remember his nieces and nephews as so little they couldn’t be left alone for even a second without making some terrible mischief, with toothy grins and chubby, freckled cheeks.

He knew. If he went to see them, at least one of them would have an omega in their house.

He wouldn’t be able to hold onto any of his love for them if he saw that. It didn’t matter everything his sister had done for him, or how her children had stolen a piece of his heart the moment he had first held them—he looked at Slick and he knew, if he ever had to face the fact they had hurt someone like them, that it would all be dead to him.

-

That house was filled with a rowdy bunch, by Lord Pyotr’s design. The kind of people who had no hope of ever making it anywhere else, and in that hopelessness, would follow an omega like Dmitri, who gave them choices and respect, and a place to belong. Most were far younger than Osip: young, lively former-criminals who spoke in loud, almost screams in the kitchen in the mornings when he just wished to have some quiet to wake up properly; and played cards at the kitchen table during their breaks, cackling and play-fighting, betting with abandon; and drank tremendously during the proper banquets Dmitri sometimes organized just for them to have some fun. 

Osip participated in some of the betting, and Hennish was at his loudest during the morning, but as a rule, they were usually the quietest—him, too grumpy for a lot of their games unless a particular kind of mood struck him, and Hennish too big in keeping to his books and his peace for all that.

When they drank, they did so together. It was in the kitchen after the others slept, when Hennish slipped his little flask of whiskey from his coat pocket, and they sat at the table, sipping as they watched the flames cackling by the fireplace. They never got properly drunk anyway. Just faintly tipsy and all warm.

“You old lecher,” Hennish said, fiddling with those ridiculous glasses of his, as Osip finished some old story from his youth. He cackled, too loud in the quiet, and couldn’t ignore the way Hennish’s eyes softened around the corners.

“I will tell you—”

He heard the soft patter of socked feet and the creak of the kitchen door. At such a time, it ought to be one of the betas trying to sneak a midnight snack, and he leaned away from Hennish just as Slick hovered close to the entrance, shocked still.

Hennish got up immediately. “Oh, kid,” he said mournfully, at the freshly open scabs in their arm.

“This hole is sorry,” they whispered, trembling. “It scratched itself while sleeping.”

“It’s alright.” Hennish sat them down in his chair carefully. “I will get my things. Wait here.”

Get his things and hide the whiskey, truly. Hennish dabbed some vinegar on the open cuts, to which Slick didn’t even flinch. The doctor looked up, an odd look on his face.

“You were very brave,” he whispered.

“A hole only endures,” replied Slick, staring at the wall. “No more, no less.”

“Nonsense,” scoffed Osip. “You’re a brave little omega, laddie.”

The chair scratched against the floor as he got up. Osip got close to the pantry, already thinking of something he could whip up quickly. Slick’s eyes followed the movement of his feet.

“Might this omega help, Sir?”

Osip paused, for one second, finding Hennish’s shocked face with much the same expression before agreeing, his own voice faint in his surprise. He knew that, when with Vytia or Pavel, Slick called themself an omega. They hadn’t done it to anyone else yet, as far as he knew.

It was late, so he didn’t make anything that would need much cooking. He let them cut some toast, the bread uneven, thick at the top and far thinner at the bottom, and asked them to hold it by the fire until it was toasted, which they did, as Hennish helped them not to burn it by keeping an eye on it. As they did so, he sliced some of the roasted meat they had for supper. When presented with a simple sandwich, Slick didn’t move.

They closed their eyes, shaking their head.

“This hole helped make it,” they whispered, as if a mantra, or a prayer, or even a plea.

“You did,” agreed Osip, knowing commenting on them calling themself a hole wasn’t the right fight to pick at that point, even if it disappointed him, after hearing them call themself omega.

“This hole isn’t very skilled.”

“No,” laughed Osip, petting the top of their head. “But you’re some damn fine help to have around, kid. Three hands are still better than two.”

They stared at his hand, their eyes watery. “Does sir truly think so?”

“I think it’s a simple enough truth to understand.” 

He wondered if they’d had some kind of nightmare, and if that was why they had scratched their arms all over, why they had taken a chance getting out of their room. They usually didn’t without someone giving them verbal permission. They looked hunted for sure. Exhausted, there in that hauntedly gaunt face of theirs, and whatever slew they’d had before, it hadn’t been the good kind.

“Eat,” Hennish asked them. “You need all of it, and then you can try going to bed again, huh?”

And so, they obeyed.

When they were gone—when Hennish had tucked Osip into his little room by the family wing, because Pyotr was a damn crazy bastard who liked for their doctor to sleep at the very most three rooms away from Pavel, Hennish took off his glasses, his hands shaking as he cleaned them. Osip sat by the bed, leaning on his knees as he watched.

“One of the last times I was in town,” Hennish whispered, “I stumbled into an omega.”

“Hennish—”

He closed his eyes. “He was so hurt, Osip. Just like Slick. I know I am expected to ignore these kinds of things, because none of us can stop all of this, and we would go mad if we tried, but—but I just kept thinking about them. About what would have happened to them if Pyotr had decided to ignore it.”

He turned to Osip. Osip leaned back. It swept through him, a powerful rush of fondness and pain that left him breathless.

“So?”

“I escorted him to my father’s house. He needed a carer anyway.”

Hennish’s father was an old asshole who had grown too old to even be an asshole anymore. The doctor had all kinds of wild stories about his childhood, but he told Osip that now he was frail and half-lost in his own mind, memories all scrambled, he was so soft and gentle it scared him sometimes. Hennish took all of his free days to visit the man, who, in fact, needed help around his house. A lot of it.

Osip frowned. “So you took some poor omega to help him?”

“He could hardly walk,” Hennish admitted. “The omega, I mean. He doesn’t have one of his arms, and his leg was broken and never healed properly, so he can’t put his weight on it. But I have visited them. He has been keeping an eye on my father, so he doesn’t just walk out one day and accidentally drown himself, and I think my father is so not there that he hasn’t noticed he’s an omega. I think he thinks he’s me, in all honesty. Every time I go there, he’s cooking him a bunch of food, only he mostly just walks away in the middle of it and almost burns the house down, so the omega saves him there, too.”

“And this omega’s master?”

Hennish’s face darkened, which meant there was a master. “He wouldn’t look for him with my father.”

He thought of the blood dripping in Slick’s hands, their chin, their arms. He thought of their delicate, breakable wrists, their banged-up brain that didn’t work right anymore. He thought Hennish was thinking about those things, too, and a dozen even worse images, when he was the one who had to examine Slick’s naked body. Osip was glad he was already sitting. By the way Hennish leaned against the wall, struggling to put his glasses back on, he too would be steadier if he just sat down.

He breathed out, “Fuck, Hennish.”

Hennish pinched the bridge of his nose. He took a chair by the lone table, swung it closer, and heavily sat, as he said, “You didn’t see them.”

“I can imagine. But you were never the reckless one out of us.”

“You forget I was also arrested once.”

“For illegally practicing medicine.”

“For illegally helping people,” he acquiesced, looking at Osip keenly, “which is just what I did in this situation now.”

Another omega. Osip sucked air through his teeth, flickering his one good eye up. “What’s his name?”

“Cum Rag.”

He snorted.

“Great.”

“My father has been calling him Gosha.” His father’s name was Georgy. That he had randomly taken to calling the omega a nickname of his own was perhaps a sign that his mind was even more scrambled than Hennish had admitted to. Hennish frowned. “That does sound bad, I know.”

“That man is centenary and insane.”

“But he doesn’t hurt the omega.”

“He could one day succeed in putting the house on fire.”

“Perhaps,” Hennish laughed, rubbing a hand through his face. “But—but Slick, Osip.”

Slick. Osip understood, of course: with Dmitri, you just forgot he was an omega. He had suffered terribly, yes, and perhaps Sasha was privy to the scars that suffering had left him with. No one else was. He came down, elegant and strong, a born leader keeping that house in order, and sometimes Osip started talking to him as if he were their alpha without even noticing, a "yes, master" slipping from his lips naturally. 

There was no forgetting with Slick. You looked at them, and there was no ignoring what had been done to them, and that it had all happened because they had been born as an omega. You saw how hard-working they were. You caught those little hints of hope when they thought of raising their kid, those glimpses of how good they were with Vytia and how great of a parent they would be, that willingness to help around and do their work and learn all they could. There was no unbelievable strength like Dmitri's. No unbelievable brilliance. They had been hurt and abused and broken, and were plainly normal under all that, and every time Osip thought about them, he thought about how all omegas must be like that. Hurt, and mediocre, and deserving of more. They were just the one Pyotr had been able to save. There were hundreds more, still.

“I know,” he said at last.

“I couldn’t keep turning a blind eye. What kind of a doctor am I, that I have always just done so?”

What kind of doctor? One that wanted desperately to survive, simply.

-

Slick didn’t like speaking first. They didn’t like speaking, generally, so as they stood washing the dishes, sleeves wet and soapy, and asked hesitantly, “Sir knew Master at fourteen?”, Osip paused, surprised. They slumped, hiding their face.

“That I did,” said Osip. Slick worried at their lip, downturned, until it hit Osip. “You want to know what he was like?”

A flinch, which was just as loud as a yes.

Oh. What a question. When Osip had gotten there, that household was nothing more than the alpha, his omega, his omega’s beta, and a doctor who hadn’t been there himself for even a whole month. Pyotr had been thirteen, then, and the strangest kid Osip had ever met. A changeling, his sister would’ve called, with those odd clear eyes and a face that never seemed to emote the way normal people did.

Osip missed him. That was a secret he knew that, if it got out, would make Pyotr never look him in the eyes again.

He missed the flapping of his hands before he learned to keep them so still and the incessant questions in Sasha’s ears before he started to want to learn everything alone. He missed that unnerving, unblinking eye contact from before Pyotr learned to school his features into a coldness that completely masked his awkwardness. Just because he had been so different, so clearly other, it didn’t mean he hadn’t been the cutest little freak Osip had ever met. 

He’d never forget the way that kid used to look at Dmitri. 

He was a good guy, that omega. One of the best. But at the beginning, Osip had decided to give him a chance despite what he was just because he needed to understand how great he really was, that he’d gotten an alpha to look at him like that. 

It came out, unbidden in its honesty, “He was the most adorable terror.”

“Uhm.”

“Don’t want to ask anything else?”

Slick shook their head, biting their cheek. “Thank you, sir.”

Osip laughed.

“You are a gift, you know?” He also shook his head, as if trying to disperse his humor. “And even if you won’t ask, I will tell you. That alpha has always been this way. His way. He has never hurt any of this house’s workers, and he certainly never hurt Dmitri or Pavel.”

“Master says—” They shifted with one of Osip’s bigger pots, eyes flickering down. “Master says Dmitri is the Master of the House, not him.”

“The Lord is a practical man,” Osip said. “He likes his office, he likes his routine, he likes when things are clean cut and his plans are intricate, complex games that’d take decades to complete. In a manor this big, everything happens fast, and there isn’t a day that goes by in which dozens of small problems don’t drastically change even the most carefully planned of routines.” Those were Hennish’s words, but Slick didn’t need to know that. Osip shrugged lazily, quite pleased with himself for sounding so clever. “He’s the most intelligent person in every room he enters, but he wasn’t made to lead a household. It’d drive him mad. Dmitri is good with people and making quick changes. This house is his, yes. I know he must not look anything like your last owner.”

They shook their head quickly, as if appalled by the thought.

More hesitantly, after a pause, they admitted, “You look like Master.”

“Me?” snorted Osip. “Like Pyotr?”

“Master Helmut.”

It knocked the wind right out of him, the second he understood it. Helmut. It wasn’t a name he’d heard before, but he didn’t need to have heard it. Slick had been saved from somewhere. They understood their last owner had been a beta, just from the way they looked. There were plenty of betas around, so it shouldn’t be a shock that one of them looked like the owner.

Did it have to be Osip?

“Well,” it came out, sounding damn right far away. “Shit. Not like the boss at all, then.”

“No,” they agreed quietly, looking down. “This omega is sorry, sir.”

“For saying I could ever look fancy enough to be a master? Don’t be.” It was a weak joke, and a bit of a desperate one to boot, but it did work in making them relax their shoulders. Somehow confident because of it, he nudged them. “But be honest, Slick. He didn’t get a beard as great as mine, did he?” Which he kind of hoped would get them to at least crack a smile. Instead, he received a wide-eyed and earnestly serious stare as Slick frantically nodded. Osip blew some air out of his mouth. “Right,” he snorted. “At least that.”

But really. Couldn’t this master Helmut look like Mikhail or Yakov?

-

Part of his job, Osip had learned right at the beginning, was to learn Dmitri’s favorites. He thought it would’ve been the case with Pyotr, but the alpha didn’t care about what he was given, as long as it was edible, not messy to eat, and Dmitri liked it. During those first two years, Dmitri didn’t ask anything personal directly, and so, Osip learned. Now, he used it again with Slick.

There was a hidden kind of delight lurking behind those eyes every time they got a fresh piece of bread to eat, and a protective curling to their shoulders when enjoying that with some cheese. They liked eggs, and happily ate the mushrooms most of the other betas were disgusted by, and smiled that small, not-truly-there smile of theirs when Vytia sneaked them his vegetables without Dmitri seeing.

They hated anything sugary and would eat themself into a headache before ever admitting it or even just politely passing something that was offered to them. The smell of fish made them sick, which could be a true preference, but was likely a pregnancy symptom they would never mention out loud, so Osip made sure to tell Dmitri so they could plan their meals accordingly. And Osip was pretty sure they had some kind of issue with eggplants, from the way he could hear them repeatedly running their tongue through the top of their mouth and cleaning their throat every time they had them roasted for supper, so he made sure to put Vytia in duty of keeping anyone from recommending it to them, as they would certainly accept it no matter what.

They liked, Osip thought, to cook with him.

Not for supper. Not for any of their proper meals, when the kitchen got full and so busy it was hard to think between all the loud voices overlapping each other, and Osip ached for a smoke as he snapped louder to be heard. Then, Slick washed the dishes, holding their body tightly, clenching their eyes every time someone dropped something, and taking the chance to help Vytia somewhere else every time it was offered.

No. They liked it during the quieter moments—for Dmitri’s tea. For a midnight pick-me-up when Osip caught them alone after everyone went to sleep, eyes bloodshot and haunted. For a small, mid-day snack when their morning sickness made them skip their other meals. 

When it was just Osip. As if they trusted him. As if, at the very least, they found being around him less terrifying than being around the others.

Osip was delighted with their new teeth. Hennish was damn proud of them, for one, perfect ivory dentures to replace the teeth his last Master had kicked off. It helped that watching them eat wasn’t the single most heartbreaking thing Osip had ever seen, not anymore. It helped to see them fill out, call themself an omega and not a hole, ask Sasha for instructions and ask Osip if they could help around.

When they had one of their proper dinners with Dmitri, they didn’t flinch so much, even if they still did it a little bit, and stayed carefully by Vytia’s side, hearing his conversation with Pavel. When one of the betas beckoned them, they didn’t try to crawl under the table to suck him, just turned their head to listen.

“Here,” Mikhail told Slick, reaching all the way over the table to offer them one of the cups from the other side.

Hennish took it before they could, smelling the drink. He winced. “No hard liquor,” the doctor warned, “not until after the baby stops drinking their milk.”

Mikhail snorted. “That’s just doctors’ bullshit. My mother drank a lot in every one of her pregnancies.”

Yakov sat by his side.

“And look at how you came out,” he called out, reaching to pinch Mikhail’s cheek as he swatted him away.

“Get him some sweet wine instead,” Hennish said. To Slick, he explained, “Drinking just a small cup every couple of days can help prevent you from going into labor before time, but you shouldn’t force it if you don't want to.”

“And if your morning sickness returns,” Lidiya told him, sitting by Mikhail’s other side, her lips stretching into a smirk, “I was always told some brandy works wonders.”

“The evidence for it is poor,” said Hennish curtly.

“It worked for me.”

“You didn’t get to the end of the first month.”

“None of you people know a thing about pregnancies,” Yakov commented, and it was—

Well, Lidiya smiled, and once she did, something in Slick’s back relaxed as they watched the three joke, ducking their head, but not quite fast enough to hide the amusement that so briefly crossed their eyes. And that, Osip thought, made him feel far too emotional, and far too old for being so emotional. He could already go house down with Hennish’s crazy father.

Pyotr came that day. 

For the first, he did, sitting by Slick’s side. Osip felt himself tensing before he even caught up with Slick’s odd, inexplicable reaction, their eyes softening around the corners as they peeked at him. Pyotr looked down at them, impassive as ever, and they tilted their head, taking their plate to give it to Pyotr and being promptly stopped by Dmitri.

There was no hope for the others to feel comfortable enough around Pyotr to joke as they had been doing. Even as Dmitri and Sasha managed to get some milder conversations going, Osip couldn’t make himself participate. Instead, he watched, baffled. Pasha talked and Pyotr answered, but his eyes kept wandering. Since when did Pyotr’s attention ever wander?

When Slick got up to wash their plate, Pyotr followed them. It was as shocking as if he had given them a kiss right then and there.

For the ten years that Osip had known him, Pyotr had never come, not downstairs, not even when Dmitri insisted on inviting him to eat with them. He’d certainly never washed the dishes he dirtied, but as he stood by Slick’s side, their big alpha Lord did the task as if he had always done so. He said something—whatever it was, it made them look at him as if he had created the air around them and was directly responsible for allowing them to breathe it. Slick tilted their head, and they—they talked. They seemed curious and they showed it plainly, as they asked Pyotr a question.

When Pyotr took Vytia’s plate to wash it, Osip thought the boy might just piss his pants in fear, but he couldn’t focus on it himself. He just watched the way their shoulders almost touched. The way Pyotr let it nearly happen, and Sick didn’t flinch or slump or shrink. He thought, faintly, oh, well.

-

The alpha boy he had first met had boasted of some deep sense of self that Osip had spent all the years after deeply respecting and often envying. He didn’t need to know what had happened between Pyotr, Dmitri, and Sasha—the fact that there was no real adult between the three and no grief to be found made him know that wherever Pyotr’s parents were, they had not raised their son to see Dmitri as not only a person, but also as his hero.

They hadn’t raised him to be what he was, Osip was sure: firm, and fair, and so full of love for his two-omega pack that he would allow dozens of lost betas in just to give them the best shot at a good life. 

Dmitri often called him neurotic, only half-joking. Sasha had called him compulsively paranoid, once, in a tone that was both amused and worried in equal parts. Hennish had lost some afternoons when Pyotr was still a young teen worrying over the anti-social way he didn’t keep any friendship with the betas or even his fellow alphas, and seemed to grow even colder than normal when the word marriage was mentioned, even if about someone else.

In a far simpler way, Osip thought he was just a man who was more devoted to his big brother than he was to life itself, and who wielded that devotion like a weapon against everyone else.

He wasn’t a warm person, but he could be gentle like no one else, to the very few he saw fit to be.

Slick? Well, that Osip hadn’t expected. Of course not. But Slick already had warm eyes, and they deserved incomprehensible gentleness.

He very much expected to talk about them with Hennish when the doctor sneaked into his room, looking pale. 

Hennish looked a bit like the rats Osip used to get rid of in his last career: squirmy, always fidgeting with his glasses as if he was one threat away from giving up information. He was great at hiding it when he was right in front of his patients, but he was surprisingly squeamish for what he did, and these days, he was quieter than anything, but at the start, he’d been downright timid.

Osip grinned at him. “Did you see—”

“I went to a brothel.”

And didn’t that make his smile die fast, huh?

“Fuck,” he said, because—because it hurt, he supposed. Even if they had never discussed not fucking others. Even if they had never discussed any of it outside Hennish liking when Osip fucked him, and were too damn old to be having jealous spats around that house.

Hennish pressed his pale lips in a line.

“Do not make that face. I went to a brothel,” he repeated, “and I requested their youngest omega, alright?”

“No,” he spat back, getting up from where he was sitting at his bed. “No, of course it isn’t right. Lost your mind, did ya’? Don’t tell me you stole them too. Some random master might not have known where their omega went, but a brothel has the guards to go after you to damnation and back, you stupid man.”

Hennish ran a hand through his hair. When Osip took a step towards him, he went to the window, knocking their shoulders. “Let me just open it. Gods. This place is too stuffy. I don’t—I just let them take a nap and sleep it off.”

Osip stood behind him, watching his hands curling around the scarred windowsill.

“Just that?”

“I also took a look at them,” he relented. Osip narrowed his eyes. “I cared for some tearing they needed treated and slipped them some salve. No more.” Somehow, he highly doubted that. At his skepticism, Hennish frowned. “They told me of some other omegas in the house who’d need medical care. I will go back on my next free day to look at one of them too, and the same on the next.”

Osip stared. “That isn’t everything.”

Oh, old dog. You forget what I did. What I was. I can see it plain in your face.

What are you still hiding?

Hennish slumped his shoulders. “No,” he agreed. He turned to look at Osip in the eyes. “When I was getting in, the brothel master stopped me. He said he knew I worked for Lord Fradkov. He said—he said the owner likes to take the limbs out of his favorites. He asked if I could do it for a cheaper price than their usual alpha.”

Osip paled. He took a step towards him.

“You said no.”

“I said I would have to see with Pyotr, because it was the safer way to say no. The omega begged me to say yes.”

He felt the dread simmering in his stomach. “Why’d they want that?”

A smile, bitter.

“Because the other doctor is meaner.”

“Hennish. You aren’t thinking about it.” But he was, and he looked at Osip as if even thinking about it already made him hate himself, but like that hate wouldn’t be enough to make him stop. “You—"

“It’s an impossible choice,” he whispered, “but someone will do it no matter what. I thought of speaking with Pyotr, but not even he can just buy a brothel. It’s already run by an alpha and if he likes his omegas like this, there’s no money who’d stop him. Wouldn’t it be better for it to be someone nice to do it? I would give them morphine. They told me the other doctor doesn’t. I wouldn’t run tests on them. They told me the other does.”

It was all about the crimes they chose: what brought them at the start, what made them by the end. Hennish had been a thief, a smuggler, and the one they called when they needed someone to disappear. Osip had always just been a doctor. He’d just been one before betas could be doctors. He’d never set out to hurt anyone. He had done it before. He would do it again, it seemed, to stop greater pain.

Osip held his wrists. “You will run yourself ragged.”

“Please,” he huffed.

He tried to get away, but, well. Osip was still one of the larger men in that house. He thought he might still be stronger than most of those young boys Pyotr employed, even if it didn’t look like it. He ran his thumbs through Hennish’s scarred pulses, like the soothing of some scared animal.

“You will spend your free days getting down these mountains,” he said. “That’s hours even by horse. You will get to town already tired, and then exhaust yourself taking care of terribly hurt little omegas while worrying over not being seen, and when you’re already feeling sick, you will perform even sicker surgery, just to go back late at night for the same journey.”

Hennish swallowed. “So you suggest?”

“I suggest.” Osip looked into their eyes. He thought, mostly, of Slick. Their soapy sleeves and faraway eyes. Their hidden smiles. It tugged painfully at his chest. “I suggest that we talk to Dmitri, so our free days are together, and I can ride you to town in a comfortable little carriage so you can rest like a pampered little alpha in between the horrors you want to put yourself through.”

“Gods,” he let out, a strained breath of relief. Hennish blinked fast. “That would help.”

“Would, huh?” Osip gave him a small squeeze. “That’s right. What am I if not helpful, old man?”

Hennish laughed. The sound tasted like victory in the back of his throat—even if the agreement was, still, one of the most grim kind, and when his lovely doctor kissed him, all he could think was of the blood that would be spilled once again.

Chapter Text

Under the weak sun, with a basket full of wet, freshly clean clothes forgotten by his feet, he hovered.

Vytia felt like he was always hovering around Slick: nervously wringing his hands, or bringing his fingers to his mouth so he could nip at the corner of his nails, or sticking them deep into his pockets to hide that he’d made his cuticles bleed. He swayed his body, just—just waiting. He didn’t know what for. Slick opened their eyes, breath catching, and for one second, Vytia held his body and waited for them to turn to snap at him. His arms itched for him to get them up and protect his face.

It was Slick, though. They clutched their stomach, a soft sound of startlement leaving their lips. It was the second time they did that, after the first gasp had shocked Vytia away from their work, and it still made the anxiety shoot through him with the same kind of alarm.

“Slick,” he called temerously, immediately. “We should take a break.” They shook their head, but they also wrapped their arms around their stomach, so Vytia didn’t feel too comforted. He took a step towards them. “Come on. Mister Dmitri says—and if the baby needs it—if you’re hurting, then it means you might be losing it, so we should—maybe we should see Hennish, actually, ‘cause that would be so so bad, and—”

And he was panicking! He always panicked when he remembered there was a whole person inside Slick. It was so sick. He could never remember to be brief and polite fast enough—could never make himself only say a few decorous words like a good servant should, when he always ended up spitting out dozens of anxiously incomprehensible mumbles.

“Here, sir,” they whispered to him. They took his hand, pushing it against their belly. Vytia held himself perfectly still, because it was so not what he would expect from Slick. It was so firm, and daring, and the kind of thing he expected to blink and turn out to be a mirage, and against his hand, the baby kicked. Just once. A small little flutter, like a tiny leg contracting, like the baby had been trying to fall asleep and shocked himself awake.

Vytia blinked. He stared at them with horror.

“Does this mean something’s wrong?”

Slick hummed. “This omega thought so,” they admitted. Their fingers brushed Vytia’s warmly. “Doctor Hennish says all babies do it.”

“Does it hurt?”

“It used to feel like being hungry at the start.” They didn’t need to say a lot about that. Vytia didn’t know hunger the way an omega slave did, but he knew the way a lonely street kid did, which sometimes got almost as bad. “A little pang deep in this omega’s insides. A tug. He’s kicking more now. Sometimes, he elbows this omega’s ribs.”

“No,” Vytia said, horrified.

“This omega is grateful for it.” 

Of course they were. Slick was grateful for everything. When the baby kicked them again, they took a sharp breath, but Vytia was staring right at their covered belly and he swore he saw their shirt move a little. Maybe it was his mind playing a trick because of how well he had just felt the movement, his other hand going to find it. He hoped it was a mind trick.

“It is more odd than painful,” they assured. They never assumed anyone worried about them, so Vytia imagined he was looking very pale and faint at the revelation he’d just had.

“Maybe I need a break,” he breathed out, completely genuine, but he had also lied a lot about that to get Slick to sit down with him for a bit that he couldn’t be trusted anymore. They tilted their head, warm eyes glimmering. If they were someone else, Vytia thought they might have smiled at him the way people smiled at Pasha. It made him swallow despite how dry his throat was. “It’s so weird.”

Slick nodded. “Maybe one small pause,” they agreed, certainly just for Vytia’s sake. Even the admission, “This omega might need a minute before it can lean forward,” felt like it was said just to reassure him.

“I dropped the basket,” he said. “I can pick it up myself.”

He didn’t want to see them trying. Everybody kept worrying about how small Slick was and maybe Vytia was being a kid about it, but he thought they looked huge. They waddled around. They held their bump constantly. They could even rest some clothing pins on there while their hands were busy hanging out the laundry.

“This omega would be happy to do it for you,” they offered, because they always were.

Vytia shook his head. He bent, knees cracking. He picked up the clothes, and the basket, and got up, just as Slick tried to hide another wince.

Because there was nothing else he could do, he hovered.

-

Pasha was a nice teacher. Vytia was an inattentive student, and though Pasha was too kind a friend to call him a shitty listener, he was honest enough to admit that he was that, too. 

He liked the omega. He was aware that he was the first person Pasha had ever met who was his age, and that was why he liked talking to Vytia so much. But being liked felt good. Being looked at with bright, excited eyes, and having someone who beamed every time he entered a room. There was something easy about that—not simple as in ignorant or dumb, but straightforward. Painless, coming from a boy who was sharp enough to understand the reality of the world outside, but who hadn’t ever been touched by any of it. 

He didn’t like the library. Trying to learn got him impatient. Sitting down for hours in a stuffy room got him jittery and jumpy, continually rubbing sweaty palms on his pants without daring to touch any of the books in fear of ruining them. He didn’t care about reading. He didn’t know how and had never wanted to know.

Slick was much better at it than he was, as long as Pasha remembered to speak slowly and didn’t mind repeating himself when they started to look lost—which, of course, Pasha didn’t.

When he sounded out the letters, Slick repeated after him, running their finger through the paper. When he sounded out the full words, Slick did it, too, to Pasha’s sweet smile. Vytia was pretty sure they did more together, but by the time they got there, he had usually lost interest and started drawing on the papers Pasha had given him, which made him laugh just the same.

“Hey!” He pulled the paper away, glaring at him. “You can’t look before I finish.”

“That’s not true,” laughed Pasha, trying to take a peek. His eyes were the bluest he had ever seen, always gleaming with happiness or mischief or something of the like, and sometimes it made Vytia nervous, because he’d never met someone with eyes that shade before he’d met the Alpha. He tried to remember that Dima had the same eyes. Fierce and lovely and as clear as the cleanest pond reflecting the blue sky above. He tried not to flinch when he looked at Pasha and remembered he was the Alpha’s nephew.

It was easier when he was being annoying.

“It is true,” Vytia exclaimed. “I have to finish it first.”

“Only if the drawing’s supposed to be a surprise for me.”

“Maybe it is,” he said. “Maybe I’m drawing you.”

“You’re drawing a wolf,” retorted Pasha, flicking a brow.

“And if I was?”

“So, it’s a black wolf. Mine’s grey.”

“I know,” he said casually, rolling his eyes, even though Vytia didn’t remember that at all, and had been sure Pasha’s wolf was as black as all of the Fradkov’s hair. “Fine. I was drawing a dog, then,” he lied. “My dog.”

“You had a dog once,” he commented, not sounding like he believed in that. 

“I did! He ran.” Slick’s eyes darted their way, flickering between both their faces. Vytia had the odd feeling that they knew, and he flushed as he told Pasha, “I’m going to finish my dog, and then I can draw your wolf. Just teach Slick, will you?”

And Pasha smiled, but he turned back to them.

Pasha didn’t know how he had ended up there. Vytia hadn’t told anyone, really, about what had happened before; why he’d been alone, why he’d been desperate and hungry enough to steal from an alpha. Sure, it didn’t sound like he would’ve had a dog when they at least knew he’d been in the streets for most of his life, but he’d had one for some time. He didn’t like thinking about that. He didn’t like thinking about anything from before. It was why he was so happy that no one knew anything, and everyone let him try to pretend there was nothing to tell.

No one even called him Viktor anymore. He knew it was dumb—he should have gone for it, especially with Alpha. He shouldn’t have flinched when Alpha called him Viktor, and he shouldn’t have told Dima that he liked Vytia more, but Dima had looked so kind the first time he visited him. He hadn’t been able to keep his mouth shut.

He’d been beaten so badly. He couldn’t think about a lot, not when his left arm was broken and so were all the fingers in his left hand, and his ribs were cracked, and his head felt like it had suffered something even worse somehow. His nose was throbbing. One of the guards had pressed their knee over his throat and it still hurt. He still felt sometimes like he couldn’t breathe. When this pretty, calming omega had sat by his side and told him he didn’t need to worry about anything, not anymore, he hadn’t quite believed it wasn’t a dream. When he spoke, a pained and shy murmur, Dima had smiled. 

He had been happy that Vytia had been awake enough to ask to be called something. Vytia had felt unbearably, unbelievably safe, seeing him smile and knowing if it had been a test, at least he’d passed it.

Everyone was kind to him, really. Generous. Even the Alpha called him Vytia the very few times he had called him anything at all, and no one had screamed at him even though they screamed at each other a lot. 

They were still too much.

They were still just not Slick.

“Sir?” they called, voice small, after Pasha wasn’t around. “Your dog—”

“The guards,” Vytia started, honest, and then stopped, not quite sure how to finish the phrase. He used his hands to imitate how the guards held those shiny revolvers of theirs, and made a very good impression of how they shot at people, if he could say so himself. He let his hands fall, shrugging. “You know. I couldn’t tell Pasha that. He’d get sad like I shot his dog.”

Slick blinked fast.

“Of course,” they agreed, and paused as they watched Vytia’s face. They said, “Was he a good pup, sir?”

“Yeah.” Vytia swallowed tightly. He stuck his hands in his pockets. “The best.”

Slick hummed, understanding. They didn’t try to touch him. They didn’t try to comfort him or squeeze out more information, and didn’t keep looking at him with pity or even the awkwardness of someone who didn’t know what to say. They just agreed. Nodded, one sharp little move, and turned their face to the ground in thought. Vytia closed his eyes.

They were so good with the quiet, was the thing. Vytia liked being around them in ways he just couldn’t bear being around anyone else, not since he was arrested for stealing, not since he was beaten by the guards, not since that strange alpha showed up and saved him from the rope. He didn’t think there was anyone like the omega even before all that, not when he supposedly still had his parents and not when he was on the streets. No one did quiet like them. No one got it like they did.

He thought maybe it was because they couldn’t hear that well, and they couldn’t think real well either, not all the time. Vytia found it hard to remember some things after all those blows to the head, so he understood that. He took a deep breath.

“Can we steal another piece of pie from the cook?” he asked, voice wobbly.

“This omega can ask Mister Osip,” they corrected, which, knowing Osip, would certainly result in a yes, so Vytia followed them a bit less shakily.

Secrets had a habit of stumbling out of his mouth when he was around them. Maybe that, though, was because he knew nothing he said could ever horrify Slick: sure, a guard shooting a little dog point blank just because he was trailing a packless, homeless beta kid was bad, but would it be a horror to a slave who had been waiting all their life to be shot point blank the second their master got bored of fucking them? Vytia doubted it. Any story he could ever tell them, he didn’t think it would ever surprise Slick, and it would never make them look at him differently.

Once, when they were scrubbing the floor, Vytia watched the dirty water inside the bucket and confessed as quietly as he could, “They said they’d drown me if Alpha Fradkov didn’t get there fast enough,” and Slick looked at him, and scrubbed, and even when their eyes went soft, it wasn’t pity: it was understanding in the form of old, aching memories.

“Drowning is a terrible feeling,” they replied, because they knew it, and they had suffered it.

“They do this thing in prison,” Vytia said, “where they stick a cloth inside your mouth and spill a bunch of water into your throat. ‘Supposed to be even worse than sticking your head under water and holding.”

Slick tilted their head. “My Master’s son wrapped the cloth all around this omega’s head.”

“Did he find it funny when you started to choke?”

“This omega cannot pretend to understand its betters,” they said, dipping their head and their voice lower, “but it does not think he was looking for amusement, sir.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I think not all of the guards were either. Makes me feel better if I pretend it was just that, though.”

And wasn’t that easy? For all the others tried, dodging their questions felt like pulling out teeth, and trying to answer made him choke with the words he couldn’t force out of his mouth. 

“They’d like to know what happened to my parents,” he told them, once, hiding with Slick during their break. He looked over his shoulder to the house, eyes itching. “I don’t know either. I was just—always packless, since I was too young to remember. I don’t know what to tell them.” He turned his head. “Do you remember your dad?”

Slick bit their cracked lips hard. “This omega doesn’t.”

“Did they ever—were you ever told anything about them?”

“He was pretty,” they said. “He was too much trouble. Slaves shouldn’t ever trouble their master. This omega—master told it how it killed him. It knows that.” They brought their hands close to their neck, mimicking a choking motion. Vytia swallowed tightly.

Yes, he thought, paling.

A murdered dog wouldn’t horrify Slick.

“That’s better than drowning,” he said, voice faint. “Or fire.”

They looked up at him. There was something unguarded in their eyes, a picked-raw flash of pain, but they jerked their head down after the briefest of moments. It felt almost like a mirage, because when they spoke, their voice sounded thoughtful and distant; an unemotional, “It is, isn’t it, sir?”

“Am I bad.” Vytia paused. He brought one of his hands to his mouth, chewing on the corner of a nail, “Am I bad for liking to think my parents are dead too?”

Slick touched their belly.

“If it died,” they replied, “this omega would prefer its son to know it had no choice, instead of thinking it chose not to be around.”

He pulled a cuticle. Immediately, Vytia hid the blood in his nail from Slick, jamming his hands deep into his pockets and rocking his body a bit. “That’s just a better thought,” he whispered, half ashamed, half humiliatingly relieved Slick had known what he meant. He’d sounded so bad.

Once, Vytia started, “Do you wonder, sometimes, what it would have been like to—” as they were sitting in one of the empty rooms in the manor, airing out the dusty furniture, wiping forgotten books, quietly letting the windows open to allow some fresh air to get in. Slick, squinting at a spider’s web in the corner as if they hadn't ever even seen a spider, turned to him. They waited. He stopped abruptly.

“What would what be like?” they prompted.

“To be born an alpha,” he admitted. Vytia wrapped his arms around himself. “Don’t you wonder?”

They looked away, eyes turning blank. It took them a second to answer, but it could always be assumed that it would take them a second. “This worthless hole would never.” They blinked, fast, flinching when Vytia flinched. He hated when they called themself a hole and they knew it, which was why they tried not to do it around him or Pasha. They rubbed a hand on their belly. “Does sir?”

“I wouldn’t want to be a Lord,” he argued. “But it would be nice, wouldn’t it? If someone tried to hit Alpha, they’d be arrested and tortured, even if it was another alpha. Can you imagine? A whole law just so people can’t hit you.”

Their brows drew together. “This omega cannot imagine that,” they said, voice level. Vytia flushed. “It sounds lovely, it is sure.”

“They can shift anytime,” he said. “Did you ever ask Alpha to let you?” He knew the answer was no, but he still waited until they shook their head. “I can’t, either. I can’t talk to him without crying,” which was embarrassing to admit, still, but Slick had seen it, so there was no point in hiding, “but Pasha talks for me, sometimes. We did it together before. It’s so weird. I don’t even know if I like it. Being a wolf is kind of—it’s kind of scary. Like I’m doing something I shouldn’t. It would be fun to be able to do it without having to ask for permission. It might feel less wrong for them.”

“This omega has never done it,” they said, “and it is already scared.”

Vytia sent them a grateful smile. “Do you know that for every confession the guards get, they get to ask to shift once?” Their nose wrinkled. Vytia’s lips curved into something more lopsided as he ducked his head. “Yeah. Good way to make them want to force things out.”

He did know what had happened to the guards who took him, of course. They’d received Alpha’s money. They continued to receive Alpha’s money, on top of their official wages, so they’d keep an eye and an ear out for any information he might like to have. Slick’s old master had been paid very generously for them, also, and probably had used it to buy himself a real pretty new slave. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t justice. It just was.

That thought always struck him at the worst of times, no matter how much he wished to forget.

He still expected to be hit. Everyone was as generous about that as they were all else: Osip didn’t snap at him when Vytia was slow, or dropped a plate when setting the table downstairs, or even when he was just being a lazy, useless kid; even though Vytia had seen him berating the others for the same. Now, when he got sick, Hennish didn’t force him to be checked after he had a small breakdown about it, adapting to just hearing symptoms and giving him medicine. The one time he ripped Alpha’s blue coat that he was supposed to be washing, Yakov helped him get rid of any evidence without a word, and Dima never punished anyone for it, even if he’d heard Alpha asking Slick if they’d seen it and so, it must have been missed. It’d been a long time since he was last hit, and though the others sometimes lifted their hands, it was always to deliver friendly, if rough slaps on each other's backs, and never his.

All their kindness didn’t change the fact that Vytia’s first instinct would always be to protect his head. 

If he burst into tears for no reason at all, right in the middle of some mundane task during a boring afternoon like any other, Slick was the only one who wouldn’t panic, or stare at him in shock, or ask questions, which was the worst thing ever, and the most common thing to happen.

They’d stop. Get him somewhere quiet, somewhere hidden, and get him sitting even if it was in the dirt. They’d let him rest their head on their shoulder, and card their fingers through his hair. “Oh, sir,” they’d say, because they still called him sir and he liked it a little bit too much, even if he knew he shouldn’t. He’d never been a sir before. No one had ever held him and let him soil their clothes with snot and tears like a disgusting little kid. Even now, no one did that, besides them.

Oh, sir, and there was no more talk. No trying to get him to admit what had happened. Just their fingers. Their soft humming, and his pitiful sobs.

When he stopped, he could only sniff, pitifully, “‘M sorry.”

“Shouldn’t,” they’d whisper. Their hand cupped a wet cheek, one crooked thumb wiping his tears. “This omega is far more emotional than sir could ever imagine.”

And he wouldn’t feel, just with them, as stupid and hopeless as he felt with everybody else.

-

They weren’t allowed to forage together anymore. Vytia always got bored and started throwing anything he thought looked interesting in his basket, and Slick was serious about it, but also so bad at being able to tell what was a poisonous mushroom and what wasn’t that Dmitri had started to fear they might have some sort of issue with their eyes on top of all else. Vytia thought their sight was fine, but he agreed their foraging would make anyone doubt that for a bit.

Likewise, Slick wasn’t allowed to sew anything again, because their stitches were so chunky and big and crooked that, after reassuring them and after they weren’t close anymore, Dima had laughed until there were tears in his eyes looking at the one old shirt he’d had Slick mending as a test. Vytia couldn’t touch the crystal glasses, because he had dropped one once and cried so much and so loudly that even the alpha had heard and came to take a look, and that had just made him panic even harder.

When Slick got close enough to the nine-month mark, Hennish banned them from crouching down.

Vytia heard him telling Osip, who’d argued his sister had been working on the fields up to the day she gave birth, that his sister probably had better instincts than Slick—because, when it came to their own health, Slick had none. Slick heard Hennish telling them time and time again not to bend at their waist, and instead at their knees and hips, and to remind them their balance would be getting worse and they needed to be careful about that. Vytia had taken it to memory in part because the “right” way to bend Hennish showed them looked very silly and in part because Dima had asked him to keep an eye on Slick, and he had taken the responsibility more seriously and proudly than Dima could ever have imagined that he would.

Slick never remembered to do what Hennish taught them, not until Vytia was holding them by the arm, worriedly and hovering. For that, they were banned from crouching. They were banned from getting on their knees, which they still tried to do all the time, and from any kind of lifting without supervision, because telling them not to lift something heavy hadn’t helped at all. Most things most people could do while pregnant, Hennish forbade Slick from even thinking about: because theirs was a more dangerous one, and Slick understood limits a lot less than normal people did. 

They didn’t quite want to put the strain all on Vytia (he thought Dima already regretted asking him first), but he was the one who was around Slick the most, and, anyway, he liked keeping an eye on them. He liked being trusted. He liked being useful like that.

He caught up with Slick outside that night, bare feet sinking on the muddy, half-melted snow. They didn’t look back although Vytia’s boots made enough sound that they should’ve heard him coming and startled like they usually did. They didn’t react—they weren’t there at all, Vytia understood. Their eyes were staring into space, far away and empty, lips open. Whatever they were doing, Vytia was terrified that it couldn’t be made better by him appearing by their side.

He hovered. It was too cold for him, even though he was wearing a coat, and he could see the goosebumps on their bare arms.

“Sir?” he asked, his voice small. He hadn’t called them that before.

Slick didn’t turn. When they finally spoke, their voice sounded strange. 

“This omega never wanted to be this hole it was born as.” It seemed far away, like a dream or a haunting. They seemed, clutching at their belly. “It will—it was so terrified of birthing a hole. Of having to watch it being taught what it is.”

“Slick—”

Their eyes shifted, now aware enough to find his face. “It will be so happy,” they whispered, “if it ever gets to see its son grow like sir.”

“I’m not grown,” he said, suddenly feeling too shy and too self-conscious to even look them in the face. He felt his cheeks burning.

“Eleven,” they said. “That’s older than most omegas get. It’d be a lovely dream.”

Everybody kept saying he was eleven just because it was the age the guards had written down when they had arrested him, and so the age they’d told Alpha. Vytia was too embarrassed to tell them that he had no idea when he was born and that the number had just been chosen quite randomly by the guards themselves. He was for sure too sheepish to tell Slick that just then.

“Dima is the oldest omega ever,” was what he said, taking one step closer to them. “If he can be that old—”

Why couldn’t they?

Of course, Dima was Alpha’s brother. That made him different.

Vytia wasn’t sure if he was supposed to know that. No one had explained that to him when he first got there and, to that day, no one had ever said it out loud, but also, Pasha didn't try to hide that he called Alpha his uncle, and it wasn’t like they could ignore that Dima looked just like the Alpha, besides the fact that Alpha’s skin was darker.

Dima was family to a lord, which was why he got to be the oldest ever—but if Alpha had decided to buy Slick, then he must have thought they were special too. Alpha never let go of his betas. Vytia knew that. Even if they got in trouble with the law again, he didn’t let them be hurt or killed, or hunted. Vytia didn’t think the Alpha saw them as pack, but he saw Dmitri, and they were Dmitri’s pack. It was close enough.

They blinked at him. “Oh,” came out of their lips, a revelation. “Mister Dmitri is older, isn’t he?”

“I think he even has some grey hairs.” Vytia nodded sagely.

“Mister might,” they agreed. They lifted their head, watching the dark. “Oh. He has, doesn’t he?”

They still sounded strange. Vytia dared touching their hand, and felt just how cold their fingers were as they gave his a squeeze. He looked down at the touch. His eyes darted back to Slick’s pale lips. “Why did you come out? You didn’t even take your shoes.”

“This omega never used them before,” they replied slowly. “It never—it used to sleep outside, too. It is not as cold as it was used to, even now.”

“I did it too,” he snorted. “I slept outside in the cold, I mean. I hated it. Can’t we go back to the warmth?”

He was pouty. He sounded like he was whining. It wasn’t right for him to whine and he felt like bracing himself. Once again, every instinct he had ever had itched to protect his head, but instead, he wrapped his free arm tightly around his body, pulling his coat to keep the frigid air away as he trembled, and reminded himself he didn’t need to fear being beaten, not with Slick.

Their thumb brushed his hand.

“Sir is cold,” they said as if they had just noticed it, almost surprised. As if they hadn’t quite known other people—his betters—could get cold, and it wasn’t another weakness of their kind. They blinked, slowly, miserably. “Of course he should be inside.” 

Vytia didn’t let go of their hand and so, they came back to the manor with him.

-

They forbade him from seeing Slick give birth—Dima, Sasha, Hennish, even Slick themself, all giving him the perfect opportunity not to need to act like he wanted to see them give birth. After, however, no one stopped him from going into the room when the baby and Slick had already been cleaned.

Vytia looked at the baby, so tiny in Slick’s arms, and at Slick’s tear-stained face, their bright eyes finding his.

“This is Motka, sir,” they offered, their voice rough and pained.

“Hello, Motsha,” he said quietly. Perhaps childishly, he looked at them and commented, “He’s kind of cross-eyed,” which made Hennish send him a warning look. He flinched, just in time for a low huff to escape Slick’s lips, eyes darting up with a twinkle. It sure shut both of them up: it sounded, for a moment, almost like a real laugh. Vytia risked a glance and saw a weary, fond look in their face, the corner of their lips twitching.

“Looks like it,” they agreed, amused. Had he ever heard them actually sound amused? Look like it so plainly?

“Babies sometimes do,” said Hennish.

Motka, in response to the insult, yawned. A smile cut across Vytia’s face and he turned to Slick, awed. The world, he felt, tilted. 

“He can yawn.”

“He did it when he was inside this omega too,” they commented. They laughed again, just as gently, somehow even truer, at the face Vytia made. They hardly moved a finger, as if afraid of disturbing the careful support they had around Motka’s little neck.

“You’re mocking me.”

“This omega can promise it isn’t.”

“You didn’t tell me!”

“You seemed afraid enough of the kicks,” commented Hennish. He, too, looked like he was laughing at Vytia.

“I don’t think I can hold him,” he admitted, somehow even more terrified just thinking about doing that.

“Best not,” the doctor agreed, eyes sparkling behind his glasses.

“He looks real fragile.”

“He does,” whispered Slick. They bowed their head, forehead almost touching Motka’s. Their eyes were watery, rimmed red from all the previous crying. “Motsha,” they repeated Vytia, tasting the nickname. “Little one.”

“All yours,” Hennish said.

Alpha visited Slick. He came all the way from university to see them, and cleaned more than a month of his infamously tight schedule to stay there with them, overseeing their recovery. Vytia didn’t understand how those things worked, but he was sure a normal person couldn’t just stop going to their classes because one of their servants had given birth. No alpha lord would put their life on hold because an omega was born—but that was what it appeared that Alpha had done.

Vytia didn’t stay when he was visiting Motka. When he came after he almost expected Slick to be crying or shaking, but instead they were usually smiling at the baby, lighter than before. They smiled at Vytia, the expression still little more than that small tug at the corner of their lips that would be easy to miss if you didn’t know them that well, and welcomed him in with a new kind of warmth that seemed to emanate from them now that they were a parent.

Vytia slept curled up in the armchair by Slick’s window. Not every night, not even on most nights. Just some. Mostly, when he didn’t work all day, because he’d begged and Dima had let him stay with Motka. He had a thick blanket, a soft pillow to curl his body around. Adults worried, and Slick was the only one to understand that he was so used to sleeping in worse places that a comfortable armchair didn’t even bother him.

No words, when their eyes met. Just Slick’s quiet contentment and Vytia’s sleepy eyes.

-

Sometimes, when Sasha went to town, he brought Vytia with him, even if he was scheduled to work.

Dima gave all of them a very generous amount of free days, but while the others could ride down the mountain alone, Vytia couldn’t. Not just because he couldn’t ride a horse yet (Sasha and Pasha were trying to teach him), but also because he couldn’t bear it. The closest city wasn’t the same Alpha had taken him from. That still didn’t change that the mere thought of being alone on those streets made him start to shake as badly as Slick. The thought of never being outside the Fradkovs’ estate ever again was almost worse.

He followed Sasha quietly as he did his tasks: talking to suppliers, buying whatever the household needed, and sneaking little surprises for Dima into his list of essentials, sending letters from the others. Through all that, Sasha kept a hand on his back. Always, he made sure to let him know he wasn’t going to lose track of Vytia, because everyone was generous like that, even if they weren’t Slick.

When they entered one of the stores, Sasha ruffled his hair with one big hand and, at his indignant squealing, laughed and told him to go buy himself some sweets. Vytia went, scowling.

He mulled over the choice. All the little tins were delicate and pretty, and it made his fingers itchy with the thought that he was allowed to choose one of them for himself, but he just didn’t know if he should get the hard caramel (wouldn’t that be too hard for their teeth, though?); or the chocolate-covered gingerbreads (those could be so dry sometimes, and Yakov loved buying them to distribute around the kitchen every time he visited the town, but Vytia was tired of the taste); or the honey sweets with poppy seeds (but the honey would be too sweet for their taste, wouldn’t it?). It was a funny sort of feeling to have too many options of food to choose from. It made him almost giddy, and also a bit nervous, as if making the wrong choice would make it a lost opportunity he’d never get to have again.

He chose the chocolates, but his chest still felt kind of funny, tightening and flustering around that anxiety over whether it had been a good one. 

When he sat on Slick’s bed and showed them the tin, they peered at it curiously, one finger following the ornamented borders, eyes reading the words in the metal.

“We could share,” he told them, nervously, and they shook their head, pushing it towards him. He whined, “Slick.” At their tilted head, he paused, cheeks flushing with heated blood. “Please. Pasha gave me my first chocolate. The ones he likes are sweeter, though. Milky. I got one of the darker ones. I know you don’t like sugar too much, so I just—I was thinking about you.”

And so, they ate together. Vytia opened it and unwrapped one of the little gingerbreads, and ate it so he wouldn’t have to watch Slick's first taste, in case they didn’t like it and couldn’t hide.

When he sneaked a look, Slick was looking at him with some soft, unreadable look that made him feel even shyer. “Can’t he?” he asked, nodding to Motka’s crib.

The corners of Slick’s eyes wrinkled as they sent him a little smile.

“Not for the next six months.”

“Oh.” Vytia looked down. “Did you like it?”

“It is the kindest gift, sir.”

-

When Slick was sleeping, but Vytia couldn’t, he sometimes liked to watch Motka. He was so tiny it made him finally understand why people were worried about Slick’s belly: even he, who hadn’t ever met that many babies, could tell Motka was too small and too thin, even if Hennish had decided he wasn’t at such a risk anymore. He still hadn’t, and wouldn’t, hold him, even more so after Pasha had told him what he’d heard Dima explaining to Slick about babies’ heads and necks.

He ran his thumb through a little cheek, leaning over the crib. In the dark, with only a little bit of moonlight getting in through the curtains, it all felt like a dream, shadows shifting and moving under the pale light. Now he wasn’t so red and his face so squished, and he had gained some weight, he looked more like a real baby. He’d started to grow some thin hair, lighter than Slick’s dark blond, and he was still a lot paler than Slick, but Hennish said those things might get darker later. Vytia didn’t know. 

He couldn’t see it when Dima said Motka had Slick’s nose, or when Osip smiled and said he got their eyes. His nose looked like a nose, little and normal, and his eyes were just brown. Sasha said, trying to annoy Pasha, that Alpha thought Motka was the cutest baby ever, cuter than Pasha—and that, Vytia supposed, he could agree with.

“Hello, Motsha,” he said again, a murmur in the night. It was only for himself to hear, because he knew waking up Motka would be a nightmare to deal with. He had just started to sleep for longer stretches at night. Vytia gripped the crib. “I’m sorry we can’t give you any chocolates. I promise that when you get teeth, I’ll get you some.”

He kept thinking about it—Motka’s future. He didn’t know if Slick was still afraid they wouldn’t get to see him at eleven, so he was planning enough for them. Someone would need to buy Motka his first candies from town, and he was going to have to fight Yakov for the chance. Someone would need to teach him to ride a horse and sometimes, when Vytia didn’t want to go to one of Sasha’s riding lessons, he thought that he would need to learn to show it to Motka before Pasha could and it gave him the push to go to the stables. He could let the younger omega deal with the boring reading and writing problem, and teach him how to play street card games, and how to throw a punch, and how to tie his boots.

He didn’t know any of those things when he got there. He hadn’t ever had any candy before, and he used to stick the shoelaces of his own boots inside them so he wouldn’t trip until Pasha saw it and showed him how to tie them properly, while Mikhail taught him how to punch someone so he could run away from them if he needed to. He didn’t want Motka to have to get to eleven without doing those things, or without having had any taste of fun. It was embarrassing. It was, sometimes, just so humiliating that it made Vytia tear up even if he was in front of someone as impressive as Yakov, whom he really didn’t want to see him crying like a kid.

“I’m gonna show you,” he promised, small. “I’m gonna.”

When Slick woke up a little later, Vytia was curled in the armchair, still awake, still feeling impossibly restless in his own skin. For a second, they didn’t move, before they propped themself on their elbows, hair falling messily around their face. 

“Sir can’t sleep?” they asked, voice dropping, sounding half-asleep yet.

He closed his eyes. Took a deep breath. “No,” he admitted, both their voices equally and carefully low. “I’m—I can’t.”

It was dumb, but it also wasn’t, not at all. He found their eyes, although he couldn’t see them well, and hoped against all hope that they couldn’t see he was crying. Hoped, stupidly, that they could.

Sometimes, Vytia wanted to ask about their old master and the master’s son. He wanted, knowing that he shouldn’t, to ask which one was Motka’s dad, and to know if Slick had wanted them to be. Sometimes, he felt like he was going to die if he didn’t immediately blurt out they got me on my knees, Slick, please, please, do you know what—

But he never did.

He curled his shoulders, making himself smaller. Slick patted the bed, “Oh, sir. Come here,” and he did, he did, because he couldn’t even think of stopping himself from slipping under the covers. He knew all the servants’ rooms were the exact same, but Slick’s bed felt softer. Warmer. Like a proper nest. He felt so cold. He felt like there was no way to stop thinking about Motka, and himself, and Slick.

A full-body shiver wracked through Vytia’s body. He felt, starkly in the quiet dark, as Slick’s breath caught. It made him hesitate as they grew still.

“I can go,” he said, embarrassed. He ran a hand through his cheek. He sniffed, a pitiful sound. “‘M sorry.”

“No,” they whispered. “You don’t need to, pup.”

They let him rest his head on their chest, carding their fingers through his hair. A part of Vytia knew that Slick wouldn’t be able to sleep with him so close to them, knew that, even if he was just a kid no one else could ever be afraid of, Slick’s body wouldn’t relax with his weight so close enough to allow them to rest—but his eyes were heavy, and their touch was so gentle, and when he fell asleep, he didn’t have any of the nightmares he always had, not when Slick's arms and Slick's nest felt like the safest place in which he'd ever been.

Chapter Text

He should’ve stopped visiting his family long ago. Yakov knew he should. His father didn’t want to see him, and he didn’t want to see his brothers, and when he came, he made sure to do it only when his Ma was alone in the house, even though he didn’t even like her all that much and she didn’t like him either.

It was still his mother. The only one he got.

She lingered by the door, watching as he dismantled Dmitri’s borrowed horse. She looked tired, more so than the last time he’d seen her, hair peppered in grey, thin lips pinching tightly as she stared him down. It didn’t hurt that she didn’t hug him, because he thought he might shove her away if she tried, and it didn’t sting that she looked sick looking at his face, because he felt equally disgusted by hers. They were too alike in all those fronts, letting their bitterness fester and still insisting on trying to meet in the middle. She still took his coat and his arm as she guided him inside the house, and he still handed her an envelope with a day’s wage as he took off his hat.

“Ma—”

“Where is it?” she snapped, letting go of him as they entered the kitchen. She threw the envelope onto the table with little care, which was still better than the first time he brought her money and she tore it in front of his eyes before trying to beat him with a wooden spoon for bringing his dirty business into her house. Now, she screamed too. She looked like she wanted to hit someone and he held himself perfectly still as he waited. “I can’t believe that little bitch!”

He should’ve stopped visiting. A little head popped from behind the table, battered and bruised, and Yakov was hit by just how much better he would’ve been if he had just let go of his family completely—because now they had a slave, blinking his way, and now he knew they had one, and he just couldn’t forget that.

-

His Ma snapped the omega’s name as she ordered him around. Yakov decided, right then and there, that he wouldn’t be calling the omega that, not even in his own mind. 

His glare followed him as he darted around the kitchen. His Ma tugged at Yakov’s sleeve, once, twice, all the more annoyed until he was able to peel his eyes away and look back at her, letting himself be forcibly sat. He turned back as soon as he could.

“What the fuck’s his wrong with its head?”

His father had shaved the omega’s hair, he guessed, because he had always been the worst at cutting their hair when they were young. He could see ridiculous little spots of fuzz of dark hair where it hadn’t been cropped evenly, and the raw scabs and irritated cuts where he’d nicked the omega’s skull, through his head and around his ears. In that case, hurting them wasn’t even because he was a slave, when he’d done the same to Yakov and his brothers. He made a face. His Ma didn’t even look, and the omega ducked, cheeks aflame.

“They sold it full of lice,” she said, scowling. “I told your father, Yasha, I did. With these little bitches, you have to do a proper inspection before buying. They’re desperate to get rid of them, they’d sell the things dead and find a way to hide it if you ain’t careful. He says he didn’t notice because its hair was too matted. Shouldn’t have bought so matted to begging with, huh. Had to pry three of its teeth off, too. Too fucking rotten. And he says he didn’t even smell it. Fuck me, then, I guess.”

The omega looked like Slick. It hit Yakov like a train: it was not in the face, maybe—he was paler, sweeter, his eyes a haunted green. But the haunting was the same. That kind of hollow distance, as if he wasn’t there at all. As if he was long dead. He was around Pavel’s age, around Vytia’s. 

Around twelve.

“Won’t ever let your father talk me into getting one of those things,” she continued, angrily. She reached out. Hit the side of the omega’s head, hard. Once. Twice. “Fuck does it even do, Yasha? Your Da doesn’t bother me as much, sure, but then, when no one is using it, it just kneels there. It is ill, you know. Not just the fleas. It got one of those whore’s illnesses. I didn’t know its kind could get sick like that. S’ppose it hurts. It just cries.”

He didn’t cry with Yakov, when Yakov was there. 

It was stupid. Usually, after he visited his Ma and stayed in that unbearably stiff house for no more than half an hour, all that both of them could endure, he took Dmitri’s horse to town and drank until the pub owner had to tell him to stop—after seeing the omega the first time, he drank until the woman had to physically kick him out, and stayed in the curb, in the rain, for more time than it was wise. It was a wonder he hadn’t been robbed. 

It should’ve been a point of no return. The moment in which he put his foot down and renounced his entire family for good.

Instead, he started visiting more during his free days, just so he could see the omega. Only to make sure they hadn’t killed him.

When he saw him again, the little omega crawled towards him. Yakov did his best to ignore him, until the omega got to him and immediately tried to nuzzle Yakov’s crotch with his nose. He swatted the side of his head, weaker than his Ma, the way his brothers did with him when they were young, although perhaps that was too harsh considering how bruised the kid already was. It had been, perhaps, a bit of a cruel game even when Yakov’d been a boy. He flinched, trying to crawl away, but Yakov kept his resolve as he grabbed his chin and told him, voice firm, “Don’t think about it.”

The omega froze.

“Yes, Master.”

“Good.” He let go. He reached out a hand. “Up we go, now.”

And he didn’t cry. Not with Yakov.

It wasn’t hard getting the omega to follow him when none of the men of the family were around. From what he could tell, the little thing wasn’t half as teary as Slick used to be at the beginning, not at all like his Ma said he was. Yakov fixed the fence in the backyard for his Ma and the omega kneeled a little behind him, just watching. Yakov cut firewood for her and the omega sat on the log he put for him so he wouldn’t be in the dirt, eyes following the axe intently. Yakov helped her with dinner and slipped a bun to the omega, and he shoved it in his mouth quickly, quietly, before ducking under the table. His eyes were dry; wide, dazed, distant. But never teary.

“Come on, brat,” he called one day, urging him, and he came easily, because when would someone like him—like Slick—not obey? He tried to crawl again, like Slick always did when they’d just gotten there, but he stumbled up when Yakov held his arms tightly and made him stand.

His parents had a small farm. It wasn’t their land, of course: they paid a lord for it. Not Lord Fradkov, because the man’s proper estate wasn’t around those parts. From what had been explained to Yakov, that big mansion in the mountains that he’d moved his pack to was, in fact, the Fradkov’s winter home. Their alphas were far less generous with betas than his. The land his parents paid to live and work in was unlucky at best, a little piece of crap away from the main road. 

As he walked, bag slung around his shoulders, boots squishing down onto the wet ground, the omega followed, his feet bare, getting muddier with each step, though that likely didn’t matter, when his knees were the muddiest, and scraped to hell and back. Yakov took his shoulder into a tight grip as they entered the woods—aware, to some point, that it looked awfully like he was bringing the kid somewhere no one could see to do something terrible with him. Aware he wouldn’t say anything to stop it anyway.

Finally, Yakov stopped by a familiar little lake.

“Can you swim?” The omega looked, his eyes unreadable, before shaking his head. “Right. Stay in the shallow, then.” He stared. Yakov sighed, taking his shoulder and pointing to the water. “Come on. Wash yourself.” The omega’s eyes flickered from his face to the lake. Eager, but too scared to take the chance. Yakov took his bag and took the towel he had brought all the way from the manor. He dangled it like a treat. “You can even dry yourself after, huh? And I got an apple I can cut up for you if you behave, brat.”

It was too cold. He and his brothers used to swim there, but always in the summer, when it was so warm they didn’t even need towels to get dry. That didn’t matter, not to him. The way the omega was dirty, any chance was a good chance, and he got into the cold lake. He stumbled, just a bit, and trembled, teeth-clicking, but there was relief in his face. There was old blood caked in his skin, all over his little body, and Yakov guessed there was no water too freezing to make him not take the opportunity to clean it. He could hardly scent any omega sweetness, not under the smell of old piss and shit that followed the kid.

Yakov sat in the drier spot in the grass that he could find. He didn’t watch, but just being around the omega made him feel like enough of a creep.

“Can you even piss?” he called out, unable to stop himself. The omega blinked up at him before nodding slowly. “It hurts, though?”

”Hurts,” he agreed, his voice a croak. It was the first time Yakov had heard him speaking at all.

Yakov tried not to look at the omega’s crotch, as a rule. He tried not to think about it. But he’d peeked, before, an uncontrolled flicker of his eyes when his Ma first mentioned the omega being ill, and there was no way he could ever forget that. Everyone knew most diseases like that didn’t stick to omegas, not easily. Biologically more resistant, they said. So Yakov couldn’t even imagine how badly his past fucks must’ve been looking, and how much they must’ve used the boy, for it to get like that. He didn’t like thinking about what that meant for his father or his Ma.

He made a face as the boy scrubbed to get rid of the blood down there. The boy tilted his head, a small, innocent reaction. “It ain’t so bad no more, Master.”

“It looked worse?”

“More yellow.” 

More pus, perhaps? It wasn’t the most pleasant of images, and so, Yakov looked the other way as the boy finished washing himself and stubbornly refused to think about any of it, besides the gentle sloshing of water.

There was none of the laughing of his childhood. None of the play fighting, or the playing that had turned into real fighting and ended with one of his brothers trying to shove the other under the stream, screaming I’m gonna drown ya’, ya’ cunt! The boy was quiet, and then he was in front of Yakov, trembling and dripping, naked as everything. When Yakov held out the towel, still sitting on his little spot, he took it as if he’d never touched a towel in his life. His fingers brushed the fuzzy, soft cloth.

“Thank you, Master.”

“Uhm,” Yakov said. “Dry yourself, brat.”

He wrapped it around himself, shuffling awkwardly in front of Yakov. He looked down at the ground already soiling his soles again.

“Got a name, Master.”

Yakov pressed his lips. “A bad one.”

The kid blinked. “It’s Little Pussy, Master.”

“I know,” he said, huffing. “Heard my mother saying it. I won’t be calling you that.” He sent him a look. He remembered Slick's terrible panic at the mere thought of being called a real name instead of Slick. “You like it?”

He shrugged.

“Proper name for an omega, Master. Don’t need to like it, when it’s all that’s deserved.”

He was quite good at dodging having to call himself anything, Yakov noticed. Omegas couldn’t say I, couldn’t call themselves anything but terribly degrading names given by their masters, but that one was pretty masterful at avoiding having to refer to himself as a slut. Clever little shit. Yakov smiled, unbidden.

“I’m gonna get you a real name,” he said, thinking out loud.

“No need,” he said honestly. “No one’s gonna call this anything.”

“I will. Someone’s better than no one, no?”

Half a joke. Half too mocking, too cruel, because every joke he had ever made had always turned into it, when he learned his humor at the feet of his brothers. When the boy looked down, biting into his bottom lip, it was just like looking at Slick, and it made him sick. 

He told him, “Dry your hair and then sit by my side.”

He obeyed. He wrapped the towel under himself before sitting, hugging his skinny legs next to Yakov, and as he did so, the man took the apple he had brought and the knife on his boot to cut it into small, steady pieces he slowly passed to the boy, fearful of making him puke.

The little omega closed his eyes, but not before Yakov could see the tears welling up in them at the first taste he had. His entire body shook as he shoved the rest of the apple piece inside his mouth, too fast, almost choking. Yakov watched, throat closing. “Good?”

He nodded. “Sweet.”

“Go slower,” he warned as he passed them another piece. “Don’t make yourself sick.”

That time, he did, munching on the apple. He sent Yakov a look.

“How many names are there to choose?”

“How many names?” he repeated. He laughed. “Gods, brat. I don’t know. How many names you know?”

The kid tilted his head. Thinking, he was. Seriously, even, staring down at his hand and counting his fingers.

“Five,” he said at last. 

It struck Yakov dumb. He wanted to laugh again, even louder, even crazier. He wanted to argue that it couldn’t be right. There were five people in Yakov’s family alone.

Your father bought him from an omega house, he thought. You knew that. You know how that works. Why the fuck would a slut need to know its clients’ names? He called all of them Master no matter what. You know that.

His Ma used to say that, despite being the one to clash the most with his father, he was the only one to have the man’s appetite, because Yakov was the only one who could visit the brothels as much as him. He’d never fucked an omega as young as this boy. He hadn’t. He—he couldn’t have. He would have noticed. Even as a young man, he couldn’t have been so careless or so stupid. He’d never liked kids. He’d never fucked one. He couldn’t have.

Did it even matter, if they were Slick’s age instead?

The dark pit inside him grew and Yakov got dangerously close to cutting his thumb open with the knife. For a second, he closed his eyes and steadied his hold on the blade, before he carved another piece out and watched as the kid put the sweet fruit to his lips. That time, he sucked the juice slowly, and it was even worse to see happening. It was a hungry tactic Yakov knew from years where the unlucky weather left them with not enough crops—to suck all the taste out, and chew the rest after, so it felt like two separate acts, as if you had more to eat than you actually had. The boy licked his lips, and then he licked each one of his fingers hungrily, the tears still falling down sticky cheeks and stickier eyelashes. Yakov should, perhaps, have let him eat before he’d bathed, but he hadn’t thought about how hungry he’d be.

He stopped watching as the omega finished the rest of that damn apple. 

When he did, Yakov got up. He pulled the kid to his feet. Bad choice. He was too thin, feeling impossibly light in Yakov’s hands, and he just came like a fucking rag doll. Yakov steadied him. “Shit,” he said, and then, “fuck, you’ alright?”

The omega went still.

“Of course, Master.”

Yakov was touching his arm. It was impossible not to think about how cold he was, or how his fingers could meet as they grasped at him. Even calling him skin and bones feels too generous.

Ma, he despaired, Pa. Do you give him any food at all? Or just scraps every other day? What’re you doing to him?

Yakov squeezed his fragile bones.

“I will think about something,” he said, and he wasn’t sure if he was talking just about finding the omega a new name.

-

He got the paper from Dmitri, but standing by Slick’s side after supper took most of his confidence away. 

It’d been six months since they’d had Motka, but there was a kind of quiet delight that still followed Slick, some constant bright light in their eyes that could only be called pride. They looked lighter. They looked exhausted, despite all that: sure, they were grateful every time Motka woke them up crying in the middle of the night, for as long as it meant their kid was alive and they were allowed to care for him. They were still kept awake at night, and gratefulness couldn’t replace sleep. There was a general understanding that bothering them was the last thing anyone wanted to do.

Yakov held the paper, wrinkling it. Slick looked over, cradling the back of Motka’s head against their chest. Their eyes were alert, but not quite alarmed. They weren’t scared of Yakov anymore, hadn’t been ever since Yakov gave them Motka’s first toy, and though there was some anxiety there in that warm brown, they seemed trustful enough, almost comfortable in the sureness that they wouldn’t be hurt in the middle of everyone. Their braid was tight and straight, which meant Lord Fradkov had likely been the one to make it for them. He wondered if that helped. The Lord. The weight of his fondness brushing their shoulders.

Yakov sat by his side, running a hand through the paper to smooth it and pointing with the pen. 

“I needed some help,” he explained. “I promised to bring someone a list of names on my next visit, but I can't write that well. Can’t think of many names either.”

Slick shifted Motka to free one of their hands and shoved the mashed vegetables they had been giving the baby away from the paper cautiously, sending him a searching look. Yakov smiled, nervous, a bit shy, because Slick knew there were far better writers in the manor and he knew that Yakov knew. Dmitri himself. A couple of the betas. Anyone who could write could write better than Slick, with their missing fingers and the stiffness in the remaining ones which left their letters all crooked and strange. There weren't a lot of reasons for Yakov to ask for their help specifically, besides him wanting them to.

Slick paused, but they didn’t ask. They never did, not really. They nodded instead, a small thing, and took the pen.

“This omega knows a lot of names,” they assured and Yakov smiled, because they’d all seen the omega bending over books with Dmitri and Pavel at all times of the day when they were still pregnant, trying to choose a name for Motka.

Said baby had just gotten to that phase where making high-pitched squealing noises and trying to stick things he was interested in on his mouth was the most fun he could have. Slick lightly tapped his back as they wrote down options and suggestions, rocking him softly. The others piped in as they finished their food and got up from the table. Some even pushed their meals away just to lean closer and put their unasked opinion forward. They were a bunch of meddlers, Yakov knew, who couldn’t stop themselves from putting their big noses in others’ business, and who found as many excuses as they could to stay around when Slick brought sweet, adorable Motka downstairs.

He brought the paper in his pocket. He got the omega away from the house, which was still too easy when he followed orders without thought and Yakov’s Ma seemed to be almost hoping he was taking the kid away to fuck him, at least in the sense she hoped he’d kill him one of those days. When Yakov sat in the dry grass, he patted for the boy to follow, and he did it quickly.

“I can’t read that well either,” Yakov admitted, scratching his cheek. “But names ain’t that hard. Just point to one and I can read it out to you, and you choose the one that sounds the best.” He stared at the letters blankly. It stretched, until he tapped the middle of one of Slick’s crooked lines. Yakov was pretty sure he did so completely randomly, but he still read it dutifully, “That says Matvey.”

A pause. The kid bit his lip and, bafflingly, he nodded.

“What?” asked. “This one?” He nodded again. Yakov stared at him. He squinted. “That’s a fast fucking choice.” He wanted to argue more. To say this mattered and he couldn’t just point at some random letters he couldn’t read and decide that whatever Yakov said was going to be what he was from then on. Instead, the kid flinched violently at his tone, terrified eyes finding his, and it was so startling all he could blurt out was, “It’s good. A good choice. A good, modern name to have.”

“Matvey,” they croaked out. Yakov had the odd feeling he only spoke around them. His lips curled. “This thanks you, Master.”

“Uhm,” he said, uncomfortable with the tug inside his chest. Still no this slut. Not even this hole. Just this, because he was a sly little brat, Yakov could tell. “A name for a name.”

It took him longer. When he spoke, it was a trembling breath, eyes wide and tear-bright, “This thanks Master Yakov for the name, then.”

-

Matvey didn’t have enough meat in him to have any muscles and that left him with no strength in his arms. Yakov didn’t attempt to teach him how to chop wood, but he did teach him how to mend the fence when one of the cows broke it again. 

Even though some of his fingers were crooked, broken once, they were less stiff and awkward than Slick’s, and he worked kneeling by his side with something that could almost pass for easiness, despite the weak sun beating over his skinny, pale shoulders, and how his knees were chapped raw against the cold ground. One of his eyes was freshly swollen shut from what he could tell had been one damn good punch, which Yakov supposed was one of those little gifts his father had to bestow upon an omega slave these days, now that all his own sons were too old not to fight back. Matvey still did his best to watch him with only one good eye.

His Ma brought Yakov a flask of cold water. He took a swing and, when she was gone, passed it to Matvey. He expected some hesitation, perhaps. Slick would have paused. They would’ve waited for verbal permission and kept their eyes wary in Yakov's reaction to every sip. He didn’t expect for the boy to take it from his hand and drink it ravenously, even more so than when given food. As he watched his throat swallowing desperately, Yakov felt the dread setting in at the thought that for all he’d been worried about feeding him, dehydration might get Matvey even before the hunger.

Yakov swallowed tightly. Matvey lowered the empty flask, wiping his chin. He breathed heavily.

“Sorry,” he said, voice empty.

“It’s alright, brat,” he replied, although it wasn’t, not at all.

At the Fradkov’s home, Slick smiled at their son. At home, Slick, an omega who’d once been just as desperate and hurt as Matvey, snorted quietly when Pasha told them a joke; and gave Vytia soft little corrections that felt like a whole new world of confidence coming from them; and, for some reason, held their alpha’s hand, sometimes, and had their fingers brought to his lips warmly, for an even more shocking scene.

At home, every time he visited, Matvey had a new bruise or a new scar. He kneeled by the front door as soon as he heard Yakov’s horse, dazed eyes following his purse eagerly as he dismounted, as if trying to sense what it was Yakov had brought him that time. He was always bleeding. Often, it was from his genitals in some way or the other.

At home, every horror the Fradkov manor protected its inhabitants from persisted.

So, he taught Matvey how to fix a fence. There was nothing he could do to stop the rest, but he could teach the little thing how to use his hands. It was what Osip had done with him when he first appeared, a failed murderer with nothing but his fury and his fists, and he knew it was what Osip was doing with Slick now, too. 

Holding an axe was far too much, but he told his Ma to go rest and walked around the farm with ta Matvey, teaching him how to milk the cows and feed the sheep, and get the chicken’s eggs. “Do this when my father isn’t around,” he whispered to him, “and Ma might go easier on you.”

It had been the case with him and his brothers, with her hitting the side of their head with such a heavy hand his ears would spend hours ringing, and shrinking useless! useless boys!, running after them with a wooden spoon, until they learned to make themselves useful around the farm. He would’ve thought it was different with an omega, but the way she’d complained about him not doing anything when he wasn’t being used by his father made him think that it wasn’t, not where it really mattered.

Yakov made a point not to look at the belt welts on his naked back when Matvey was crouching down in front of him. He made an even stronger point not to think about the similar scars on his bony arms, his thighs, his ass.

He saw it in flashes, like tricks of light. Slick putting the laundry up with Motka on his hip, humming under their breath. Matvey’s arms trembling as he touched the cows, too weak to hold them up firmly. Slick turning to Vytia, bowing their head to hide a smile. Matvey crawling his way with dirt and blood on his face, bowing by Yakov’s feet. The fury was reasonable. The guilt, he wished it wasn’t.

“Ma,” he called, “where’s the revolver?”

She stopped kneading the bread on the table. Her eyes fell on Matvey hiding behind his back, derisive, before flicking to Yakov’s face. “Don’t do it in the house.”

“Fuck off,” he spat. “I’m teaching it how to hunt.” And then, for the sake of making her agree with it, “Someone needs to get you some meat when they ain’t around. Gods know you ain’t no good hunting alone.”

“You little brat—” and she slapped him, but she also brought him the shiny, expensive revolver that Yakov had bought them a year ago, so he supposed it was a win.

Yakov didn’t put him to shoot at any animals. He thought that would be too much too. Instead, he got the empty bottles he knew his father would have laying around, gun tucked on his trousers, and brought Matvey to a distant spot in the woods for him to try and hit the bottles. 

“Hey, Matvey.” When his eyes didn’t immediately go to Yakov, too focused staring at the weapon with barely concealed horror, Yakov hit the side of his head lightly. It did the trick—he looked, pale. “Listen here. You never point this to something you ain’t ready to shoot. I know my father likes his games, but he’s a dumb fuck. This ain’t a toy. You always gotta’ know what you’re aiming for and what’s behind it. You hear me?”

He nodded quickly.

As expected, Matvey was bad at it—his hands shook as he had a tight two-handed grip around the revolver, and he kept staring back at Yakov as he tried to teach him a proper stance, unfocused in his fear of doing something wrong. His aim was not too bad, though Yakov kept a close eye and a hand on his elbow just for safety, but the point of it wasn’t to get him to shoot like a hunter.

“You know where Ma hides it?” he asked, watching him. Matvey paused, before nodding. “You know how to run from the house to these woods?” A longer beat. He nodded again. Yakov let out a long breath. “There we go, brat,” he said as he shoved his head, feeling somehow lighter and heavier in equal measures.

He managed to hit two of the bottles. Yakov supposed, worst came to worst, it would be enough to get him away and running.

-

Sasha handed the letter to him without much thought early in the morning. No one from the outside was allowed close to the Fradkov house, so Sasha was the one to go down the mountains to get their mail every odd day or more. He didn’t read it. Once Yakov did, he’d mourned that Sasha respected them so much. He mourned a lot that brought him to that moment, touching that letter.

He went looking for Slick. He didn’t know why—he just went and handed it to them. Somewhere deep down, he thought if it was for him to get those news, it should be from an omega.

“Can you tell me what they wrote?”

Slick looked down at the paper. Their lips moved in tandem with their eyes, silently sounding the words. For a second too long, they stayed parted as Slick rationalized what exactly they were seeing and went painfully still. When they looked up, their eyes were wide.

Yakov felt himself shake. “I—I read it, too. But I was kinda hoping I read it wrong so—so can you just tell me if I did?”

Slick just stood, frozen. A beat passed and then—

“This omega is sorry, sir.”

No mistake on his part, then. 

His father was simply dead.

-

It was just the shock, Yakov could tell. He didn’t care about his father. He sure as fuck didn’t love the old man. He’d been a stern, cruel figure for all of Yakov’s childhood, responsible for making the two terrible bullies his brothers had become and the sleazy, bitter bastard Yakov knew he’d been when living with them. If there’d been any small amount of care Yakov had held for him, it‘d died the second he laid eyes on Matvey.

It was still his Pa. The only one he got.

Dmitri let him take the carriage. Insisted on it, as if it would change a thing. Yakov took it down the road, but he didn’t take it home. He stopped in the middle of nowhere and sat by the dust, waiting for it to feel less like a punch and more like something that had truly, really happened after so many years waiting for it. He didn’t cry. His hands shook, some old, familiar fury that made him ache to punch someone, and his eyes stayed dry, but his hands kept wiping them until they were red as if he’d been crying.

He stayed there for longer than it was wise, before pulling himself up. Though it would have been wiser to ride to the house, he walked instead, lost and empty, until his legs ached.

He hadn’t been close enough to the house to see them, when he heard them.

Matvey screamed. It was a bloodcurdling sound; the desperate, terrified last shriek of someone who was sure they were about to die. It made Yury struggle, his arms tight around Matvey, trying to drag him back into the house as the kid continued to scream and screech and, gods above, fight. He kicked the air and threw his body against Yury, trying to wiggle out of his hold, slamming his head and shoving his elbows blindly.

There was only one thing Yakov needed to do, truly.

Just show his face, and Yury had immediately thrown Matvey to the ground.

“You fucker,” he spat, and then he was marching towards Yakov and he was the one Yury was grabbing, which was alright. He could take a punch to the face better than a starved little pup. He could dish back a lot more, too. “Got a lot of fucking nerve,” Yury snarled, “coming here after everything,” only then, Yakov’s fist found his mouth, so there was no more talking from him.

“Fuck you,” he spat back.

Before Yakov got arrested, he’d managed to get away from the guards and get home. His mother had wanted to hide him, while his father had been adamant that they should either run him off or turn him in. His brothers, though, had been the ones to actually do it. Somehow, they came out angrier than Yakov. He’d been the one betrayed, the one jailed, the one tortured, but they thought that, doing what he did, he’d put the family in danger. They couldn’t forgive him even now that he worked for Lord Fradkov.

Which was alright, also. Yakov wasn’t planning on forgiving them any time soon either.

It was their mother screaming that made Yury stop, and it was Yury taking his hands off Yakov that let him get the man on his back, kneeling over him. He panted. Yury snarled a dozen terrible curses, but what finally got Yakov out of the adrenaline were Matvey’s sobs. His hands let go of Yury’s shirt, knuckles bloody and cracked open, and he looked up.

Mother, crying and being held by their brother, shoved Anatoliy away.

Yakov got up. “Ma,” he called, and louder, urgent, “Ma,” taking her wrists into his hands as he pulled her away as she tried to get to the omega. “Shit, Ma.”

Her eyes fell on Matvey, fervent.

“Take it,” she said. “Just get it out of my face, take it, take it!”

“Mom,” called Yury, the worry in his face making him, for one brief second, look just like the boy Yakov had grown up with, like a trick of the light upon them. Anatoliy stared, and he, too, was as useless as a little kid again.

“My husband is dead,” she shrieked, pushing Yakov. “Dead. Take—take this hole away from me, Yakov! Now!” She went to grab Matvey by the arm, but Yakov pulled her back violently before she could. He held her tighter.

“I’m gonna,” he said. “I’m gonna, just don’t hit him, alright? I can deal with the omega.”

How, he had no idea.

-

Matvey was naked, but he was always naked. He was bloody and bleeding, but it was a particularly good day when he was only the former and clearly that day wasn’t going to be a good day. He didn’t say a word about any of it, just followed Yakov to the Lord’s carriage. 

Yakov made him sit with him in the driver’s seat, just because he couldn’t imagine taking his eyes away from the kid at that point. When he took his coat off and pulled it around Matvey’s cold shoulders, he looked up, his breathing hollow. Yury had gotten him good before Yakov got there—half his face was a bloody mess and the other half a dirty one. Gods knew how much he’d been hit and how much he’d been dragged against the ground. Grabbing the back of his neck, Yakov moved his head to the side, grimacing at the damage.

“How old are you, even?”

He let go of him. Somehow, only then did Matvey’s eyes focus on him, as if he’d just taken notice of Yakov. He looked surprised to even be able to focus on anything, blinking slowly.

“Don’t know, Master.”

Yakov sucked the blood from his knuckles. “Fuck.”

Quietly, Matvey stayed by his side, watching the road. He rocked his body back and forth and it seemed like such a childish little move it made Yakov want to cry. Instead, he looked the other way.

“Master,” Matvey said, his voice very, very low. Hoarse from disuse. Yakov turned to him. It was strange, because the omega turned, too. Looked Yakov right in the eyes, like Slick still didn’t do most of the time. He blinked, his eyes filled with tears, but bright, wide, lively like Yakov hadn’t seen before. “Master, you’ve been kind to this slut.”

It was the first time he called himself a slut around Yakov. He hated it.

“I’ve tried to be,” he said through the lump in his throat. He knew he hadn’t been gentle enough. He knew he shouldn’t grab or hit him the way he did, but it was the only way he knew how to be.

Matvey nodded. “This slut doesn’t deserve it, but it thanks you anyway.” He looked down to his naked thighs. His hands were painfully small, but all fucked up as he let them rest on his lap. Just like Slick there were broken fingers healed wrong and scars on his palms, though his seemed to be some nasty burns, not knife wounds like the older omega. He didn’t have any missing fingers, but he also didn’t have any nails. He blinked down at them. Yakov tried to blink away the image of someone tearing off little Matvey’s nails one by one. “Can it ask for one last thing?”

Yakov's throat felt parched. The entire situation felt wrong.

“What?”

“Can you do it with a knife?”

“What?”

“Thought about it, Master. Being beaten to death is so very slow, and so is being fucked to death, or choked or drowned. And burning—” He scratched his palms, blinking fast. “Burning just hurts so much. Master could cut this slut’s throat. If—if Master has a gun, it knows it doesn’t deserve, but it’d be grateful for a bullet in the head, too. We could do it on the road. Wouldn’t need to clean it or anything. Can just leave this slut here. Someone will take its body to fuck at some point and then it won’t be Master’s problem at all.” 

“You think I could kill you and leave?”

“I’d be happy,” he replied. It shocked Yakov. The use of the pronoun. Slick still didn’t dare to so much as whisper the word I. It made him deeply aware of just how much Matvey was sure he was going to die in the next couple of minutes. “It'd be alright, Master,” and gods, the way he says it, it was like he was reassuring Yakov of all people. That kid. That poor, tortured, raped kid, reassuring him instead of the opposite, blinking big eyes and saying with all the sincerity of the world, “Dying in the hands of someone kind who gave me a name, it ain’t that bad.”

“I couldn’t be kind and kill someone.”

“Can be kind and kill an omega.”

“You weren’t going to let my brother do shit to you.”

Matvey’s eyes went vacant. “That’s Master Yury. Didn’t want it if it was gonna be him. He’d make it hurt. But it’s right, if it’s you. You’re gonna be quick with it, Master. I can tell.” He shifted. Matvey lowered his head, brushing one hand through a swollen, scratched cheek. “I know—it knows. Master doesn’t want to fuck this slut. What else would it be right to do?”

“Anyone tell you why I live somewhere else?” He shook his head. “I tried to kill an alpha.” Matvey blanched. Yakov grinned. “Yes. You see, maybe talking about what would be right to do according to your training isn’t that valuable when it comes to me.”

“How?”

“Nothing well planned,” he admitted. “I was drunk, I was furious. Fucking exhausted, too. Had just gotten out of work and the boss didn’t wanna pay up, ‘cause those alphas can just say they don’t got the money and say the wages are gonna be late, but see what’d happen if I tried using that excuse with the bank. I went to the first tavern I saw and I just wanted to drink until they had to kick me out, but then this pretty boy comes talking shit and putting his hands on the poor tavern girl who didn’t want anything with him. There was a fight. And I got a lot more hits than him.”

He’d talked a lot more than just shit. He’d been doing a lot more than touching, too. But Matvey knew how those things worked. He didn’t need Yakov explaining it to him. 

Yakov had done a lot of damage, likewise. Enough so that “a lot more hits” didn’t feel like enough of a description. But Matvey had seen enough violence. He didn’t need to hear Yakov describing even more of it.

“I should have died,” Yakov continued. That was just another thing Matvey didn’t need to hear him say to know. He put a hand on Matvey’s  shoulder, finding his eye. “I stayed some long weeks wishing I had, after the guards got me and made me suffer for every hit I landed. They were going to execute me, but what I did gathered attention. One of those people who was interested in me is my current employer.”

He didn’t mean Lord Fradkov. Yakov knew that, unlike most of the others, his situation wasn’t simply the Lord being notified of some criminal beta marked to die and stopping it from happening with an offer that felt like a deal with some foreign god of evil. Lord Fradkov hadn’t wanted to save him—Dmitri had, after hearing about his crime. Lord Fradkov had gotten into a lot of trouble and lost a lot of money, only because Dmitri had been so delighted by Yakov’s story.

He owed his life to an omega. He didn’t know how to explain that to other people: even the others at the estate had been helped by the Lord, by chance and luck.

When he looked at Matvey, a sharp burst of guilt rang on the hollow of his chest like a physical blow. The omega was so young. Yakov liked to think he would’ve helped him no matter what, but he didn’t know. He didn’t want to even think about it. 

He’d hurt omegas before being employed by the Fradkov, the way all of them had, and it left him sick to think that he couldn’t be sure if he would’ve gone through all the trouble with Matvey before Dmitri. He could, of course, be sure that he wouldn’t have known how to be patient enough before he’d known Slick. That felt even worse, somehow.

His coat dwarfed Matvey’s small and starved body, though it didn’t stop him from trembling. It was cold enough that Yakov thought at least some of it was because of the weather, not just his fear. He tugged the heavy wool tighter around Matvey out of some lost, desperate need to get him warmer and more covered.

Matvey whispered, hands tight around the coat, “Your employer got a gun?”

“Hey.” Yakov took his chin. “I didn’t give you a name just to shoot your brains out on some dirty road, alright, Matvey? I’m not cutting your throat or doing any of this other shit either. My employer—you’re gonna get it when you see him, but he’s a good guy. Lord Fradkov is fine, too.”

They talked shit about Lord Fradkov, sometimes, if only behind his back. It was very easy to make jokes about his weirdness, when he had so much of it. But under it all—under the cold, under the apathy—he was the best alpha any of them had ever known. Yakov would take the leap and say he was the best alpha to have ever existed. Even if he hadn’t a bone of empathy in his body, it didn’t change that he was a good man.

The kind, it so seemed, that took one look at Matvey wrapped in Yakov’s coat and leaned back in his chair, terrifying eyes glinting as he studied the little omega.

“Draw him a warm bath,” he said, his voice firm: an order, after all, “and call for Hennish. Dmitri has gone to bed already. Tomorrow you can discuss the finer details with him.”

Which meant Matvey would be treated, and he would be dressed, and gods, he would stay.

-

Most obviously, Hennish said, a cut that ran through Matvey’s cheek needed to be stitched together. One of his eyes was so swollen he could hardly crack it open when Hennish asked him to try; the other, the white had been filled with bloody-red, and somehow the doctor tried to assure Yakov that wasn’t a priority. What he needed was to take off Yakov’s coat and that, Hennish didn’t want to do with an audience.

“Can you leave us, please?” Hennish asked him, voice calm, voice soft as if he was speaking around an easily-startled little cat, and Yakov was going to, he was.

Matvey held his hand before he could.

“Master Yakov?” 

Yakov looked over his shoulder. “You want me to stay?”

He didn’t answer immediately. Instead, Matvey stared at him with one big, terrified eye, grasping at his hand before nodding. Yakov, because he could never have said no after such a scene, stayed.

He sat by Matvey’s side in the doctor’s bed when it became clear the boy didn’t want to let go of his hands. Hennish watched it for a beat, before forcing his shoulders to relax, nodding at Yakov, and pausing for one second only to clean his glasses. Matvey’s wary gaze followed him, unthinkingly squeezing Yakov’s fingers. His eyes fell on Hennish’s wrists. 

Hennish, when he turned, caught the attention. For a second, he paused, before he turned his pulses towards them to show it better. “These are rope scars,” he admitted. Matvey stared at him with open confusion. “I was, like Yakov, arrested once. They weren’t kind about it.” Matvey lifted his free hand, before freezing. Hennish sent him a gentle look. “You can touch. I touched yours.”

Matvey reached. His thumb brushed the old, fading scars. His eyes shifted from Hennish, to Yakov, to Hennish again, and he swallowed before letting go of both men and starting to shrug the coat off his body.

“It’s bad.”

Hennish looked down at the boy’s crotch. His expression didn’t change.

“It is,” he agreed calmly, “but it is nothing we cannot treat here.”

“Master Doctor can tell,” Matvey said, looking down at his fingers. “If I will die.”

Hennish stopped for a second. He turned to Yakov, eyebrows rising with surprise, and Yakov shrugged. I, again. It almost made him smile, if the rest of the phrase wasn’t so terrible.

“You will not,” Hennish assured. “There’s medicine I can give you.” He stopped. “I will be clear, it is nothing that will cure it completely, but I can make the pain more bearable.”

“Really?” he asked. “Old Master—they said he died ‘cause of this.”

Yakov froze. Hennish didn’t look at him, but it was the kind of not looking that felt deliberate and, as such, felt heavier than if he’d been staring straight. Old Master. It had to be his father, didn’t it?

“He didn’t,” Hennish promised him. “Perhaps, if he was sick already, you could have given him an infection that made it worse. But rest. You couldn’t kill him by itself.”

“Would—could I live?”

“You will,” Hennish promised, firm, so sure of it some terrible dread that had been gripping at Yakov’s chest went lax. Hennish had never made promises he couldn’t keep, much less about one’s health. “Please. Can I give those wounds a look? I will need to touch them, just a bit.

His cheeks flushed. “Master Doctor doesn’t need to ask.”

“I believe a doctor always should,” he corrected and waited, patiently, until Matvey nodded and spread his thighs open.

-

Yakov let himself think about it only once, curled on the blankets in the floor while Matvey slept in his bed: if it were Slick in Matvey’s place, they would’ve let Yury kill them. They wouldn’t have fought or screamed. Instead, they would have been pliant in Yury’s arm, and his brother would have raped them one last time and drowned them in their childhood’s lake. There would be nothing for Yakov to hear and, so, nothing for him to stop.

Once, he allowed himself. Just once.

It was already one time too much.

-

Dmitri was angry that Yakov hadn’t woken him up and furious that Pyotr had told him not to do so, not when there was an entire new child in their home that Dmitri would have liked to have settled properly the night before. Yakov watched Matvey’s face and could not be more grateful that they had angered Dmitri, as that let him see Matvey’s awed reaction to an omega scolding an alpha and only receiving an honest, rigid apology in return.

The clothes he had borrowed, some of Vytia’s, were too large on him, but the pants were too short. Even after Dmitri told him he could rest and that he had no duties besides healing, he followed after Yakov as he worked, like a wide-eyed little duck. Many of the others wanted to joke about that—they didn’t dare after they caught Yakov’s glare.

His face was still so swollen and bruised it didn’t look like a face when Yakov caught sight of him on his peripheral. 

He was still limping. At night, Yakov knew that he didn’t sleep and that he woke up screaming when he did, and that he never used his bed no matter what. He could eat very little and Hennish was quite serious about introducing more food to him slowly, something about the possibility of too much too soon bursting his stomach. Yakov’s own hands had to be disinfected and bandaged, and he too received a scolding from Dmitri just like Lord Fradkov, but besides that, he was handed the Slick and Vytia special, in which he had to pretend all the pauses he made during the day were normal and not a carefully crafted routine Dmitri had made just for Matvey’s sake.

When he first saw Slick, it was as if every small amount of trust Yakov had managed to grow had been broken. 

Slick was walking with Lord Fradkov’s, just to make things worse. They looked like they’d just taken a bath, hair wet and Motka on their arms, bouncing Motka as he cried, Lord Fradkov hardly glancing at the crying as they walked into the house. Matvey’s face fell.

Yakov looked. “That’s Slick.”

“I heard.” Matvey continued looking. He hugged himself. “The Master fucks them.”

Yakov tried not to laugh. “Lord Fradkov doesn’t fuck anyone,” he said. “You saw those gloves of his? He can’t even touch Slick without ‘em. He can’t touch anyone, from what I’ve seen. Too mighty for the pleasures of the flesh.” 

And gods knew he was handsome enough a good deal of the betas would’ve liked serving his bed even with him being as charmless as he was. Gods, he was so handsome even Yakov couldn’t deny the appeal. It was impossible to ignore that face and that body. Impossible not to linger on them, even if only for one beat too long. He'd never taken anyone, however, not willing nor unwilling. Yakov hadn’t even known of him taking an alpha suitor even if just for appearance’s sake. 

“Those two don’t do that. He—” What did he do? Yakov watched the house, frowning. “Lord Fradkov likes them, I think. As much as any alpha can like someone.” He looked down at Matvey. “He won’t fuck you.”

“But he hurts them.”

“He doesn’t. Dmitri wouldn’t allow it.”

Matvey snorted. “‘Cause it matters what an omega wouldn’t allow an alpha to do to another omega.”

“Matters to Lord Fradkov.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause he loves Dmitri and Pavel more than any alpha had ever loved anyone.”

“Why?”

Yakov laughed. It seemed like Matvey was not so different from Pavel; he asked the same endless amount of questions, when he trusted someone enough.

“Dmitri’s just the kind to nurture that kind of devotion.”

“And them?“

A pause. “Slick gets something different.”

“Like?”

Like pity, for one. Guilt, because everyone in that place knew they had at least once been responsible for hurting an omega just like Slick. Like Matvey, now. It might even be only guilt and pity to some. After all, it wasn’t like Slick had bonded with every one of the betas. But it wouldn’t be fair to say it was only guilt and pity to all. It was easy to grow fond of that little omega. It was easy to grow to care for them, to wish to protect them, and hard to explain why besides the fact they seemed so much like they needed it and had never gotten it before.

“Regard,” he answered at last, knowing it wasn’t enough, surprised when Matvey was confident enough to send him a glare to make sure he understood that the kid also didn’t think it was enough. Yakov laughed. “It’s all I got, brat.”

He looked down.

“‘Course,” Matvey mumbled and Yakov laughed again, pushing his head with something like deep fondness, too, blossoming inside his chest.

-

Matvey didn’t like eating at the table with the betas. It overwhelmed him and even the most oblivious of Lord Fradkov’s hires could have seen it. Instead, Osip got him and Yakov two chairs close to the furnace, so he could stay away from the noise in the pretense he was seeking the heat, curled around his bowl with the trembling awe of someone who didn’t quite believe they were being fed so much even now. When Slick walked their way with a cup of juice for Matvey, Yakov thought the boy might not understand how the act was still very daring coming from them.

“Here,” they whispered, sending him an anxious, close-lipped smile that Yakov never saw him giving anyone besides Vytia, and very rarely Osip.

Matvey took Slick’s hands instead of the cup. It startled them, and startled Yakov enough he froze from where he was watching them. A small little breath left Slick’s lips, some half-gasp, half-whimper, before they tilted their head and caught Matvey’s gaze. It made Slick’s smile slip and their face soften, if that was even possible.

“This omega’s old Master took this one out,” they told him, their voice quiet, as Matvey’s thumb touched one of their missing fingers, “and then he broke this one,” they tapped one of the crooked ones, “because this omega was crying too hard and it tried to dry its tears. He liked when it cried. It was supposed to let him see it. All of it.”

Matvey’s eyes were heavy and red-rimmed. The fire danced in the left side of his face, making his features sharper, more hungry.

“How old?”

“Younger than you,” they confessed.

Matvey swallowed. “How?” and from the way Slick looked, Yakov had the feeling there was some unspoken question there that he didn’t understand. They shook their head, a rueful smile tugging at their lips. Their eyes flickered towards Yakov, before going back to Matvey.

“Take their gentleness,” they said. “Take the quiet. Makes it less painful.”

“Won’t stop?”

“Sometimes, it will. Will get smaller, when everything else gets bigger.”

Yakov didn’t understand. Matvey did, blinking teary eyes. Slick hesitated as they went to go back to their son, but they reached, drying the tears with their sleeve. They brushed a hand through Matvey's hair and leaned down, letting a kiss in his forehead.

He croaked, “Thank you.”

Slick smiled. It was small, more willful than happy.

“Did nothing,” they whispered.

Yakov supposed, if he couldn’t explain to Matvey the effect that Slick had on that household, that he shouldn’t be surprised that Slick themself didn’t even know that there was some sharp, noticeable change that they had caused that ought to be explained.