Chapter Text
Bruce Banner was angry.
(He almost always was.)
He glared at the man seated across him, a grey-haired Beta doctor dressed in a nondescript lab coat. The identity card attached to his pocket stated, ‘Dr Erskine’. Despite the calm manner he was exhibiting, and the friendly smile adorning his bearded face, the dark eyes staring at Bruce steadily through horn-rimmed glasses were steely.
Beta soldiers (and the occasional Alpha ones) continued guarding the doors stoically as the doctor spoke, “Mr Banner,” (Bruce clenched his fists), “the Safe and Healthy Impregnation, Embryogenesis, Labor & Delivery program is your best option right now.”
Bruce barked a laugh. “Because your program is so experimental you have to resort to recruiting convicts. And a juvenile record is sealed and can be expunged,” he said sarcastically.
Dr Erskine gave Bruce a humourless smile. “Planning to blow up your school during school hours and killing half the staff and students there – approximately five hundred lives – is a serious crime,” his voice was stern, “You’re not facing house arrest or probation here, Mr Banner. You’re facing jail…and most definitely a blended sentence [1].”
And you won’t want to be an Omega in heat in an adult jail, the unspoken but implied sentence hang heavily in the air, they’ll tear you apart.
‘They wouldn’t,’ Bruce thought. There weren’t enough Omegas in the US, and the number was declining year by year, with advances in medical technology enabling more Betas to carry (their statistically more likely Beta children) to term. His dynamic was something Bruce had hoped would protect him from incarceration.
(But of course, Bruce didn’t even plan on surviving the bomb in the first place. He fully intended to disappear, along with the jerks, the good-for-nothing chauvinistic Alphas and Betas bullies in that sorry excuse of a school, brainless criminal-to-be who thought Omegas could ever amount to nothing and didn’t hesitate to tell this to Bruce’s face every single day. Bruce was doing his country a favour, really.)
But of course, when have fate been kind to Bruce?
“Even if you survive that ordeal,” Dr Erskine continued painting the horror story for him, “you’ll leave jail without having finished high school, some ten, twenty years from now. I don’t have to tell you how doomed your life will be.”
When the doctor looked at him again, there was something almost…tender about his gaze. “You’re smart…Bruce,” Bruce gritted his teeth at the reminder (he’s a freak, freak, freak), but at least the older man had stopped calling him with his father’s name. “I know you can be something…more. A lot more. In our program, you will have a place to live in, you will be well-nourished, you can study for GED and if you are up to it we can even provide you financial assistance to complete college.”
Bullshit. Bruce would be kept pregnant, year after year after year, until his body broke. He would just be the breeding machine everyone expected him to be.
“And letting my babies live with parents who weren’t pregnant with them and didn’t form bonds with them during the pregnancy is a good idea, isn’t it?” Bruce snarled, half surprised that of all sentences, this would be the one he’d voice out.
But that was the gist of it, wasn’t it? The world was rotten and a horrible place to live and Bruce had never wanted to bring a life into this place. His mother, the Omega who’d had him for nine months in her womb, was the only person who’d ever cared about him.
Dr Erskine was quiet for a while. “I know your…family situation was not ideal, Bruce,” despite how soft and careful he sounded, Bruce still flinched, “but couples have to pass through very stringent State requirements to be adoptive parents…and some of them in our list have waited for five years to have your baby. I can guarantee that they will cherish your baby, love him, and treat him right,” even more so than yours did.
And that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
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At least, Bruce thought as every inch of his body was prodded and examined, he would be contributing to the world now.
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The first heat Bruce shared with an Alpha assigned to him (Patrick, a twenty-something blonde with broad shoulders and a strong frame, a cop), some three weeks after Bruce signed the contract that would drop his charges and signed him to five years in the Safe and Healthy Impregnation, Embryogenesis, Labor & Delivery program, was a disaster.
Bruce was not sexually active before joining the program. Well, for one, no one had exactly been pawing for a nerdy, weird guy like him. Also, he had his first heat late (at sixteen, two to three years later than the average Omega). Bruce’s cycles were irregular and generally heavy (might be due to malnourishment, the medical staff who performed Bruce’s entry physical speculated) and Bruce generally disappeared to the heat hostels [2] to take care of his problems by himself. He’d shared a heat (his first) with someone else by accident, staying in a secluded corner of the public library after school to sit out the discomforts he’d been feeling over his spine and his feverish skin for the past week, only to lose his senses by the evening. The Beta librarian who’d found him helped relieved him before sending him to the clinic, where a patient Omega nurse taught Bruce how to use the pelvic massager [3] after he’d regained his full mental capacity two days later. Bruce thought he was going to combust in shame.
Bruce had never particularly liked Alphas (not that he liked Betas any better). May be (most definitely) they smelled too much like his father, and Bruce had never associated his father to an overwhelming sense of safety (it was rather the opposite).
So the moment Patrick entered the room, Bruce, who had been sitting at the corner in nothing but the medical grub that exposed his genitals, his skin clammy with sweat and his thighs wet with slick, curled into a ball and was paralyzed in terror instead of getting down on all four and presenting himself to the strong, virile Alpha.
Everyone in the observatory next to the room (attached to a drawer for the nurses to pass the coupling Omega and Alpha water, towels and blankets over the next few days) noticed that something was wrong straight away, and despite the fact that the room stank of Bruce’s pheromones, Patrick had enough sense to not start stripping off and mounting him. (Or may be Bruce just didn’t smell that good.)
“Get Mr Eriksson out of the room,” Dr Erskine, who monitored every single one of the program participant’s first facilitated intercourse, told the rest of the staff in the observatory, who immediately prepared themselves to go in and manhandle the Alpha out of the room. Patrick left the room without much struggle. He was a cop before he was an Alpha, so when the bespectacled doctor apologized to him, the blonde only shook his head.
“There is violence in his family background, isn’t there?” Patrick was staring at Bruce through the two-way mirror as he breathed deeply to calm his dynamic, which five minutes ago was convinced that there was an Omega to be claimed.
Dr Erskine looked down and pursed his lips. “His father was an alcoholic Alpha,” he said quietly. Brian Banner’s crime was in public records; he wasn’t divulging anything confidential.
An involuntary growl left the blonde’s throat. Patrick hated Alphas who were dicks, and made their spouses and pups suffer instead of providing for them. His eyes couldn’t help but soften slightly as they watched Bruce slowly unfurling in the other room, letting the nurses take care of him. “Such a beautiful Omega,” he whispered, “It’s going to be a tough journey righting the wrong, Doctor. I really hope you’ll succeed.”
Dr Erskine sighed. “You and I both, Mr Eriksson. You and I both.”
“Well,” when it appeared that his body had returned to normal, Patrick stood up, “perhaps next time it’ll help if the Alpha he’s assigned to meet with him before the heat, you know, to familiarize with him.”
Dr Erskine blinked. “What a brilliant idea.” Why did he never think of it before? [4]
The Alpha grinned. “Always glad to help,” he waved his hand.
The doctor waved as the blonde left, thanking the Gods he’d chosen the cop correctly as Bruce’s first match.
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Bruce came to two days later, none the worse for wear. No pains on the hips and legs he’d expected to feel. No cramps in his arms. In fact, Bruce felt very much like after his first heat, where he had nurses assisting him.
The thought woke Bruce up with a jolt, his heart beating quickly under his ribcage. He turned his head to sniff himself, and his stomach sank.
Bruce wasn’t pregnant.
In fact, judging from the lack of any Alpha’s scent on his body, an intercourse might not have happened at all. (The nurses might have cleaned him, sure, but even after that the assigned Alpha’s scent should stick. Alpha’s pheromones weren’t that easy to scrub away.)
Not only was Bruce a freak, he was also a failure for an Omega.
Not long after Bruce had regained consciousness, Dr Erskine entered the medical bay and approached Bruce’s bed. He leaned on the headboard and smiled at the younger man. “How are you?” he asked in a carefully constructed friendly tone. Bruce hated it.
“…Why did you stop the intercourse from happening?” Bruce was never one to beat around the bush.
The older man’s face fell. He straightened up. “Because you weren’t ready,” he spoke as though he was sighing, his face looking ten years older in the blink of an eye. “It’s okay. We can wait for your next heat.”
“Which can be in…two months or a year, I don’t know,” Bruce gripped his blanket tightly. “Isn’t my having babies the whole point of this?” the pitch of his voice started rising.
“If we let the intercourse happen, it would have been rape,” Dr Erskine said, his loud voice overriding Bruce’s thin, frail one. The Beta moved to the end of the bed. “Look at me, Bruce,” the doctor commanded, and the Omega followed instinctively until their eyes made contact. “We need you to have babies for the country, yes,” Dr Erskine’s dark brown eyes held Bruce’s as he talked; his words precise, warm but firm, “but we don’t want to damage you. We want you to be able to have your own children after you leave this program, if you choose to. That means you being able to have a healthy sexual life with a potential significant other later and not always scared of anyone who finds you special and attractive,” he hissed the last part of the sentence.
Bruce inhaled sharply. But nobody is going to. I’m a monster. He began to shake.
The good doctor sighed. “You still need to rest,” he mumbled as he took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’ll see you later,” his voice grew fainter as he stepped away.
Bruce lay down when the nurses told him to, but sleep eluded him the whole night.
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They placed more therapy sessions in Bruce’s schedule. Bruce attended them dutifully, but after a couple of hours of psychologists managing to coax nothing out of the dark-haired Omega, they turned to sessions of yoga and art and craft instead. Bruce spent the rest of his time lightly exercising as the doctors suggested (keeping himself fit for the pregnancy he was meant to already have by this time) and staring at the ceiling of his private quarter, his mind constructing and reconstructing the molecular structures of organic compounds, the last thing he studied in high school. When asked what his favorite pastimes were, Bruce told Dr Hernandez he liked to read about physics, and a week later a set of the most updated American scientific journals appeared in the empty cabinet at his quarter.
Bruce waited dreadfully for his next heat, hoping to God it would come soon and result in a baby. They were wasting so much money for him, and if he didn’t deliver his end of the bargain, they would ship him to jail. Sometimes Bruce wondered why they hadn’t already.
“What’s the last interesting thing you’ve read about?” Rick Jones’ question pulled Bruce out of his reverie.
In a bid to get Bruce more used to Alphas, once every two to three days he would meet one of the Alphas in the program for an hour, just to talk about nothing or have an activity together. Bruce had met Patrick again a week ago in the gym, the blonde smiling widely when he told him, ‘Glad you look better now.’
Rick Jones was a cheerful guy, loved sports and joking around [5]. He was Bruce’s antithesis. At first he reminded Bruce of the Alpha bullies in his previous high school, but Rick was more considerate and strangely protective of him; he wasn’t half bad.
“It’ll bore you,” Bruce answered, a small smile splaying on his lips. No matter how fascinating the World Wide Web was to Bruce, Rick’s eyes would glaze over after two sentences.
The slightly older Alpha raised his chin and looked at Bruce with an expression that said, ‘try me.’
As Bruce worried about what to say next, Peggy plopped herself to the empty seat at their cafeteria table. “Good afternoon, lads,” the dual British-US citizen nodded at them, “could you lend me a hand?”
Peggy Carter was one of the older Omegas in the facility, one of the few who actually volunteered to join the program. Yue Lan, an Asian American Omega in her early twenties who’d participated in the program to avoid charges like Bruce had, made the mistake of asking Peggy what her crime was. The glare Peggy subjected the black-haired woman to could have sent her six feet under, if looks could kill. As it was, Peggy was still giving Yue Lan the cold shoulder now.
Peggy’d given birth to an Alpha in the program before, and baby Phil was adopted by the Coulsons [6], a loving Beta couple who lived the American dream. Photos of the adorable blue-eyed baby dotted her living quarter, Bruce realised, as Peggy brought him and Rick there.
What she needed help with was also apparent, wooden blocks and home-improvement tools strewn all over the table at the centre of the room. “I’m making a fire station toy for Phil,” she explained, “but my grip on the saw isn’t too steady.”
“So cool,” Rick bounced into the room excitedly, “A birthday present? I wish my parents gave me something like this when I was a kid!”
Bruce picked up one of the frames and stared at a photo of baby Phil in a swimsuit, grinning toothlessly as a hazel-eyed blonde woman held him up. He traced the smile on the tiny human’s face. “They let you in his life much?”
Peggy nodded. “They never plan to keep it a secret from him, that he’s adopted.”
“Wow,” Ricky raised his brows, “I don’t know if that’s dumb or that’s good for you. I mean, he’s not exactly your kid now, is he?”
Well-said, Bruce thought.
Peggy grew pensive.
“Uh…sorry,” Ricky frowned and raised his hands. “I put my foot in my mouth a lot-”
“Just lend me your bloody hand,” she commanded, and the boys got down to work because if Alphas could be females, Bruce bet Peggy could definitely pass off as an Alpha.
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Five weeks later, Bruce started feeling a tingle at the base of his spine, and he breathed a sigh in relief that he didn’t have to wait six months for his next heat.
The morning after Bruce told Dr Hernandez his suspicion, there was an Indian man in his late thirties waiting for Bruce in the room designated as the facility’s dance studio, where Bruce usually had his yoga sessions.
“Hi, I’m Raj Sharma,” he offered his hand, lean muscles rippling under the chocolaty skin of his bicep as his arm moved, “a sex therapist,” he winked, “and your Alpha match for your incoming heat.”
Bruce blushed red as a tomato. “Bruce Banner,” he nearly stammered.
“Okay, Bruce,” Raj’s large, smooth hand covered the back of Bruce’s and the Omega nearly jumped in shock, “for the next few days, we’re going to work on making you feel more comfortable with intimate touches.”
For the next one hour, Raj caressed different parts of his skin, moving inward from the end of Bruce’s limbs. He was gentle, never pushing when Bruce tensed in discomfort, always patiently waiting for him to relax again, his baritone accented voice soothing and lulling as he continually told Bruce what he was going to touch and praising the Omega every time he let Raj closer to his erogenous zones [7]. By the end of it, Bruce was deathly embarrassed that he was half-hard, but Raj only beamed at the slight tenting of the younger man’s pants.
“It’s only right that you feel aroused. We’re to have intercourse by the end of the week, after all,” he reassured Bruce, his fingers heavenly as they petted the Omega, carding through Bruce’s hopeless curls in repetitive motions. “You’ve done well today, pup, you’ve been so brave.”
Bruce didn’t believe any word of it, but he soaked in the affection in Raj’s voice like a starved man, his eyes closing as he leaned into the touch.
Before they parted, Bruce looked down at his feet as he asked, “You aren’t an Alpha from the program, are you?”
Raj chuckled. “You’re so sharp, pup,” he reached for Bruce’s hair again. “Yes, Dr Erskine specifically brought me in for you.”
Bruce flinched inwardly. Again, they had to put in extra effort for him-
“But I did willingly choose to be your partner for your incoming heat, Bruce,” Raj lifted Bruce’s chin and kept his gaze, “for I’m to be one of the adoptive parents of the baby resulting from that heat, if all is well, and you’re a gorgeous Omega. I’m endlessly grateful that it’s you who will be the biological mother of my child.” Raj leaned in to drop a kiss below Bruce’s ear.
You’re just desperate to finally have a child, Bruce thought, somewhat unkindly, but craned his head back to offer Raj easier access anyway. Better enjoy it while it last.
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In the next few days, Raj managed to get Bruce to let the Alpha strip him naked and hug him tightly without anything between them, skin pressing against skin from calves to torso. “We’re ready,” Raj spoke to Bruce’s hair.
God, Bruce hoped so.
When Bruce’s heat arrived, the Omega was able to identify Raj by his scent as he entered the room designated for their facilitated intercourse. Bruce dug his nails against his thighs to keep them from curling to a fetal position, forcing himself to keep his breathing even, according to Raj’s soothing counts.
“That’s it, Bruce,” the Indian petted Bruce’s hair as he entered the younger man’s personal space, his demeanor calm and controlled despite the fact that his huge Alpha cock was hard and straining against his medical gown. “Good boy,” he praised when Bruce managed to uncurl his fists.
The Omega whimpered, his belly warm from having managed to satisfy the Alpha.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Raj spoke as he carefully guided Bruce to his hands and knees, his touches gentle as he examined Bruce’s opening. His rims parted under the Alpha’s fingers, slowly dripping with slick.
Bruce listened as the Alpha positioned himself behind him, his steady hands never leaving Bruce’s skin. “Are you ready?”
Bruce nodded. He didn’t think he ever would, but there weren’t many choices.
The Gods must have decided to be kind to him today, for the moment Raj started pushing in, filling the void that’d been aching in most of the Omega’s previous heats, the pleasure forced the perpetual noises in Bruce’s mind to shut up.
Three days later, Bruce woke up with little recollection of his heat (as usual) and in pain, muscles he didn’t know he had throbbing, but a smile spread on his lips. For he knew, without a doubt, even before Dr Hernandez’s tests, that he was pregnant.
Bruce was, for the first time since what seemed like forever, perfectly content.
TBC