Chapter Text
Seungmin had a few constants in his life.
Every morning he brushed his teeth and took his gummy worm vitamin.
He had to make sure his glasses were put away properly in the protective case they came with.
His mother expected him to do his math homework before he watched cartoons after school.
And Felix.
Among them, Felix was his favorite.
“Seungminnie!”
Seungmin turned with a bright, happy grin, watching his very best friend race up the school sidewalk, a shiny pack of cards in his hands.
“Look what I got us, Seungminnie!”
He held his hand out, and Felix excitedly dropped one glimmering golden pack onto his palm before hopping around in excited circles with his own matching one.
“Mom took me to spend my allowance this weekend. These were the last two on the shelf!”
Felix was always brimming with joy, bursting with happiness, overflowing with the most concentrated form of whatever feeling he currently possessed.
Seungmin admired that about him so much, his ability to broadcast what was in his heart so easily.
“Come on let’s open them!”
They tore through the foil, pulling out a thin stack of brand new Pokemon cards and going through them together one at a time, groaning at lame pulls and giggling when they got something good.
And then they lapsed into a full, warm silence that Seungmin liked the best.
“Thank you, Bokkie,” he said quietly, and Felix beamed. “I.. have something for you, too.”
“You do?!”
Nodding, Seungmin pulled his backpack into his lap. He willed his hands not to shake as he unzipped the bag and reached into a small pocket he usually kept empty sewn right into the main flap. He pulled out a bracelet, tiny glass beads lined up on a string in blue to rival the sky.
His Yongbok’s favorite color.
“For me? Did you… did you make that?”
Seungmin nodded with a shy smile, and Felix lunged forward, wrapping him in a hug that knocked them both to the grass.
“Thank you thank you thank you!”
He took the bracelet, slipped it onto his wrist with the brightest grin Seungmin had ever seen, and then pulled him up from the ground.
“Let’s go before the bell rings.” Felix said, lacing their fingers together and pulling him toward the school building.
His birthday was not supposed to be a sleepover, so he and Felix were under strict orders to keep their mouths shut through the duration of the party.
But after cake and presents and party games, two small and excited boys couldn’t help but vibrate and giggle and clutch each other in anticipation as the other guests filed out one by one.
“Come see the nest eomma made us for tonight!” Seungmin whispered when the last of their school friends said goodbye, and they dashed upstairs together and fell into Seungmin’s room in a heap of laughter and successful sneakiness.
On his bed was a fresh, pristine nest, piled high with soft pillows and plushies, lit softly with twinkling fairy lights tacked to the walls and ceiling.
It was much more lush than the one Seungmin’s mother generally made him to sleep in, more conducive to late night giggling and complete with baskets of comic books and crumb free snacks.
“Oh wow!” Felix exclaimed, dashing forward to get a closer look, marveling at the extra plush blankets lining the bottom and sides. “Seungminnie, this is amazing!”
“Eomma always makes the best nests!”
“Don’t tell my mom I said this,” Felix leaned in, lowering his voice and glancing around. “But you’re right. I wish my mom made me nests like this!”
“But your mom’s a beta. Beta’s don’t make nests Lixie.”
“I know,” Felix replied, heaving a sigh, then they both burst into giggles again and clamored into the nest, grabbing snacks, carefully picking which comic book they wanted to start first.
His eomma had gone to the comic book store and picked out a fresh stack of brand new ones they’d never read.
Seungmin held his breath for a moment as Felix snuggled in close, resting his cheek on Seungmin’s shoulder and tucking his knees up, sighing in contentment.
Little heart fluttering, Seungmin peeked down to make sure Felix was comfortable, then he cracked open the comic.
“Okay okay, one more time.”
Seungmin sighed and rolled his eyes, lounging back against the side of the pool, letting himself dip a little lower, until just his neck and head were above water.
Outside, toes gripping the edge and face set in a determined scowl, Felix crouched low and held, breathing in deep, counting one, two, three- and then sprang up into the air.
He tucked his head and arms, pulling his knees to his chest, and Seungmin couldn’t hold back his cheer of excitement as he watched Felix finally complete one whole front flip before splashing deep into the recesses of the pool.
He burst out of the water with a loud woop, and Seungmin wrapped his arms around his waist and spun him around, their laughter melting together into one cacophonous drone as they celebrated a hard won accomplishment.
Felix had been working on that damn flip all summer.
“Now we can do literally anything else before school starts next week.” Seungmin quipped, smirking as Felix turned to him with a dry expression.
“Hey. I was not going to be the only guy going into 8th grade before I could do a pool flip! How lame would that have been?!”
Seungmin rolled his eyes again and made his way up the pool steps. It was well past lunch and his stomach had shifted from light rumbles to long, loud growling that would probably set off an Alpha if there was one nearby.
“Help me out!” Felix said, holding his hand up as he watched Seungmin wrap a towel around his shoulders.
“The stairs are right there.”
“Yeah but you’re right here,” He replied with a smile, the same big, earnest one that always made Seungmin’s heart lurch and press forward in his chest to give whatever it was Yongbok wanted.
It was maddening.
He pressed his mouth in a thin line and reached down, clasping tightly onto Felix’s wet hand and hauling him out of the water, dripping and shivering like a soaked kitten.
“Thanks Seungminnie!” He said, eyes creasing with the force of his happiness, and Seungmin felt his cheeks warm.
He cleared his throat and fished around in the pool bag, drawing out another towel.
“Yeah yeah, hurry up and dry off, I’m starving.”
“Wanna go to the arcade after lunch?”
Felix’s face was bright and open with hope. Even though they’d spent the better part of a week together every day, he always seemed so tentative to ask for more, like he was shy or something, like they hadn’t spent most of their time together since they were five and hunting for 4 leaf clovers on the local playground.
He was just so… sincere.
In everything.
And Seungmin was so devastatingly loathe to deny him. He didn’t even want to.
“Of course! I still have all those tickets we got last time.”
“Ah, I bet we can get a really good prize this time. I still have some leftover too! We’ll have to stop by my house on the way. OH, then I can show you my new stereo Mom got me!”
Seungmin listened to him rattle on with an indulgent grin, the summer breeze in their hair, the sun warm on their backs.
“Hey Seungmin.”
Seungmin startled, turning to find Felix staring at him wide eyed with red stained cheeks.
“Hey, sorry. I was just… distracted.”
Felix bit his lip and nodded, tangling his fingers together.
His voice has dropped, really dropped, a final push out of childhood that went far beyond the squeaky cracks and breaks they’d all been talking around since the first day of 6th grade, and Yongbok’s vocal chords had decided that his voice would be deep.
Really deep.
It had happened sometimes between the last time they were able to hang out before the end of summer and the first day of 9th grade.
Texting didn’t really convey vocal tone, of course, and Felix had shied away from phone calls claiming his throat was scratchy from a cold.
But the first day of high school had proven that to be a lie.
He’d just been self conscious.
He was still self conscious, truth be told, having trouble adjusting to the reactions people had to him even several months later.
And it didn’t help that sometimes Seungmin still reacted… simply startled and nothing more.
“Hey, I mean it,” he said, one hand coming up to hold Felix’s shoulder. “I was watching this.” He held up his phone and let Felix watch the video he’d paused, a fat cat in a tutu falling over in anguish, hating to be dressed in anything.
Felix’s laugh was still big and bright, his grin stretching his face, pinching his eyes, his whole body radiating with his joy.
He was still just Felix.
“Awwww, poor thing.” Felix said, leaning his head on Seungmin’s shoulder, that deep voice vibrating down his spine and sending jitters down all his nerves until his arm hair stood up in a smattering of goose flesh.
See? Still just Felix.
Seungmin’s 16th birthday came and went, and as family and friends filtered out he and Felix found themselves once again in his nest, freshly fluffed and scented by his Eomma as she always did for him.
Felix was cuddled up under his arm, clingy as he’d always been, and Seungmin turned all of his effort and energy to keeping his heartbeat slow and steady.
“We’ll be presenting soon.” Felix said, his deep voice breaking the silence that had ensconced them.
“Just a couple more years.” Seungmin replied, and he felt Felix shift around and sigh before settling again.
“Do you have any idea what you’ll present as?”
“No.” Seungmin answered without thought, because he generally gave it none at all.
He would present how he presented no matter what he wanted or felt, so there wasn’t much need to worry.
“I could see you being an Alpha.”
“An Alpha? Me?”
“Yeah.” Felix’s grin was sunshine after a storm, lighting his entire face and warming Seungmin’s entire soul. “You’re steady, ya know? You’re good at staying calm in a crisis.”
“Well so are you. Maybe you’ll be an Alpha.”
“I don’t think we’ll both be Alphas. I’ll probably be an Omega or a Beta or something.”
They lapsed into silence again, and Seungmin gave into one of his most difficult to stifle curiosities and ran his fingertips up and down Felix’s shoulder.
Snuggling back down more bonelessly, Felix sighed again.
“You’d be a good Alpha,” he all but whispered, deep voice tinged at the ends by a bewildering wistfulness that Seungmin found himself struggling to pin down.
His head spun, his heart thumped painfully, his toes curling over the precipice of something huge he’d tried so hard to ignore for most of his remembered life.
Felix’s arm tightened around his waist, and it felt like another push to make him topple over.
“You think so?” He asked, voice thin as cracking ice, and he felt Felix nod against his chest.
“Yeah. You would.”
Seungmin gulped, throat tied in a knot that threatened to choke and squeeze any further words if he could conjure some to say, and then the last of Felix’s tension bled out.
He peeked down, caught thick lashes pressed against soft freckled cheeks, and his heart twisted itself into something bleeding and painful.
With one last failure of his hard fought control, Seungmin pressed a secret kiss into Felix’s hair.
The time for presentations came upon them faster than they could grasp.
Exactly when someone would present could not be pinned down exactly, but most presented shortly after their 18th birthday. As late as the 20th birthday was also within the range of normal, with late bloomers sometimes needing as far out as 25 before medical intervention should be considered.
Felix- bright, sunshiny Felix- presented on midnight, the minute the clock struck September 15th on his 18th birthday.
Seungmin picked up his phone on the first shrill ring that cut through sleep, swimming quickly up through the layers of the nest his mother still made him.
“Hello?!”
“Seungminnie,” he heard Felix whine, panting harshly through the receiver, and Seungmin feels his blood run cold.
“Bokkie… are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“Hurts… Minnie… it hurts! It’s so hot!”
“What is? Felix, what happened? Where are you?”
“S-Seungmin.. I can’t…”
Another whine, a gasp for breath, and then Seungmin thought for sure he heard Felix break down into quiet sobs.
“Bokkie… Bokkie please, tell me what’s wrong.”
“It hurts Seungminnie! So bad! It’s so… hot… I can’t…”
“Bokkie…” Seungmin whispered, startled realization settling his still sleep frazzled mind. “Bokkie are you… are you presenting?”
Pain..Fever…Wild, swinging emotions… all things they’d been taught to look for as part of secodnary gender presentations, especially for Alpha’s and Omegas.
Seungmin checked the time again.
Just after midnight. Felix’s 18th birthday.
How punctual.
“Felix I think you’re presenting. It’s gonna be okay, but you need to go get your mom.”
“Just… just want you Seungmin…”
Seungmin’s heart twisted painfully and his feet burned to hit the floor and run.
But his mind made his body come to a screeching haunt.
“I can’t…. I can’t come.” He whispers, every part of his soul recoiling like a rubber band pulled too taught.
Felix’s deepening sobs are nearly his undoing. “I can’t come because it’s midnight and my eomma will kill me if I wake her. But I’ll come tomorrow. Please go get your mom. Can you do that for me Bokkie?”
“Y-yeah. I will. But please come tomorrow. Please Seungminnie.”
“I’ll try. I promise I’ll try. It’s gonna be okay. It won’t hurt forever, I promise.”
“Okay.”
Felix’s voice was small, thin, warbling around the pain and heat wracking his body. He kept the phone clutched in his hand as he forced himself across his house to knock on his mother’s bedroom door.
There’s some shuffling, some sniffling, and then the phone was picked up again.
“Seungmin?”
Felix’s mother.
“Yeah, yes it’s me!”
“He’s okay. Thank you for helping him. Please go back to sleep sweetie.”
“I-“
The line went dead, and Seungmin knew he would not go back to sleep.
MinnieWinnie:
I’m so sorry Bokkie. Eomma won’t let me come. She says pups have no place helping with presentations. I tried to argue but she threatened to take my phone and I’d rather be able to at least answer a call or text if you need me.
I’m sorry.
It was a full week before he saw Felix again.
Radio silence in his phone left him anxious and desperate, worried for his best friend, worried for their friendship, worried for himself.
How would Felix presenting change things? Would be no longer want to hang out with someone who was still technically a “pup?” With his sense of smell now developed, would he find Seungmin’s undeveloped pup scent unappealing?
Would he see him as a child?
Felix’s simple text of ‘Can I come over?’ had pinged his phone 30 minutes ago, and anxiety had twisted Seungmin’s guts from the second he’d seen that name on his screen.
That eternally beloved name.
He chewed his fingernails into painful stumps and twisted his blanket around his feet with his restlessness until finally a timid knock sounded at his door.
“Come in.”
Felix pushed the door open slowly and peeked inside, every line of his face tilted with uncertainty.
Seungmin hated it at once.
“Felix! I’m… I’m so… I’m so sorry. Eomma wouldn’t let me come. I would have!”
“I know…” Felix spoke, his deep voice soft with nerves, his eyes roving over Seungmin’s bed. “Can I… can I come in?”
Seungmin blinked, brow furrowing in confusion.
“In?”
Felix bit his lip and gestured to the bed.
“Can you come in… to my bed?”
“To your… nest.”
“My….” His eyes widened in realization and he scrambled to untangle himself from his blankets and make room. “Right. My nest. Yes of course you can come in. You can always come in.”
Felix seemed to sag in relief and climbed in, settling gingerly next to Seungmin, his entire body buzzing with something.
But Seungmin knew Felix. Seungmin knew what he needed.
Slipping his arm around Felix’s shoulders, Seungmin pulled him close. He felt the rest of the tension flood from Felix’s frame, felt arms wrap around his middle, felt a face nuzzle his shoulder.
“So. You’re an Omega then?” He couldn’t imagine an Alpha or a Beta being so skittish around a nest used by an unpresented pup.
“Yeah. Is that… okay?”
“Of course! It suits you. You’ve always been the sweetest person in any room.”
Felix hid his face in Seungmin’s neck, his arm tightening around his waist, a tiny embarrassed whine building in the back of his throat.
Seungming giggled, feeling like nothing had changed, before previous concerns bubbled back up.
“I… I don’t stink now, do I? I know I still smell like pup scent….”
He felt Felix’s nose press into his neck, a blush crawling up to overtake his ears at the sound of soft, snuffly little sniffs.
“You could never smell bad to me, Seungminnie.”
Exactly a week later, Seungmin braced himself.
He couldn’t sleep, watching the clock as it approached, hit, and then smoothly rolled over midnight with no fanfare.
No heat, no pain, no wild swings of emotions, no… nothing.
But that was okay, he reassured himself as he snuggled down into his bed- he’d long stopped thinking of it as a nest, even if his mother liked to keep it built up for him, even if Felix melted into it more bonelessly now that he’d presented- there was time. Plenty of time. Felix presenting at the stroke of midnight was an anomaly, really, and he shouldn’t set his own presentation expectations based on anyone else’s.
It was fine.
His mother watched him with tearful eyes all day, though, as she fussed and fluttered around her “growing baby boy” and made his favorite meals and asked him no less than 300 times if he felt warm or crampy or anything less than stellar.
And all day long he felt stellar.
And then all week long.
And then all month long.
Month after month.
For a year.
Felix kept telling him not to stress about it, it’ll happen when it happens and it’s not exactly fun. The heat had been unbearable and Alpha presentations are even worse than Omega ones.
“What makes you think I’ll be an Alpha?”
“I don’t know. Just seems fitting, ya know? Since I’m an Omega.”
“A matching set?”
“A matching set.”
And then they’d giggle and Seungmin would realize that presentation wasn’t going to change him so fundamentally after all.
His Yongbok was still his Yongbok, anyway.
Snuggled up in bed long after that very best friend had left after another day of “Seungmin Nest Time,” as Felix called it, Seungmin’s eyes followed a mote of dust as it drifted lazily above his head, his sheets warm at his back, the faint buzz of his computer making his eyelids heavy.
He’d been so tired the last few days, nearly sleeping through his alarms and collapsing into his sheets straight after dinner, body slack and brain slowing to a stop, full of fizz that bubbled at the edges, surging more and more towards the center each night.
Idly, he wondered what would happen when it finally boiled over and consumed him whole. He imagined it then, the bubbly fuzz in his head multiplying, eating away at his brain matter until all that was left behind in his brain was a fizzy, formless goo snap-crackle-popping in his ears and down his spinal column.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, he thought, as the bubbles grew in size and number, popping only to be replaced by a dozen more each time.
His eyes grew entirely too heavy to hold open, eyelids full of lead resting heavy against the tops of his cheeks and his heart beat slowed to a crawl. His entire body tingled, warming, heating slowly from the inside out until sweat prickled at the back of his neck.
But his limbs were heavy, so heavy, too heavy to wipe his moistening brow, so he simply squirmed in discomfort, his shirt beginning to stick to his skin.
He must be getting sick, fever leaving him warm and fatigued as every muscle and bone in his body began to increase in mass and press him more firmly into his mattress. He could feel the springs within pushing up on his spine, his shoulder blades, the dip in his back, and the sides of his nest trapped too much heat.
He heaved himself onto his side, body full of sand dragging him down, and flailed as best he could until the excess blankets and pillows fell to the floor.
Immediately he noticed what had been a comforting scent right up against his face vanish, and he felt his heart stutter and shatter as loneliness, keen and sharp, sliced through his soul.
He choked on a sob, hands reaching out to close around nothing, and a foreign sound, a high pitched whine, slipped from the back of his throat.
“Seungmin?” He heard on the other side of his door, and his heart lurched.
“Eomma!” He cried, voice cracking, and the door opened.
“Seungmin? Seungmin, what’s wrong?”
“Eomma… I’m sick. I think, I think I’m-“ suddenly, the world tilted and dropped, a despair the likes of which he’d never felt dumped through his system until he was curled up, shaking out sobs, wailing in agony as his soul wilted and crumbled.
“Seungmin!” He could barely hear his mother over the sound of his own sadness, but then something soft and sweet and strangely familiar burst through the loneliness, the desperation, soothing the jagged shards of his broken heart. “There there my baby, Eomma’s here. You’re okay.”
A purr, gentle and rumbling, vibrated through his body, adding lightness to his heavy bones. He unclenched, though he couldn’t recall when he’d locked up so tight, and his sobs pettered off into sniffles.
He could feel his mother curling around him from behind, much like she used to do when he was a small child still afraid of the dark, and he realized the soothing purr was hers, the soft, candy cloud of something around his head was her.
“Eomma? What’s happening?”
“I think, my baby…” she began, one hand running gently up and down his arm. “I think you’re presenting.”