Chapter Text
“So, if you had to boil it down, simple as you can, what is your mission?”
Louis chuckles. “Mission,” he echoes, “makes me sound like some sort of superhero.”
“Well, aren’t you?”
Louis pauses. “I’d like to think I’m someone to look up to.” Ellie leans back a little, smiling, and Louis realises he’s meant to speak again so he does. “As for my mission… well, the point of what I do is to spread awareness and kill off ignorance. To put it the simplest.”
Ellie nods, smiling as she scribbles on her notepad. “Kill off ignorance...”
“Well,” Louis grins, “I could’ve put it in more professional terms, but I think that might go against the first part of my mission; how am I meant to spread awareness to the general population if the general population can’t understand or relate to what the fuck I’m saying?”
Ellie clicks her pencil, then looks up, smiling. “I like that,” she says, “you make a good case for yourself.”
“Well, that is sort of my job, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so, yeah.”
She turns back to her notepad for a moment, scribbling again. Louis fights the urge to crane his neck and attempt at lopsided reading, and instead has another sip of the tea he made when she arrived at his flat, not twenty minutes ago. He picked their nicest mugs, the blue porcelain-ones they bought on their honeymoon in Paris, because if there’s one thing he knows about these kinds of at-home interviews it’s that every article starts with a neat little description of the interviewee’s home, and outfit. He’s wearing a nice white button-down and tight dark-blue denim jeans. He spent forty minutes on his hair.
It’s his job to make a good impression.
“So, Louis,” Ellie says after a while of cleaning up her notes, “your book-title.”
Louis leans back in his chair, smiling. “My book-title.”
“Hi, my name is omega, I’m Louis. Simply put, what’s the thought behind it?”
“Hm, I don’t think it’s a difficult one to crack, but mainly it’s just… well, my entire life, as an omega - I’m sure you get this as a beta too - I’ve been asked, what are you? What are you? Omega, beta, alpha, what can we label you as, what box can we fit you in so we can predetermine your personality before even talking to you? And, more importantly, who are you supposed to end up with, if you’ve not failed at life?” Louis says, “I’ve experienced it several times, getting asked what I was before I’d even said my name. It seems as though me being an omega - or if I was a beta, or an alpha, it doesn’t matter - somehow reigns over any individual viewpoints, opinions, personality traits, even sexual attractions, that I might have.”
Ellie nods, eyes wide with interest, mouth a little slack. “Right, right, yes.”
“So,” Louis smiles at her, “that’s the thought behind my title. It’s a joke on the general consensus in society, that my breed is more prominent in me in every way, than my actual personality. Which is such an incredibly ignorant thing to think,” he adds, getting himself fired up a little, “I know Beta’s who are very assertive, who climb the corporal ladder like any alpha would, my own husband is that way. I know omega’s who shout and scream and wear the pants in their relationship, even when dating an alpha. I know alpha’s who are sweet and shy, even some who are stay-at-home dad’s and mum’s. It’s wrong to think that breed determines personality.”
Ellie, who’d been unthinkingly sucking at the back-end of her pen, takes it out of her mouth to say; “I can understand a long way down the road, Louis, I can, and I find your points very interesting. But I couldn’t help but latch onto something you said just before. You mentioned sexual attractions.”
And, here we go. “Yes,” Louis says, bracing himself.
“And, as far as personalities differing, I agree, I’m personally in a beta-beta relationship with my current boyfriend and we’re like night and day in many ways. But, when it comes to sexual attractions, realistically, can you really run from the fact that, as an omega, your biology wires you to want to be bred by an alpha? Are you claiming that that isn’t the case?”
Louis puts his tea down. “Of course I’m not,” he says, and that seems to relieve Ellie, like she’d been worried she were speaking to a madman for a second, “I go into heat like every other omega, I get - mind the language - slick when I’m horny like every other omega and, yes, I have attractions to alphas, like every other omega. That doesn’t mean I absolutely must act on those attractions,” he explains, “I met my husband at an omega sanctuary when I was going through my very first heat and he was working as a care-taker, and we fell in love. The fact that he just so happens to be a beta doesn’t make a difference to me. I want him more than I’ll ever want any alpha, because he’s who he is as a person and that means more to me than anything else.”
Ellie nods, slowly. There’s a small crease between her brows and she looks as though she wants to say something, but can’t find the right way to phrase it. In the end she just bites her lip and looks back down at her notes. “Ehm,” she says, “sorry, I just have to collect my thoughts. Yes, all right, so, ehm… I wanted to ask you. You say that you want equality for omega-beta-relationships, compared to, say, alpha-omega or beta-beta, or even alpha-beta.”
“Yes.”
“What are some examples of things you’d like changed? I mean, just off the top of your head so I can get it down?”
Louis sighs. “Well,” he says, “while we do have the right to get married, it’s still somewhat frowned upon. My husband and I went to three different churches before we found someone willing to wed us. That should tell you something.” She nods. “And I know it has to do with the lackage of omega’s as opposed to beta’s and alpha’s, but when someone tells my husband that he’s stolen good alpha-meat - literally, someone said those exact words, that debreedinizes me. As if I’m just a piece of meat to be devoured by alpha’s, with no mind of my own. That’s just wrong, and flat-out ignorant.”
Ellie nods again.
“My husband continually gets asked, or warned, about me potentially leaving him for an alpha because, as an omega, I must favour any alpha over him, even if I don’t even bloody like the alpha. That’s a problem.”
“Right.”
“I continually get asked what went wrong, since I ended up with a beta. I get comments like ‘well, you’re so handsome, you shouldn’t have to settle for him’, or I get looked down upon because I ‘couldn’t do better’. I even had a work colleague once, who’d met my husband twice, offer to set me up with her alpha brother. When I reminded her that I was taken, she chuckled and said ‘well, it doesn’t really count, does it?’. In my humble omega-opinion, that is not equality and that is not all right. We all deserve to be treated as worthy.”
Ellie grins a little, looking up from her notepad. “You’re quite the feisty omega.”
“I get that a lot.”
“I bet,” she says, and then bites at her lip again, eyes narrowing. Louis wants to tell her to just spit out what the fuck it is she wants to say, but he once had a journalist paint him as a complete imbecile in the article because he’d been offended by Louis’ un-omegalike directness. So, he keeps his mouth shut and, to his luck, she opens hers; “don’t you ever miss it, though?”
Louis frowns. “What?”
“Just, off the record,” she says, voice lower, eyes sharper, crook of her mouth quirking up a little, “don’t you ever miss it? A good knot? You must.”
Louis blinks and then swallows, thickly. “No,” he exclaims, offended that she’d even ask, “I love my husband. And anyway, how could I miss something I’ve never had?”
*
“Well, thank you so much, Louis, this was incredibly interesting,” Ellie says ten minutes later as he’s showing her out, “you really are a one of a kind omega.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Louis says, because that statement sort of goes against the whole premise of his movement, “you’d be surprised.”
Soon as she’s out of the door, he pops two buttons on his shirt and toes off his shoes. He pads through the living-room, sticky feet clinging to the wooden floors, upstairs and then into the bedroom. Colin’s sitting on the little green sofa under the big window, laptop out, fingers clacking the keyboard with unsteady pauses.
“Journalist just left,” Louis says, gliding easily down across from him on the sofa, feet pressing up against the side of his thigh.
“Nice,” Colin mutters, “I’m just trying to formulate an e-mail to my superior. S’always a bloody nightmare, this. Don’t want to come off rude, but don’t want to come off like a push-over either.”
Louis sighs, raking his fingers through Colin’s short black hair. “You’ll be all right,” he says, “just be yourself and you’ll be fine.”
“You know it doesn’t work like that there,” he mutters, “I’m not Colin the beta. I’m beta the Colin.”
Louis can’t help a small chuckle. It’s funny, partially, because it’s true. When Louis first met Colin, at the omega sanctuary his parents shipped him off to at fifteen, ensuring he didn’t get knotted and, god forbid it, bonded to some older, abusive alpha, Colin’s main job was to change sheets, like, fucking constantly. Looking back at it, Louis can’t quite fathom how Colin managed to fall in love with someone who’s slick-drenched blankets he’d been carrying out of the room four times a day, but he did and Louis’ grateful.
Colin still changes sheets during Louis’ heats now, but that’s more his marital duty than his job. His job, on the other hand, which he fought, tooth and nail, to get, is at a large commercial firm. At some point, he reached so high up in the hierarchy, thanks to perseverance, skill and perhaps a bit of luck, that he’s now solely surrounded by alpha’s. Which means he has to work about three times as hard as everyone else to gain the same recognition.
And, he does. Every day.
“If they don’t see what an asset you are, then they’re fucking idiots,” Louis says, “you’ve put more time into that job than any of all those alpha-fuckheads put together.”
“That’s not true,” Colin mutters, but the crook of his mouth tugs up into a half-smile.
Louis presses the pad of his thumb into the faint crinkles by Colin’s eye. “She asked me if I ever missed it,” he says, “the journalist.”
“Missed what?”
“Getting knotted.”
Colin looks up from his screen. “Yeah?” he asks, still smiling, teasingly, but Louis sees a slight bit of something else, something anxious, behind it. He wishes, every time he looks at his husband, that there’ll be a day sometime soon where he doesn’t feel inferior to every alpha he meets.
“I told her I couldn’t miss something I’d never had,” Louis says, and can’t quite tell whether that’s good enough.
Colin doesn’t carry on the conversation, so Louis settles for telling himself that it is.
“Did it go well, otherwise?” Colin asks, putting the laptop away and crawling closer, over to lay between Louis’ legs, head rested on his chest.
“It was fine, yeah,” Louis murmurs, scratching at his scalp, “she was a nice girl.”
“Good.”
“Love how you’re always hiding in your room when I have people over to interview,” Louis says with a small chuckle, “you afraid of them or something?”
“Yes, I’m deathly allergic to journalists, didn’t I tell you?” Colin says. He nuzzles into Louis’ chest, right where his shirt’s been buttoned down, then says, “No, I just don’t want to be disruptive.”
“Yeah, I get it,” Louis murmurs, “I get it. Good thing she wasn’t an alpha, though. Could’ve snatched me right up and stolen me away.”
Colin bites his collarbone, gently, then gets off the sofa and hauls him up by the wrist. “C’mere, you fucking idiot,” he cackles against Louis’ lips, as they tumble toward the bed together, “you know, when I married an omega, I was expecting some kind little lamb to make me dinner every night.”
“Yeah?” Louis straddles him in bed, tugs off his own shirt and then works at Colin’s trousers. “How’d that work out for you?”
Colin moans softly, hips snapping up into Louis hands before he’s even got his dick out. “Not very well, I’m afraid,” he says, “got this violent fucking powerbottom instead. Think I might return him and ask for my money back.”
Louis slaps him over the cheek, gently, and then begins to rip off his own trousers before they get ruined by his slick, “love, you’re asking for a fucking spanking if you don’t shut the fuck up already.”
*
The following day, Louis does what he does on any regular Monday. He eats breakfast with Colin and Betty, sees Colin off to work, then packs his laptop and other necessities into his bag, puts Betty on a leash and leaves the house. The pastel-pink row house that Louis and Colin rent off Louis’ grandmother lies in an upper-class residential area, at least a thirty minute walk from Zayn, Liam and Niall’s flat.
So, Louis always gets the tube.
Colin once muttered something about not getting the tube alone in case he should be aroused and smell too tempting and be vulnerable to alpha’s, but Louis thought well, I’m just as vulnerable whether you’re there or not, alpha’s like that aren’t threatened by you. He didn’t say that aloud, of course, because Colin wouldn’t take it as matter-of-fact as Louis thought it. Instead he just replied why the fuck would I ever get aroused if you weren’t around, love? That seemed to settle Colin’s worries.
There’s nothing to be worried about, anyway. Sure, he gets looks, he gets loads of looks, flared nostrils and the odd growl breathed into the nape of his neck when he’s crammed between too many people to see who did it. That’s the extent of it, though. Being an alpha makes you want to jump an omega’s bones on the tube, sure. Actually doing it just makes you a fucking rapist.
Which most alpha’s don’t seem to be, luckily.
“That’s one of my biggest points, actually,” Louis tells Niall, catching him in the stairway of his building that morning, checking the post in nothing but his heart-patterned boxershorts, “we’re animals, yes, at our core. But we aren’t fucking dogs, we aren’t Betty, we have minds that we can use to control our bloody groins, or at least our limbs, and we have—”
“Yeah, you like that, don’t you, wuff wuff, yeah, you like that, grrr.”
Louis sighs, leaning back against the wall as Niall scratches and pets and coos and salivates all over his dog. Betty, the adorable pug he and Colin bought two years ago, still never fails to drag Niall to his knees. Louis once asked him why he didn’t just get one of his own and Niall had said well, what’s the point of getting a dog that I have to feed and take out for shits and pisses all the time when I’ve got you coming over every day with one I can just have fun with? And Louis couldn’t really come up with a good counter-argument.
He does come here, pretty much every day. Lately, anyway.
When Louis met Niall, Zayn and Liam, and Niall and Zayn had explained to Louis, on his very first day of knowing the two beta’s, that they had an unobstructable life-plan, including becoming highly successful entrepreneurs and living in a pricey London bachelor-pad together, Louis had had his doubts. Hanging out in their pricey London bachelor-pad and listening to them run their highly successful online-business with steady hands, he scolds his younger self. Niall and Zayn are a prime example of two beta’s who went their own way, self-assured and determined, regardless of what was expected of their breed.
And then there’s Liam, a prime example of, well— individuality. A rare specimen, and one which no one’s ever written about before, at least not an entire book. Which is what makes it so bloody brilliant that he’s allowed Louis to write his next book about exactly him.
“Liam’s home, yeah?” he asks, even though he knows the answer to it. Liam works nights at the hospital, and has just about the oddest sleep patterns Louis’ ever encountered. He tends to stay up once he gets off work in the small hours, and hang out with Louis, Niall and Zayn, help Louis with his book at the moment, and then sleep from afternoon to evening before he goes to work again.
He once admitted to Louis, drunkenly, that the reason he only works nights is that patients are less likely to make ignorant comments about him being a nurse instead of a doctor or a CEO or something grand and alpha-like, if they’re asleep.
Which Louis of course put in his notes for the book.
“Yeah, he’s making breakie,” Niall says, panting as he insists on carrying Betty in his arms instead of just letting her walk up the stairs.
There’s a lift in the building, but they hardly ever use it because Niall and the lot’s flat is on the first floor anyway. Louis reaches the door first, and Niall is saying something, but Betty keeps barking over him so Louis pretends he doesn’t hear because he smells bacon, over the smell of alpha.
“Bloody hell,” he still says, as he steps into the front hall, “Liam, did you forget to shower or something, you fucking stink of yourself.”
No one answers, even though Louis can hear the music streaming in the kitchen and bacon sizzling on the pan.
“Louis,” Niall says, panting as he reaches up to him and puts a squirming Betty down so she can run in and say hello to the other lads, “Louis, mate, I forgot to mention, we’ve got someone staying in our spare room.”
“Spare room? You don’t have a spare room.”
“Well, our loft space. Liam got it cleaned up during his break a few weeks ago, I never mentioned it. Anyway, we’ve got someone staying and you might want to—”
Louis stops dead in the kitchen-doorway.
There’s nothing unusual to see. Liam’s hovering over pans of eggs and beans and bacon, Betty’s jumping up and down his legs. Zayn’s sat across from him on a stool at the kitchen island, glasses on, talking on the phone and scrolling up and down his and Niall’s web-page. There’s nothing unusual to see.
But, fuck.
“What is that smell?” He knows what that smell is. He glares at Liam, heart picking up pace. “Liam.”
Liam jumps a little, then turns, eyes wide. “Lou.”
“What have you done?” Louis asks, taking a breath to steady himself before he walks into the room, “you never smell this... alpha, not after, what have you—”
“It’s not me,” Liam cuts through.
“What do you mean it’s not you, you’re the only one in here, you—”
“Hi.”
Louis stiffens. The back of his neck goes hot, flushing down his spine and he has to take a second to adjust to the smell and not slick up like a fucking virgin in heat, before he turns. “Harry.”
“Hii,” Harry says again, smiling sweetly, like he doesn’t smell so fucking obscene Louis’ legs part just by instinct. “Long time, no see.”
No scent, more like. It’s not that Louis doesn’t smell alpha’s every day of his life, but this particular flat is one of his ‘safe spaces’. Sure, Liam smells enough for Louis to know what he is, but no way near as strongly as before he had The Snip, and anyway, he was never this bad. He was never Harry.
“Yeah,” Louis croaks out, forcing his legs together, “what the hell are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be shagging groupies in a bus midway through the US or something?”
Harry chuckles dryly, his abs moving with it, just a little. He’s not even had the decency to put on a shirt, or trackies. He’s just standing there, dopey and smiling, in red boxershorts and white socks, long greasy hair pulled up on a bun, and fuck he’s taller than he was last. Bigger. Louis can’t even fucking remember when ‘last’ was. Years, he thinks. “Tour ended a while ago,” he says hoarsely, “I’m gathering material for my next album at the moment. Needed a change of scenery.”
“And what that means is he’s eating our food even though he’s worth more than all of our lives put together, and sleeping on a springy mattress in our loft and playing horrible guitar all the bloody time,” Niall says. He’s jokey and grinning, but his gaze keeps flickering nervously back and forth between Harry and Louis like he’s afraid they’re going to jump each other in a second.
“Fucking hell,” Louis breathes, because he just can’t pretend to ignore the elephant in the room any longer, “you reek.”
Harry’s eyes widen a little, and then he bites into his lip, laughing. “Yeah,” he says like he knows it, “you do too. Could smell you from, like, two blocks down.”
“If it’s any consolation, I’ve got no nose for that alpha-omega shit, and I can smell him too, Lou,” Niall says, “he hasn’t showered since he got here.”
Harry chuckles, slapping Niall up the back of the head. “I was going to. Now, actually. I just wanted to, uhm,” he turns his gaze back to Louis, “say hi to Lou. It’s been bloody ages.”
“Hi,” Louis says, and then holds his breath when Harry comes in for a hug.
Then Harry says, “hi,” back, low and rough against his ear, and Louis makes the terrible mistake of breathing while he’s close, and then he feels it. It’s nothing, really, not enough that it’ll show, not enough that it won’t dry away by itself, it’s just the tiniest bit of slick, provoked by the smell of an alpha he hasn’t seen in ages coming up close.
It’s enough that Harry pulls back, abruptly, nostrils flared out, eyes rolling back in his head, hand swiping over his nose like he wants to cover it, but doesn’t want to seem rude.
“Sorry,” Louis mutters quietly, “it’s just my body, it’s not what I— it’s not my mind. Sorry.”
“Oh no, it’s cool, it’s cool, I just— got to adjust to the smell of, ehm… I’m just going to go shower now.”
Louis nods, burning up from embarrassment like he’s in fucking heat. Harry marches off, not stopping when Niall yells after him mate, you forgot a towel, they’re in the cabinet in the hall! and locking himself in the bathroom.
Louis lets out shaky breath and turns back to the others. “So,” he says, “Harry’s here, then?”
“Mate, relax, you were never this way around me, even before The Snip,” Liam says. “You look like a tomato in heat.”
“Eew, why is that the most disgusting thing I’ve ever imagined? Tomato in heat,” Zayn groans.
“Because it is and you’re disgusting, Liam,” Louis says, “it’s not about you, or Harry, or anything. It’s just that, well— I haven’t been around a lot of alpha’s up close in a while - apart from you, but that’s not the same. Especially not in here, when I’m unprepared, because none of you fuckers bothered to warn me.”
Niall chuckles. “Sorry, mate, he texted me to pick him up from the airport yesterday and tricked me into letting him stay.”
“Really?”
“No, we wanted him to stay, he cooks and cleans and he’s kind of awesome.”
Louis pinches the bridge of his nose. “Christ, you don’t have to sell Harry to me, I know he’s bloody awesome, he was my friend for years before I even knew you guys, Harry in himself isn’t the issue. It’s just— my body. I can’t focus on writing when… but it’s all right. It’s all right. I just need to adjust to it and have a fag. I’ll have a fag.”
He steps out onto their balcony, picks a cigarette out on shaky fingers and revels in the first long drag. Once he’s finished it, though, and he steps back into the flat, he’s immediately slapped in the face with a viciously strong gust of Harry and he nearly slicks right up again.
Fuck, this is going to take some getting used to.