The first time Shori had seen it, he wasn’t even sure what he was looking at. He’d gotten up blearily to use the restroom, at an inn sometime before the new year for a photoshoot, and when he’d stumbled out of the futon, he realized he was alone in the room. Kento and Fuma’s futons, messily slept in across from his, were empty.
He squinted across the dark room in confusion and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. He confirmed that they really were gone, and not hiding somewhere in the shadows of the room waiting to spook him and slowly made his way to the door.
Sometimes they did that, though— just slipped away together, coming back smelling like cigarette smoke or just. Strange. Changed, somehow, from before they had left.
They were a pack, though, and they always smelled enough like each other and not enough like blood for Shori to worry. He had only recently presented as an omega, to the surprise of both Fuma and Kento, but it had done well to help smooth over the tension in their group. They could both show concern over Shori’s heat cycles without worrying about showing vulnerability to each other. Shori was neutral ground, and his wellbeing was somehow above their petty squabbles.
Shori, for his part, was instrumental in keeping things running, too. He was constantly observing, keenly on the watch for any minute differences in their moods so he could mend it over, and they seemed to let him. They even seemed to welcome it sometimes. He knew by now exactly when to lick childishly at the scent glands in Kento’s wrist to comfort him when he swallowed his upset behind a strained smile, and he could read the tension when Fuma was itching for a smoke, fingers twitching by his sides as his unchecked pheromones spilled oppressively over the room.
He could tell when they were in the mood to indulge him back and when they weren’t, too wrapped in their own thorny, tangled mess of thoughts to care if Shori got pricked trying to pick flowers. In practice, though, there was something here that Shori still didn’t know.
It was painfully obvious in the moments when they came back stained with each other’s scents, wearing secretive smiles and brushing off his curiosity. He would endure Kento’s erratic attempts at changing the subject and the smug set of Fuma’s jaw with the knowledge that he was still distinctly separate from them. That, despite not being as young as Sou and Marius, despite being old enough to be here promoting with them now, he still wasn’t mature enough to be a part of them.
And then he’d feel a little lost, adrift in this strange space between age groups, where he wasn’t fully considered a child anymore, but not considered an adult yet, either.
He didn’t know how they made peace in those moments when the tension between them felt like it would explode into a real fight. Maybe chainsmoke, or scent each other briefly and embarrassingly, or maybe they did really wrestle it out in the alley, for all the times Kento came back sullen and walking a little funny.
As much as it killed him not to be able to venture inside this abyss of vagueness, Shori still wasn’t privy to what Fuma and Kento did.
They’d presented into alpha and omega far before they’d even met him, thirteen and uncertain still. They’d already seemed like adults then, a perfect alpha and omega pair joined at the hip from their time as Juniors. It was only when Shori had gotten to really know them that he understood their more personal grievances.
Despite how they always tried to keep him out of their personal spats, sometimes it became apparent their hostility was overflowing and pouring out of them. It created a thickness in the air so heavy that Shori could feel it like a dark miasma throughout waiting rooms and camera tests and official contents alike. It was rather unfair, Shori thought often but never dared to express to his thickheaded older members, to exclude him when their friction still affected all parts of their work so deeply.
He began his sullen walk down the hall towards the bathroom when he heard them, hushed but unmistakable. He froze. The voices came from the spare room adjacent to theirs, which had been used during filming, but was supposed to be empty at this hour. The staff accommodations had wound up on another floor, and so he knew it couldn’t be anyone else.
He knew he shouldn’t. That he was overstepping some kind of invisible boundary Kento and Fuma had drawn in the sand between themselves and him before he’d even been old enough to realize it. But Shori wasn’t the child of their memories, who Kento remembered barely coming up to his chest at rehearsal at the NHK hall and Fuma joked about being able to toss across the room in one hand. He was an omega now, and a member of their pack.
He had been changed in their proximity—able to read the thunder and clouds in their moods as well as they themselves could. He could feel when the tension grew thin and was about to split, when every molecule of Kento would be buzzing with insatiable, bordering-manic energy in the days before his heats, and Fuma’s scowl grew so dark that Shori almost worried he’d disregard work altogether and take a swing at Kento’s pretty face.
He had grown to know them well, and in his mind, that gave him some sort of entitlement to this knowledge. He was well aware that there was a moral failing somewhere in this line of thought, but Fuma and Kento never considered right and wrong when they left Shori to bridge the gaping distance between them. Though he wasn’t typically one to mimic their bad behavior, he felt a little entitlement in this specific instance could be warranted. After all, it could be chalked up to the harmless curiosity of wanting to understand his older brothers better.
And so, he crept to the thin sliding door and furtively pressed an ear against it. The door was very slightly ajar, and beyond it, Kento murmured something to Fuma in an uncharacteristically low voice.
Something else was going on, a rustling he didn’t recognize accompanied by a sound that resonated like a palm slapping open-faced across a cheek. Were they fighting after all?
He felt like he was distinctly doing something he shouldn’t, breath coming slow as he nudged the door open the tiniest bit, so a thin strip of light bled into the hall. He crouched forward, squinting through the crack.
Shori swallowed the gasp that rose in his throat in disbelief, heart pounding as he peered through the narrow open slat. The first thing that hit him was the scent. It was heady and thick and reminiscent of rosewater, so rich that it made his head spin like incense inside a temple. All he could see was a blur of bodies in low light and Kento’s yukata spreading dark across the slats of the floorboards like spilled ink. The slap slap slap of skin broke the silence of the night, and Shori’s gaze traveled lower to the bounce of Kento’s disheveled hair, the glistening stripe of exposed sternum through his askew yukata, and finally to Fuma curled close over him.
Though it took a second to register, Shori realized what was happening. He knew what they were doing— he wasn’t a kid anymore, after all, despite the way Fuma and Kento continued to baby him.
They were having sex.
Or rather, as he looked through the cracked door at the brutal meeting of their hips, he thought they may be doing something else altogether. Something Shori didn’t have the vocabulary for in his limited experience of what sex was supposed to be.
He knew the logistics of it, that it could be loving or necessary. But Kento wasn’t in heat, and they certainly didn’t look like they were in love— Fuma’s hands gripped his waist so tight that his knuckles and tendons stood stark against the pale thin skin of the back of his hands. Kento’s hips were crushed in that bruising grip, no doubt hard enough to leave marks along his jutting hipbone. His legs spilled long and slender over Fuma’s forearms, tensing and shaking as their bodies met each time. The low, muffled groans were forced from between his bitten lips each time Fuma bottomed out relentlessly inside him, not letting Kento even catch his breath. He was forced to take shaking gasps between the noises he tried desperately to bite back, rendering him breathless and exhausted.
Shori had felt as if he were missing something for ages, left out of the one singular thing Kento and Fuma somehow seemed to share seamlessly only between each other, but now, watching Kento’s fingers grip and scratch at Fuma’s back and Fuma squeeze his hands around Kento’s pelvic bone in consequence, he got it all at once. This is what they’d been leaving him out of.
They were doing something focused and harmful and repetitive, pouring the tension out of their bodies into each other.
He felt scared and he felt sick, and though he tried to look away, it was as if he couldn’t.
The shock and confusion throbbed through him like a second pulse. All he could hear now was the rhythmic slap of their bodies, punctuated by Kento’s bitten-back sobs and Fuma’s moans whenever he tightened uncontrollably around his cock. It was so quiet, and yet in the silence of the inn at midnight, it was as if every sound was amplified and aimed directly at Shori’s ears, where they ricocheted around the inside of his head endlessly.
Shori’s stomach churned, a mess of confused adrenaline and something else, like a sharp pang of heat that cut through the pounding blood in his body. The unfamiliar and strange feeling swelled inside him and made his knees weak, bringing his mind snapping back to his own body. He realized with a sudden flood of shame that it was arousal settling liquid-hot in the bottom of his belly.
He should go back to bed now. He should pretend he never saw anything and try to go back to sleep. Instead, his rationality eroded away against the heat that swept him up into its arms, rocking through him dizzily. Even when he closed his eyes, he could still see the firm muscles of Fuma’s shoulders in his mind, could hear the ragged noises Kento tried so desperately to hold back, and that only made him more desperate to see.
He pressed a hesitant hand between his legs. His cock stirred in the confines of his underwear as he breathed shallowly and watched Fuma take Kento’s ankles and hold his slender legs together.
In this position, he could fuck Kento deeper than before, and the slick sound of his cock entering Kento’s hole made Shori’s vision fuzzy from how hard he squinted, curiously trying to see. Kento’s legs were reddened like he’d been kneeling before turning onto his back, and when Fuma pressed his hands to his knees and bent them into his chest, he let out a weak wheeze of protest.
Fuma ignored him and swiftly kept fucking him, holding him immobilized below. “Don’t be so dramatic,” Fuma spoke finally, voice husky from disuse. The rasp of it made Shori shiver a little. He’d never heard that tone from Fuma before, low and oddly gentle despite the callousness of his words. “You like being held down like this, don’t you Nakajima?”
Kento was an unusually proud omega. He simply turned his face away despite the flushed sheen of sweat covering it, trying to hide by throwing his arms up over his resentful, watering eyes. Even from where Shori watched, he could tell that Fuma hit the nail on the head. Kento’s toes curled with Fuma’s relentless, steady thrusts now, and his breaths had gotten wetter and even heavier.
Kento’s familiar scent, cloyingly hanging over everything, was making Shori’s head spin. It was like inhaling directly from the petals of a poisonous flower, washing Kento’s arousal forcefully over him. It was different from the sleepy, comforting scent he was used to before Kento’s heats.
Kento had always made nests during his pre-heat period, and even before Shori had presented, he’d been allowed to crawl in to cuddle. They’d just sleepily nuzzle each other’s scents over each other, Kento’s fragrant and floral and Shori’s honeyed, and Kento would wrap Shori up in his arms like an octopus until he felt too worn out. Finally, he’d be sent away so Kento could take his suppressants and sleep through the side effects alone.
Now, his scent was a rosy headiness that made the room feel hot and lush like a garden, thickening as Fuma fucked deeply into him, the slick sounds now unmistakable for anything else but what they truly were.
Shori’s swollen cock bled heat against his palm through the thin confines of his underwear. The longer he rubbed gently against it, the more he could feel himself getting wet, his knees shaking as he felt slick flood his lower body. His own breaths ran ragged from the heat pooling in the bottom of his stomach. Each drag of his hand over his hard, insistent arousal made him shudder, and he reached his other hand out, carefully grabbing onto the doorframe to steady himself as he stroked a little faster.
He couldn’t help but wonder about Kento’s heat now. Did Fuma sneak in after Shori had been kicked out? Had they been doing this the whole time?
He thought back to the haphazard nests Kento seemed to be able to build anywhere, from green room couches to rehearsal hall corners alike, and wondered if the times he’d noticed Fuma’s residual pheromones on Kento’s neck and wrists came from his discarded sweatshirt in the nest or something more direct. He imagined Fuma uncharacteristically nuzzling into Kento’s nape, soft mouth covering his throbbing scent glands, and unwittingly let out the softest whimper, squeezing his lips together quickly to keep the noise in. Slick leaked stickily through his underwear, and Shori felt his cock twitch under his palm.
Fuma certainly seemed willing enough now to show a modicum of tenderness. He carelessly reached down and threw Kento’s trembling arms away to reveal his flushed face. He slipped a hand around Kento’s jaw, holding it fast as he leaned down and kissed him.
It was a simple, inelegant kiss, but the sight was enough to make the knot in his belly twist. Shori took in the span of Fuma’s shoulders curved over Kento’s sweat-slick chest, and for a second it felt as if he could imagine himself in Kento’s position, as if the hand on his cock could be the firm press of Fuma’s hips instead providing friction.
His breath hitched, and suddenly Shori was pitching headfirst into an orgasm, his cock spilling wet through his underwear. His knees shook under him, and it took his grip on the doorframe not to go sliding to the ground. When he felt steady enough to stand without the support, he found his head still buzzing distantly, fuzzy television static punctuated by his own rapid heartbeat.
Inside the room, Kento broke free of Fuma’s mouth to cry out in protest, hands scampering up his back and clinging to Fuma’s neck as he began to come too. Even this was a fight, and Kento struggled wholeheartedly the same way he did in everything when it came to Fuma. The hair at Fuma’s neck was gripped between his slender fingers, and his legs spasmed, tightening instinctively around Fuma’s waist. His voice peaked over a curse, and then Fuma was stubbornly kissing him again to muffle the noise.
Kento came and came, whimpering into Fuma’s mouth as if his orgasm would continue as long as Fuma kept kissing him. But finally, the struggle stopped, and his body calmed, too tired to do anything but accept Fuma’s cock. Shori watched in a daze as Fuma’s full mouth got a little clumsier, dragging down to Kento’s jaw, and then finally he buried his face in the arc of Kento’s neck and began to fuck him with rough, short thrusts.
Kento’s hands, unlike before, were relaxed now and threaded together behind Fuma’s nape, skinny fingers stroking through the longer hair there. The tension had been bled out of him with the force of his orgasm, and now he was languid, lazily holding Fuma against him so he wouldn’t be fucked across the floor. When Fuma finally came, moaning into the curve of his shoulder, his eyes fluttered shut against the shudder that wracked through his body, and Kento laughed, low and breathless and happy, hugging him impossibly tighter.
It was only then that Shori felt the true gravity of the situation settle on his shoulders.
Listening to Fuma and Kento’s ragged breathing run together in the room, he reared back suddenly and finally realized his own state. His underwear was soaked through and ruined, and his legs were still trembling.
He felt wild, and changed—perhaps the same kind of changed that Fuma and Kento felt when they came slinking back in the room each time they did this. The knowledge sat heavily in his belly like he’d swallowed stones the whole time he’d watched.
He backed away from the door slowly, forcing his numb legs to bring him the rest of the way down the hall to his original destination.
As if he were in a dream, he watched himself throw the underwear away, too ashamed to even think about washing it. He used the restroom like he’d originally intended, and in a daze, he went back to bed.
There was an inkblot bruise on Kento’s hip the next day. Shori stared at it intently through the tiny sliver of skin that showed above his low-slung jeans when Kento stood like that, lanky and hip propped against the table.
Were Fuma’s thumbs really so broad? If Shori tore Kento’s shirt hem back, would he find four more marks adorning the bone of his skinny hip, like dark, luminescent moons over a mountain ridge? His mouth began to water.
“Shori?” Kento’s voice was low and tinged with worry.
He snapped to attention in time to find Kento’s hand approaching his arm. He flinched back instinctively, ashamed to be caught thinking something so perverse, but Kento’s eyes widened in surprise, his outstretched fingers pausing in midair. He looked a little lost.
After a moment, he seemed to remember himself. He dropped it and smiled easily instead. “Hey, space-case. Kikuchi’s talking to you about stage positions.”
Shori turned wildly, finding Fuma looking at him with a healthy amount of concern across the green room.
He shrank under their curious eyes. His ears were hot and surely red. “Sorry,” he finally murmured in a tiny voice. “Can we go over it again?”
As if sensing the stormcloud brewing over his head, even Fuma didn’t tease him. He just nodded and opened the script back up.
Somehow, that felt worse.
It happened many times after that.
Shori had gotten so used to watching them over the years, like a macabre routine each time they had a schedule that lasted overnight. He strained through thin hotel walls and crept across wooden traditional ryokans, and once, lingered embarrassingly long beside a coat closet backstage.
It was almost compulsive by now, as if he truly couldn’t help himself. He never talked about it to anyone, never gave the slightest inkling of what he knew, but he watched them all the same, helplessly, perversely, unable to look away. Even when the sight felt as if it would rot his insides and make him as twisted and envious as they could be. He was the observer. He’d always been, stuck outside their partnership no matter how icy or heated it got. Resigned to the position now, it seemed as if he’d never stop observing new things about them.
He knew as well as Kento and Fuma themselves exactly how they sounded, only making noise when it couldn’t be helped, how they moved like two planets in orbit, churning through the usual frigid vacuum of space that stretched between them, how they loved and hated all in one. He watched with a rapt fascination, as if they may ask him to join at any moment.
This was how he knew that Fuma was different tonight. They were in a vacation cabin in Aomori for an overnight location shoot. The cabins were small, and it was only the five of them in this one. Fuma and Kento had both been in unusually good moods all day, getting all their violence out by pushing each other around in the snow and sticking their cold fingers down the back of Sou’s shirt.
By the time they went to bed, they’d practically already been signaling each other across the room, eyes locked despite Marius’s chatter as he and Sou finished up playing a board game. Shori had tried to keep the conversation going, but he’d known already that Fuma and Kento were somewhere else mentally.
Fuma hadn’t complained about how he and Kento would have to share a room—not even for the sake of appearances. They were negligent in the best of times, and tonight they were both a little drunk from dinner, sloppily leaving the door ajar. Now, a couple hours later, Shori was standing in the hall and he knew instantly that something unusual was happening.
He knew even before Kento that Fuma’s retaliations to his attempts at poking the bear were softer tonight, as if his heart wasn’t into the usual struggle. Where Fuma would usually pin Kento’s hands behind his back and hold himself out of reach of Kento’s mouth, he fought off the biteyness halfheartedly. Instead, he let Kento suck big, obvious bruises along the pale column of his throat, even above where his shirt collar would hide. He didn’t argue back when Kento guided him down to his knees, just carefully unzipping Kento’s jeans and taking his cock into his mouth willingly.
Fuma on his knees was a strange sight. Shori paused in the hallway, hand halfway between his own legs, and his heart hammered in his chest at the sheer unfamiliarity of it.
Fuma’s arrogant streak was a well-known thing among all of them, but it was even more apparent to Shori, who knew that Fuma would make Kento cum as many times as he wanted on his cock, but he rarely did something as giving as this.
Shori had always thought they were both self-serving creatures, but now Fuma eagerly sucked Kento’s cock into his mouth, letting it rest so deep in his throat that Kento let out a strangled noise in surprise and buried his fingers deep in his hair.
Even in this, there was an exchange of power. Fuma swiftly stretched a hand up and took Kento’s wrist, crushing the fine bones in his grip. His fingers curled in pain, and he let out a noise like a snarl, wrenching his hand out of Fuma’s hair.
“Such an asshole,” Kento said venomously, cradling his hand defensively to his chest.
Shori could see the imprint of Fuma’s fingers even from across the room, left like hateful lipstick kisses, pink and smudgy over the thin-veined span of his wrist.
His pulse thumped in his ears, unsteady and overly-excited over the roaring rush of his own blood. His stomach filled with restless heat as he watched Fuma pull back, Kento’s dick springing up flushed and pink from between his lips. “You got harder,” Fuma scoffed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand roughly. “You’re sick, Nakajima.” He unceremoniously pushed Kento back by the thighs, making him fall onto the bed.
Shori was surprised to see him go down willingly. Kento was usually a wild animal in moments like this, scratching down Fuma’s back hard in retaliation for the bruise he’d surely wear tomorrow, or biting his own marks into the meat of Fuma’s shoulder.
Today, though, he must have finally sensed the unusual generosity Fuma was offering. His pupils were wide and dark and blown, face equally flushed from the pain and arousal, and the expression on his face was torn. Fuma watched him fight himself briefly, and then swallow down the urge to resist with difficulty.
Finally, he sank back without another complaint. He laid back until his upper half was flat on the bed, long legs hanging off the edge. Shori could see him working his full bottom lip between his teeth in unease the whole time, gingerly flexing his injured wrist.
This was not his face to see. Though Fuma had been the one to earn it, Shori secretly always thought Kento was the most beautiful like this, uncertain and vulnerable. Far more beautiful than the bravado he put on in front of the camera, where he wore his pride like a princely cloak of arrogance. His shell pink lips parted as if the complaint was caught somewhere in his throat, and his eyelashes fluttered in a dark blur from Shori’s viewpoint. It bothered him a little bit that Fuma, indelicate and brash Fuma, was the only one who could reach past the brilliant hard shell of Kento’s exterior and pull something dark and desperate from inside.
But he’d come to learn that this was how Kento was—not an ice wall to be chipped slowly at like Shori wanted to do, but a glittering wall of glass instead, and somewhere along the past five years, Fuma had acquired the acute knowledge of exactly how to find the cracks, pressing his nails into the thin spidering fractures until they spread and shattered uncontrollably. He could reach in through the shards, uncaring of how they cut at his outstretched palm, and draw out the Kento who was bloody and frightened and raw from behind the fragments.
The ease with which he did it made something inside Shori go a bit shivery and odd. He felt floaty watching, as if he was just as under the thrall as Kento, swallowing down the wetness in his mouth as he watched Fuma bury his face back between Kento’s legs and mouth softly over the milky skin inside Kento’s thighs.
Kento shivered and arched restlessly. Shori’s breath caught in his throat as Kento’s lithe waist twisted off the sheets and he groaned in frustration.
Shori pressed a palm slowly to the pressure building between his legs. His cock was filling just watching Fuma leave openmouthed kisses across Kento’s bare, soft skin. Each time the blossom-pink curve of his mouth left Kento’s thigh, a dusky mark would appear, sometimes angry with teeth marks and sometimes glistening with saliva. Shori’s eyes were transfixed on the span of Fuma’s pale fingers caging Kento’s thighs, keeping him in place as he mouthed lower, deeper, sealing his lips with a soft wet sound over Kento’s hole.
Shori bit the inside of his cheek hard to keep in the surprised moan that threatened to bubble its way up his throat. Instead, Kento’s harsh sob cut through the air, masking the muffled exhale Shori let out. His whole body jerked, lean muscles pulling taut as he tried to escape Fuma’s grip.
Fuma’s voice cut in, half muffled and half teasing. “You’re going to break my rib kicking like that.”
Kento went limp like a puppet cut from its strings.
He adjusted his knee away from Fuma’s chest, draping a long, slender leg over Fuma’s shoulder instead. “Now you’re going to cave in my skull if you kick,” Fuma warned him.
“I—” he swallowed against the hoarseness of his voice. “I won’t,” he promised.
Fuma made a low, derogatory noise in his throat that told Shori he didn’t believe him in the slightest, but he spread Kento’s other leg even further apart with a hand under his knee. Though Shori couldn’t see it now with Fuma sitting between Kento’s legs, he’d seen Kento’s pink, glistening hole many times before. He knew Fuma was just taking a second to watch, and that thought made his ears hot for some reason. Shori wanted to see—but he also wanted to be watched that closely.
It was always a convoluted mix of envy that arose within him when he watched them. He wanted to make Kento’s eyes turn glassy and wet like this, but he also wanted to be on the end of Fuma’s tiny, secretive smile, the one he gave Kento so briefly when he was pulling out afterwards, like they were getting away with something. Though he wanted to be Kento one moment and then Fuma the next, every time, he’d come to the conclusion that he simply wanted to be with them.
He watched with bated breath, feeling distinctly pathetic tonight more than any other. It wasn’t often he could read the affection in their actions so clearly.
There was more aggression in the way they usually had sex. He’d learned what he didn’t have the words for before, the concept whispered to him conspiratorially by one of the senpai. They were just fucking—it had nothing to do with love, expressing nothing but their frustration for each other in a physical manifestation.
Tonight was precarious, though Shori didn’t quite understand why. He could sense it in the air, different from the usual hateful tension. This wasn’t how they normally fucked. Fuma didn’t spend so long kissing and licking Kento’s shy entrance until it twitched under his mouth, and Kento didn’t obediently take it with nothing but small sobbing noises. But tonight, something seemed to have shifted.
Kento’s bruise-adorned hand skittered along Fuma’s side, and in an act Shori couldn’t understand at all, this time Fuma grasped his fingers, sliding his own into the slots between Kento’s slender ones. Kento let out a wounded noise and jerked helplessly, grinding down against Fuma’s tongue.
Fuma’s free hand slid from Kento’s thigh to his hole, and his mouth shifted sideways to replace where his hand had just been, continuing to kiss wetly at the thin skin as he worked two long fingers into the slick ring of muscle.
Kento let out thin, restrained noises with each crook of his fingers, bunny-teeth sunk into the swell of his lower lip to keep back the whimpers. He twitched with each gentle thrust, flat belly glistening with sweat. His skinny fingers, still held in the cage of Fuma’s hand, gripped him back so tight his knuckles were bone-white.
When Kento turned his face helplessly, Shori was surprised to see it wet with tears, clinging stickily to his long lashes and streaming down the flushed curve of his cheek. Fuma gave no indication that anything was wrong. He calmly straightened up from between Kento’s legs, watching Kento shake needily under him.
Kento blinked the wetness out of his red-rimmed eyes, sniffling a little. He murmured in a small, uncharacteristically timid voice, “Hurry, Fuma…”
Hearing Fuma’s first name from Kento felt like a hit to the chest, knocking the air right out of his lungs. Shori, winded, blinked rapidly.
It was one thing when they were doing something hateful and mechanical— Shori could excuse it in his mind as curiosity, as understanding how his members dealt with the underlying issue that had plagued their group from the beginning. But this was an act that transcended Shori or any semblance of their job, an act guided by tenderness.
He had forgotten that under it all, for all the times he told himself that he was the one holding them together when they were dissonant, there was still a thread of trust that bound Fuma and Kento together, something profound and imperceivable to all but themselves. This is the way it had always been, long before Shori had ever come into the picture.
He felt shame invade his body tonight more purely than any time he’d watched them before. This openness wasn’t meant for him, nor was the intimacy that came with it. It was a painful reminder of what he’d stubbornly pushed aside all along; that he’d never be part of this truly, always stuck watching, wanting and waiting but never able to stand at the same level and be equal to the two older members.
Suddenly, Shori felt young for the first time in a long, long time.
It was rare, when his job usually made him feel older than he was, but it struck him now sharp and acrid in the back of his mouth, stinging his throat. He realized with a start that it was the urge to cry.
The shock of his realization was enough to break the spell. He stumbled back from the tiny opening in the door. His throat and nose burned from the ridiculous tears welling in his eyes.
He didn’t stay to watch if Fuma would obey the request, unable to bear the gentleness in his dark eyes. He looked away from Kento’s crying with his own salty tears tracking down his cheeks in hot rivulets, backing away from the door rapidly.
He fled across the small second floor landing of the vacation house to the room he was supposed to be sharing with Sou and Mari.
The three of them hadn’t slept together like this in a very long time, and that only had him feeling smaller. He dove into his bed and buried himself under the blanket.
The sobs shook through him relentlessly no matter how much he tried to calm himself. Sou’s small, sleeping form was visible on the bed beside his, and Shori clamped a hand over his mouth, trying to inhale slowly through his nose not to wake him.
But it was impossible to keep in the shuddering breaths wracking through him, and as he tried desperately to stop crying, he heard a quiet, groggy voice.
“Shori?”
He was too embarrassed to answer. If he caused a scene now, would Kento and Fuma be found out? Would he have to admit to the stupid, dirty thing he’d been doing for years? In the silence, his shaky sobs kept coming unendingly.
Though it was Marius’s soft voice that called him, Shori heard Sou’s bed creak as well, and then his own bed dipped under additional weight.
Shori felt them both slide into the spaces on either side of him. The bed was much too small, and Mari’s most recent growth spurt did them no favors, but he wrapped his long arms around Shori and Sou, holding them fast.
Sou clumsily kissed Shori’s cheek. He brushed his sleep-warm wrist comfortingly against Shori’s, dragging their scent glands together. “Don’t cry, Shori,” he murmured.
Shori buried his face in Sou’s shoulder and cried even harder. It came suddenly and childishly, all big tears and trembling shoulders, but he was unable to help himself. He felt stupid and small and undeserving of their sweetness. He’d held himself apart from them somehow, thinking himself older and more mature—but here he was, bawling into Sou’s chest and letting Marius nestle him against his chest. In this moment, he thought perhaps he was the most immature of all of them.
The cotton of Sou’s shirt soaked through in no time, until Shori’s face felt hot with embarrassment and his head hurt a little. He cried himself out between them as Marius’s cheek nuzzled into the nape of his neck. His milky-soft scent spread through the air like an additional blanket over the three of them, so utterly un-alpha in its gentleness. His recent presentation had been equally as shocking as Shori’s, according to Fuma.
He let Mari lap soothingly over his scent gland a couple times, sniffling a bit as he tried unsuccessfully to take in a steady breath.
The space between them was so warm… They used to cuddle like this all the time when they’d been younger, but it felt less and less common as time went on. Shori drowsily rubbed his tear-swollen face against Sou’s shoulder idly, feeling the crest of Sou’s collarbone under his cheek. The earlier panic had begun to subside with the familiar mingling of their scents. All he was left with was exhaustion and bone-deep shame. He inexplicably had the urge to tug the sweatshirt he’d borrowed earlier from Mari out of his luggage and hide under it forever.
Mari stiffened slightly against his back. “Shori-kun,” he murmured, sounding conflicted. “Your pheromones are—” he hesitated, and then rephrased. “Did you bring suppressants?”
Shori struggled to lift himself out of his haze and remembered that his heat wasn’t due for a couple more weeks, according to the tracker he used.
He blinked the sleepy confusion out of his swollen eyes. His heats were usually very regular, but he knew that stress could affect the frequency. He’d definitely been stressed recently. Had Kento’s pheromones triggered his own heat into starting early?
One look at Marius’s concerned face was enough to answer the question for him. He flushed and realized his scent was out of control, rolling thick through the room as though it had been washed honey-sweet.
He wasn’t typically the type to fall into moods or show his emotions in such a grandiose way, and he hadn’t even realized how oddly raw he’d been feeling. But to begin his heat here, in a snowy rented vacation home in Aomori, was unthinkable.
He felt like crying again just thinking about it. He’d left his suppressants at home, not planning to use them for another week. He stupidly remembered that they were in his bedside table drawer where they always were.
“Ah, no!” Mari said in distress as Shori shook with another round of sobs. He quickly squeezed Shori to his chest and reassured, “It’s okay, Shori-kun, really. Even Kenty forgets his suppressants sometimes. Sou-chan may have extras.”
“I had my heat last week,” Sou murmured, shaking his head. He raised a hand and pressed his slim fingers to the nape of Shori’s neck, feeling the heat resonate from his scent gland. “I think you’re right, though. He feels feverish. Should I ask Kenty if he brought any suppressants?”
At the mention of Kento, Shori choked over another cry, shaking his head quickly. “D-don’t bother him,” he pleaded hoarsely, but Marius shook his head firmly.
“You can’t go into heat here,” he said decisively. Shori fell silent. He knew Mari was right, and that he was being even more childish by refusing their offered help. In his mind, though, there was nothing worse than Sou crossing the hall and seeing Fuma and Kento in the middle of what they were doing.
For so long, it had been Shori’s secret, despite it really being Fuma and Kento’s secret. In his own twisted way, this was something that belonged to him as much as them. It was the only way he could tell himself he belonged, that he knew what Fuma and Kento knew— a way to confirm his place was somewhere between Marius and Sou’s naivety and their maturity. Even now, he grew panicked at the thought of Sou or Mari knowing about the only thing Shori had ever really coveted in his life.
So he struggled to calm his shaky breathing and compose himself. Sou and Mari, ever patient, waited until he said softly, “Can we just—can we wait until the morning? Everyone’s tired and I don’t want to wake them up when Kenty just finished his drama schedules.”
Thankfully, Shori still held some semblance of authority when it came to the three of them. He said it as firmly and rationally as he could manage without shirking under Sou’s worried eyes.
Finally, Sou softened as he was apt to do, which Shori was counting on. He sighed and settled back into the bed. “What if your heat starts before that?”
Shori shook his head. “I would feel even worse,” he said, and they both looked at him doubtfully. The rare sight of him crying must really have spooked them. “Really,” he told them. “Smell me, Mari. It’s not that bad yet, is it?”
Marius raised a skeptical eyebrow, but he leaned in and nosed deeper into Shori’s neck, eyes fluttering shut for a moment as he focused on the honey-scented pheromones there. His breath washed gently over the thin skin, making Shori shiver in the circle of Sou’s arms. Mari was Mari, but he was an alpha regardless, and his teeth were alarmingly close to the defenseless scent gland in his nape. He knew he wasn’t in any danger of being bitten, but the physical proximity was enough to make him dizzy.
“It’s not that bad,” he repeated, though he felt a little breathless from the contact. “Right?”
Marius hummed consideringly, his soft mouth brushing the topmost divot of Shori’s spine where it was exposed above his collar. “You smell good,” he said. “But you’re safe, I think.”
Sou looked unconvinced still, but he reluctantly dropped it and held onto Shori tighter. “I’m getting Kenty first thing in the morning,” he warned.
Shori buried his face back in his shoulder. “Okay,” he agreed.
“And Fuma-kun, too.”
“Okay,” Shori said again. He felt Marius’s giggle vibrate against his back.
“Fuma-kun’s going to panic about it for a while,” he whispered conspiratorially.
“Good,” Sou grumbled, and pet Shori’s hair like a cat. “He deserves to worry a little.”
He fell asleep drowsily between their slumber-party whispering, cried out and exhausted.
He woke up covered in sweat to an unfamiliar noise. It wasn’t dawn yet—the sky beyond the curtains was still deep grey and the room was cast in shadow. When he raised his achy head and found Marius still sleeping beside him, he was leached pale from the faint pre-sunrise light that crept in.
He blearily found the source of the sound that had woken him next. Kento was standing by the foot of the bed wrapped in a hoodie, hair disheveled and glasses pushed over his swollen eyes. Guilt draped over Shori like a wet towel at the sight of him. He forced himself to sit up under its oppressive weight, sore and sticky from sleeping heat-feverishly between Marius and Sou.
Kento smiled a little when he found Shori awake. He held up the package in his hands and Shori squinted across the dark of the room to find a foil sheet of pills between his fingers. “Sou told me you needed these,” he said softly, as not to wake Mari.
Belatedly, Shori realized that the other side of the bed was empty. He turned stupidly to where Sou’s scent lingered in his vacated spot, and then back at Kento, who was watching him with a little uncertainty.
“I’m not too late, am I?” Kento asked, only half joking. He lifted the blanket at the foot of the bed and pretended to take a look inside. “Don’t tell me Mari ravaged you last night.”
“I would never be such a brute,” Mari grumbled sleepily, shifting beside Shori to roll over and bury his face in the pillow.
Shori, caught off guard, startled at the sudden movement.
Kento laughed at his spooked expression, shrugging off the tension. “No,” he agreed happily, leaning over Mari to hand Shori the pills. “I raised you to be a gentleman like me.”
Mari scoffed, but he didn’t protest Kento’s exaggerated attempts at kissing him good morning. He obediently stuck his cheek out of the blanket, hiding the rest of his face. Kento, unbothered, planted a fat kiss on his cheek and grinned.
“Kikuchi talked to the staff,” he told Shori, stroking the tufts of Marius’s fluffy hair that stuck out from the edge of the blanket, eerily reminiscent to the way he would pet Bonita. “You’re free from shooting for the morning while the suppressants kick in. We can check on you around lunch and see if they’re working, but feel free to sleep for a little longer.”
Shori studied the medicine in his hand. He tucked his feet over each other, circling his knees with his arms. The lingering upset had fortunately faded with the night of unrestful sleep, and now he was left with a deep-rooted exhaustion. This was more familiar—this is what usually happened when he went into heat, rather than the waterworks the night previous. He was mortified by his own actions, and even more mortified at how Kento was helping him without a second thought. “Thank you,” he said shyly.
Kento shot him a smile, not flashy and smirky like the smiles he’d spent yesterday flashing at the camera, but gentle and a little tired and sweet. “Tell me if it gets too bad and I’ll come back so we can nest.”
“You’re just trying to get out of work!” Marius interrupted, raising his head finally to show off a particularly egregious bedhead. His long arms snaked around Shori’s waist and he stuck himself to Shori’s back, telling Kento cattily, “You can go, I’ll just stay here with Shori-kun all day.”
Kento rolled his eyes and shared a look with Shori. “We need you at work, Mari-chan,” he deadpanned. “How can the content work without the female lead?”
Marius groaned into Shori’s shoulder blade, but after a moment, he raised his head and blinked the sleep out of his eyes. “It’s so hard being the only pretty girl in this group,” he said loftily from under his bird’s nest of hair, making Shori smile.
Then Mari reluctantly left to go wash up, and Shori was left with Kento.
He felt even guiltier with the knowledge of what he’d been doing to trigger this heat. Kento’s kindness now was unfair, like twisting the blade he’d already plunged into his own belly. He didn’t deserve Mari and Sou’s worry, and he certainly didn’t deserve Kento’s or Fuma’s.
“Shori,” Kento said gently, and frowned at the way Shori looked up immediately, eyes wide and scared. “Why are you beating yourself up? Someone on the staff would’ve had a spare suppressant even if I didn’t.”
Shori just shrugged. It was clear that his anxiety was palpable, even if Kento couldn’t pinpoint the true underlying cause of it.
“You put too much pressure on yourself.” Kento’s voice was airy, but the way he studied Shori with care told him that he was being serious.
“It’s my job,” Shori said tiredly. He wanted to go back to sleep as Kento had said, feeling the distant throbbing return to his temples. His heat wouldn’t be held at bay for much longer without the medicine.
A stubbornness set Kento’s jaw. “Well, right now it’s your job to take your suppressants and stop thinking.”
Kento sat casually on the bed beside him, and Shori instinctively breathed deeper as the scent of the garden, subdued and sweet now, crept over him. This was not the lush sticky jungle of last night, but the fragrance of dew-speckled blooms on a mild spring morning.
“Drink,” Kento told him, and handed Shori the water bottle on the nightstand. Shori obediently took the medicine, feeling distinctly like a kid taking a sick day from school.
When he handed the bottle back, Kento reached to take it from him and the sleeve of his hoodie slid back.
Shori’s mouth went dry.
The bruise from last night streaked lewdly across Kento’s delicate wrist, the color of the sky smudged over his fine bones, his blueish veins and thin skin.
Seeing his surprise, Kento quickly yanked his sleeve back over his hand, but it was too late. Shori, despite the water he’d just downed, felt as if he’d swallowed a mouthful of sand.
He couldn’t ignore it, and he couldn’t brush it off because it would reveal that he knew where it had come from. So he just sat quietly.
Kento had gone still and silent beside him.
“It’s okay,” he finally said in a voice as scarily calm as his countenance. His eyes searched Shori’s briefly before he looked down. “It’s okay,” he repeated. “Sorry if I scared you.”
Shori wondered what kind of expression Kento had found on his face, because he wasn’t sure himself.
He had scared Shori. Just not in the way he thought.
Shori looked down at Kento’s clothed wrist and in a moment of recklessness he couldn’t even blame on the heat, he took it carefully between his fingers and tugged the sleeve back again.
Kento’s hand really was so beautiful, slender and bone-thin, with long, neat nailbeds and a rosy, soft palm. The jutting bone of his wrist was cradled by an oval-shaped bruise. He turned the hand, and just like in his countless fantasies, he found a few more smudged bruises on the other side from the rest of Fuma’s firm, clamping hand.
The hand in his grip was limp, but suddenly it seemed to gain strength and flex, the tendons standing stark on the back of his hand as Kento pulled it deftly from Shori’s grasp and pulled the sleeve back over his wrist.
Shori swallowed dryly. “Kento-kun…”
It was Kento’s turn to be awkward, his gaze locked on the hand he’d flung into his own lap.
I know, he wanted desperately to say. You don’t have to hide it from me. He wanted to be like them, with them, a part of them. But that would be too much.
Kento would never think he understood, and perhaps he didn’t, really, after what he’d seen last night. He thought back to the fathomless look in Fuma’s eyes, to the tears that had fallen in shining rivulets down Kento’s cheeks that he still couldn’t fully understand even now. Maybe he didn’t know what he thought he knew at all.
Kento’s cheeks were uncharacteristically flushed. “It’s nothing. Sometimes you have to fight it out like grown-ups.”
Shori bit his tongue, refraining from making the very obvious comment that grown-ups were supposed to be rational and not fight it out. But maybe he was wrong about that too.
“You didn’t scare me,” he said listlessly. “Fuma-kun’s done worse on camera.”
Not entirely a lie. The bruise isn’t what had scared him, after all. It had been everything else that followed, the things that were completely incongruous to the bruise’s very existence. It wasn’t the hate between them, as he’d known from the beginning that it was there, but the paradoxical tenderness instead, the undeniable existence of love that made him realize he didn’t know anything at all.
A brief flicker of surprise flew across Kento’s neat features, but then he gave Shori an elastic sort of smile that made Shori think he didn’t really believe him. “You’re too smart for your own good.”
Before Shori could formulate what he meant by that, Kento was reaching over and ruffling his hair. “Okay,” he said definitively, and the subject was closed off, roped away behind some luxurious rope curtain in Kento’s mind. “Shooting starts soon. You have water and the omega staff will bring you snacks. Do you need anything else, or should we come check on you later?”
“I don’t need anything,” Shori confirmed. Except a nap. The effects of the suppressant were beginning to set in, rendering everything oddly floaty and detached.
Kento’s face swam in front of him, still worrying his pink lips with his teeth. He was always beautiful, but the uncertainty showed again now—that expression Shori loved above all, aimed at him this time. It sent Shori reeling even further, like he was falling through the air.
He reached out and gently wrapped his fingers around Kento’s wrist, careful not to press too hard. Kento’s eyes were bright and alert, darting from his hand to Shori’s face, but Shori just said softly, “Thanks for taking care of me.”
Kento maneuvered so he could hold Shori’s hand properly, and his palm was warm, even warmer than Shori’s feverish body. He squeezed Shori’s fingers in acknowledgment. His eyes were soft, looking at Shori so preciously that it was hard not to avert his gaze.
“Anytime,” he promised.
Shori dreamt of his first heat.
He’d been in a hotel room in Arizona, shooting content with Fuma and Kento at the Grand Canyon. He’d chalked his feeling unwell up to the jetlag and exhausting schedules, not recognizing the symptoms that would become so familiar in the years to come. He’d collapsed with a fever the night before they were set to return to Japan.
In the strange hotel bed thousands of miles away from home, Shori presented omega. He woke up to shorts soaked with slick and cotton seemingly stuffed down his throat, struggling for each breath in the thin, arid climate. The deep pulsing in his belly made him cry out unconsciously.
His gasps woke Kento, who had been his roommate for the night. He’d rushed over, anxious hands fluttering over Shori’s clammy temple to his shaking chest, before he’d realized what was happening and ran across the hall to alert Fuma and the head manager.
Except that the managers had negligently gone out drinking that night to preemptively celebrate a job well done on the US project.
In the end, only Fuma and Kento were there with him, both panicked and pale-faced. Fuma had stood as far on the other side of the room as possible, hands fisted at his sides, as Shori sobbed and sobbed in Kento’s arms from the first heat ravaging his body.
He’d spent the entire night crying and begging, and they’d spent it holding him and holding him back in equal parts, even when he tore, embarrassingly weak and inefficiently, at Fuma’s shirt, or when he rubbed himself off on Kento’s thigh. Kento just stroked his back and told him in a low, comforting voice that it would be over soon, that nothing was wrong and they were here with him.
It had been the first and only heat he’d experienced. Three days and one delayed flight later, he was back in Japan being prescribed the same extra-strength suppressant Kento and so many of the senpais took.
He dreamt now of how they’d soothed him helplessly amidst their own fear, of how Kento had stroked his hair and Fuma had massaged his scent gland until he’d given himself to the mercy of sleep. The dream was all sensation, of Kento’s skinny arms around his waist surrounding him with the delicate scent of flowers, and Fuma’s palm drawing circles on his back. There had never been a time he’d felt safer, never a moment where he felt their protectiveness more tangibly. He would ache for the same feeling for years and years.
When he awoke, it took him a minute to realize where he was. The touch between his shoulder blades had not faded. It only grew more tangible as he dragged himself from the threshold of sleep.
“Fuma-kun,” he slurred out in surprise, recognizing him from touch alone. He was still half asleep, and the rhythmic drag of Fuma’s palm made it even harder to separate himself from the comforting haze in his head. The suppressants were working, holding back the arousal from crashing through his system, but it didn’t stop the tiredness and mild fever threatening to pull him under again.
Fuma’s broad, steady hand came to rest gently on the crown of his head. “Go back to sleep, Shori,” he murmured. His fingers were mercifully cool as they stroked gently down Shori’s nape, rubbing soothingly over his swollen scent gland. They brought instant relief, narrowing the world down to the slow drag of Fuma’s boney knuckles over where his pheromones spilled unchecked.
His hairline was wet with sweat, but Fuma paid it no mind as he massaged Shori’s nape like he would pet a cat. Shori wanted to protest in embarrassment, but the touch felt too good against the exhaustion of the heat.
His heavy eyelids slid shut and he focused on Fuma’s hands instead of the cramping in his belly. The rhythmic back-and-forth of his strong fingers pressed gently into the thin skin and released each time as Shori’s scent gland throbbed in response. He thought he may melt into the spaces between Fuma’s fingers, end up as nothing but a puddle held in the span of Fuma’s palm.
And then, another more insistent voice said, equally as hushed. “You didn’t even clean the sweat off, Kikuchi.”
Kento’s deft fingers pushed Fuma’s hand aside—Shori hadn’t even realized he was here too—and then a warm, damp washcloth was carefully wiping away the wetness slicking his nape. Shori frowned and batted weakly at him, and Kento just let out a little sigh at his futile, clumsy movements. “Poor kid,” he murmured, the words full of fondness. His knuckle stroked down Shori’s overheated cheek.
Shori, barely awake, couldn’t protest. Rather, he couldn’t help but bask in the attention. It was a complicated feeling. He liked when they doted on him, and when they got along because of him, even if it was because they were babying him together. And in an odd way, he sometimes enjoyed that too.
He sank into the soft melodic mixing of their voices as they continued to fret over him. It wasn’t the abstruse, complex way they showed affection to each other, but something more straightforward and sweeter. It was what he yearned for most, and maybe it could be given easily, if he just made the need known.
There was much he still didn’t know, but this one thing he could be sure of. In their own way, they both loved him, too.