Price of Silence

The boy still built walls with thorns bristling from behind them. Watching him throughout the meeting — arms crossed, glaring somewhere into the empty air with a sullen, crooked expression — it was impossible to tell whether he was even listening to what people said.

Even so, Beau Beau's position was that the very fact he kept coming back of his own accord — this being no mandatory gathering — was a sign of hope, and that the right thing was to wait patiently.

"How was today? Doesn't it feel a little better, realizing you're not the only one struggling? Think about how many 'abnormal' people there are in the world."

After the meeting dispersed, Beau Beau approached the boy, who was standing at the long refreshment table set against the wall picking at a cookie, and tapped his shoulder with a grin. It was a teasing retort, borrowing the boy's own word for how male Omegas and female Alphas were considered 'abnormal.'

"How about helping me clean up before you eat cookies, huh?"

Beau Beau looped an arm around the boy's neck from behind and tugged him along. The boy lost his balance and grumbled as he was dragged away, but he didn't seem to dislike the kind of teasing Beau Beau initiated.

Beau Beau didn't treat the boy with excessive caution. His judgment was that trying to instruct him gently, or approaching him with the 'adult' facade of understanding everything, would simply not work on this particular child.

Beau Beau and his boyfriend had first encountered the boy three weeks ago at Parc de la Villette. In one corner of the peaceful park — where small children played on the playground, families spread out on picnic blankets laughing over sandwiches, and couples in swimsuits shared kisses while sunbathing — behind the information booth, in a shaded spot where few people wandered, the boy had been curled up on the ground, drenched in cold sweat.

Finding it strange that the boy seemed to be deliberately hiding rather than asking anyone for help, Beau Beau and his boyfriend had approached to ask if he was all right.

His heat had begun. He hadn't taken any suppressants. The two immediately took him to a small nearby hospital, got a prescription, and made sure he took the medication.

The fourteen-year-old named Nicholas was unable to accept the fact that he had manifested as an Omega. He hadn't told his school or his family, and he was in a dangerous situation — insisting he didn't need suppressants and trying to endure his heat on his own.

The two had invited the boy to the 'Late Blooming' group. The boy who had left them swearing he would never live as an Omega had now shown up for his third meeting.

"Nick, it's about time you told your parents."

Beau Beau said it casually as he folded the chairs in half and stacked them neatly at the back of the exhibition hall. But the boy's face went bright red and he jumped to his feet.

"Absolutely not! If my father finds out, he'll throw me out!"

"You say you hate your father so much, yet you're afraid of being kicked out of his house?"

"……"

From his very first meeting, the boy had spoken with a terrified expression — if his father ever learned he was an Omega, he wouldn't even want to look at him; the shame and disgust might even lead him to send him to a mental hospital. He was convinced his entire life was already over, that he would be ostracized and bullied at school and would never find a decent job.

Ultimately, Nick's denial of himself as an Omega stemmed less from any judgment of his own and more from the prejudice against Omegas that society and those around him had instilled.

"Anyway. I mean it. Don't go telling my father anything behind my back. Got it?"

"Why would I do your work for you? For whose benefit? Don't count on that."

Beau Beau smiled wickedly and gave the boy's forehead a gentle push as he clung to his arm with an almost desperate expression, making sure not to hurt him.

Yeehyeon, watching nervously from the side and wondering whether the boy's anxiety and defiance might explode and send him running out never to return, finished arranging the last chair and slung his worn bag from the refreshment table over his shoulder.

"Um… I should get going."

"Oh? I'll come with you!"

The boy grabbed several large chocolate-chip cookies and followed Yeehyeon out. With the canal between them, the boy's house and 'The Hands' were about a twenty-minute walk apart. This was the third time they had walked home together, a habit that had started on the day the boy first came to the meeting and they had discovered they lived in the same direction.

Nick never brought up Alphas or Omegas on the subway, but out on the street, he opened up far more honestly and readily than he ever did at 'Ttu.'

"Why do male Omegas even exist? I just want to die already."

After getting off at the Romainville station and walking with the canal on their left, Nick shoved his hands deep into his pockets and kicked a loose stone on the ground. It was an extreme statement that didn't suit the lazy Sunday afternoon bathed in warm sunlight — but Yeehyeon now knew that when Nick said he wanted to die, the words didn't carry their full weight.

"There are even male Betas who envy male Omegas because they want a child with their Alpha partner."

"That person must be gay!"

"Hmm… his partner was a female Alpha, actually."

"A man… wants to become an Omega to have a child with his girlfriend?"

The boy stopped walking and turned to Yeehyeon with an expression as if he had just heard about some grotesque, revolting crime. The shock seemed to run deep.

"The two of them wanted a child born between them. If becoming an Omega was the only way that could happen, they were willing. Is it really that important who carries the child, between two people who love each other?"

It had been over half a year since Yeehyeon, after considerable hesitation, had finally started attending the 'Late Blooming' group. During that time, he had met people in all kinds of situations and heard their innermost stories — their worries, their wounds, the ways they had found to overcome them or hadn't. It had been half a year of learning that there is no absolutely correct or ideal designation, that the gender one desires and the way one comes to accept their own designation varies entirely depending on situation and environment.

Yeehyeon spoke to Nick about a handful of male Omegas whose stories might chip away at his prejudices. The reaction, however, was not much different from before.

"Whatever those people do — I never wanted this! Then just make those men into Omegas instead! I… I really hate becoming a monster like this."

Nick shouted, his face on the verge of tears, then bit down hard on his lower lip, turned his back on Yeehyeon, and started walking again.

At the boy's words, Yeehyeon felt a brief, dizzying sting — as if he had been lightly struck on the back of the head.

He remembered how he himself had described his own state — stuck halfway, neither Beta nor Omega — using that exact word. Monster.

"Yeehyeon-ah."

The first person who had ever called him that — called his name like that — had seemed like someone standing beneath a collapsing sky. He understood now that by calling himself a monster in front of someone who couldn't even approach him carelessly, he had driven a knife not only into himself but deep into that person's heart as well.

This time, it was Yeehyeon who stopped walking. Nick, a few steps ahead, noticed and looked back belatedly, squinting against the bright sunlight.

"Males insert, females receive. Both male and female are needed for conception, but it's the female who actually becomes pregnant — calling that arrangement 'normal' is a Beta standard."

"But most of the world is Beta."

"Just because most people are Betas doesn't mean everyone is a Beta. Is it justifiable to call the majority 'normal' and treat the rest — a minority — as 'abnormal,' simply because they are the majority?"

"……"

Realizing this was probably too complex a concept for a fourteen-year-old, Yeehyeon relaxed his shoulders and let out a quiet sigh. He took off his sunglasses and tucked them into the pocket on the left side of his T-shirt.

"What I mean is… there's no need to declare one thing as the standard and render everything else abnormal."

Nick tilted his head, looking up at Yeehyeon with an expression that still didn't quite understand.

"Then what are you, hyung? Are you really a Beta?"

There was doubt in his tone. The boy had grown up in a world where Betas naturally defined themselves as 'normal.' It was just like… a place like his grandfather's village.

Meeting the honest gaze in Nick's eyes — a mix of confusion, anxiety, anger, and fear — Yeehyeon slowly opened his mouth.

"I'm… nothing."

"What does that mean?"

"I could be a Beta. Or in the future… I might become an Omega."

Yeehyeon took a quiet breath. Even if Nick didn't know, he knew the meaning and weight hidden behind those words.

He hadn't expected to speak about this — the thing he had been building up and tearing down inside himself, approaching and retreating from, for nearly ten months since leaving Seoul — in a way like this.

"You saw it at the meeting. So many people experience their manifestation in their mid-to-late twenties. No one knows what I'll become. And… whatever I become, or even if I become nothing at all, I am still myself. Not a monster."

"……"

"I attend 'Late Blooming' precisely because I don't want to see anyone — including myself — as a monster."

Though dissatisfaction and lingering questions still showed in his face, Nick's expression had softened compared to before. Yeehyeon started walking again, giving Nick's back a gentle, encouraging nudge. Nick looked up at him and nodded slowly.

The prejudices Nick had absorbed from society and his family wouldn't disappear overnight, or because of a single decisive sentence. But if there was one thing Yeehyeon had learned over the past half year, it was that change wasn't entirely impossible.

"Hyung… aren't you going on vacation?"

Nick had been rambling about the annual family trip to his grandmother's house in the Loire Valley in central France, timed to coincide with his father's vacation, before asking this.

Despite grumbling that he couldn't go to other countries in Europe the way his friends could, he seemed genuinely excited about the once-a-year trip. For the moment, he appeared to have forgotten entirely that he was now an Omega, and that he would need to manage his suppressants differently to get through it.

"Instead, a friend is coming to Paris."

"A friend?"

"Yeah. I'm going to pick him up at the airport tomorrow."

"He must be… a really close friend, to come all the way here."

Nick asked with a slightly cautious air, as if gauging Yeehyeon's reaction. Yeehyeon nodded. Nick's eyes — which had been clouded with despair just ten minutes earlier, saying he wanted to die — now sparkled with simple curiosity.

Perhaps, just as Beau Beau had said, Nick only needed time and attention, and might eventually adapt and come to accept himself in a healthy way. In any case, Beau Beau had gone through situations like this far more often than Yeehyeon had, and the only way forward was to trust his words and keep moving — with each of them holding steadfastly to their own truth in their own place.

By the time Yeehyeon parted from Nick and arrived at 'The Hands,' his back was soaked in sweat. Even though the temperature was lower than in Korea, the cloudless sky made the sunlight fierce. He was quickening his pace, already thinking about a shower and a cold can of beer, when a long-haired man coming out of the building waved at him.

"Yeehyeon."

"Ben."

"Look at you sweating."

"Yeah, it's pretty hot today."

Yeehyeon wiped the sweat from under his chin with the back of his hand.

"The apartment's an oven too. I was thinking of going to a café instead."

"It'll be just as hot there."

"At least there are beautiful people to look at."

Ben murmured it like a self-evident truth everyone would agree with. He simply enjoyed appreciating beautiful people as subjects, and he never bothered hiding his aesthetic sensibilities.

"Want to come?"

Yeehyeon smiled and shook his head. On days when the 'Late Blooming' group met, he had work planned from afternoon through evening.

Contrary to Ben's comment about the building being an oven, the moment Yeehyeon stepped into the lobby, the cool air hit him like a relief. Even if the lower floors were cool, the studios upstairs would surely be roasting by now.

Peeking through the open doorway of the exhibition hall, it seemed quite crowded — visitors often came on Sundays. He was about to slip quietly up to his room when a familiar voice called out from behind and stopped him.

"Yeehyeon-ssi, a package came for you."

Yuni nuna, with a playful expression on her face, was holding a small parcel tucked under her left arm and waving. She must have spotted him returning and followed him out from the office. Yeehyeon smiled and stepped back off the stairs.

"It arrived on Friday. Pierre must have forgotten to leave a message for you to collect it before he left for his vacation."

The box she handed him was a small cardboard box, not even two spans tall, and not particularly heavy.

"It looks like it's from the US. Do you know anyone in America?"

Yeehyeon looked down at the box and checked the sender's name. Even in the handwriting, there was something neat and warm.

Marcus Dunham. It was Marcus.