Chapter 31
G ood news had become so rare for him that he didn’t know what to say.
Mr Evans raised an eyebrow. “This is good. I know it sounds like we are not officially pushing your complaint, but the fact that the police are willing to use this stalker case as an excuse to get the footage is huge. It means they believe you and it means they want to catch them, and if your team—”
“Not my team,” Kallen said.
“Of course. If the White Cats haven’t thought to remove the evidence of what their captain did to you in the locker room...”
Kallen glanced away. It was difficult to think of anyone seeing him there, being used like a fucking rag doll and just taking it. “You think they wouldn’t have?”
“If it’s only got as far up as their media rep, we might get lucky.”
“The doctor knows too. Maslow.” He snorted. “I don’t know his first name, does that matter?”
The children of team omegas took their surnames, not the alphas’. Besides the doctor, there were at least two other Maslows in the support staff, and there had been a player too. It was strange now that he thought about it. Was it because the alphas didn’t want to take responsibility? Kallen knew the kids were raised in the Den by their omega parent and other omegas who lived there. Did the alpha players feel they’d contributed enough with their DNA, or did they take the kids out sometimes?
God, it got worse the more you thought about it. It wasn’t just shit for the omegas, was it? The kids must have known they were just... a tool. One the team hoped to use one day and would take care of in the meantime.
“It’s Oriol.”
“What?” Kallen repeated.
“The doctor’s name. Know thy enemy,” Mr Evans explained. “And don’t worry about that sort of thing. Anyone reading your report will be seeking to understand you, if you name someone by their job title and their surname, it will be enough. If they need to be identified, you’d be expected to look at their faces.” Kallen couldn’t suppress his reaction at that. “We could start with photos, unless... Well, let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we?”
Kallen nodded slowly. “So I... do I do anything?”
Mr Evans shook his head. “You have done your bit, now leave it with me.”
It sounded too easy and maybe Mr Evans sensed it, or maybe he’d just been planning to do it all along, because right before Kallen left so the next client could see him, Mr Evans handed him a flier.
“WHO YOU TEXTING?” ANALISA asked, bumping shoulders with him as they walked. She must have been really bored because she’d been coming to knock on his door every time she went to walk Mini.
“Oh, sorry,” Kallen said, pocketing his phone.
She rolled his eyes at him. “Whatever, who?”
Kallen licked his lips and considered lying. “My teammate.” It felt weird to say, even if it was technically true, he was still employed by the White Cats and Levy was still his teammate.
It was enough to stun her into silence, apparently and he turned his head to look at her. “What?”
“No, nothing. Only... Is he nice?”
“Levy?” Kallen laughed. “He’s a puppy. In fact...” He took the phone out again to show her the last image, which was of a literal puppy. “He is trying to decide on his ideal dog.”
Analisa’s face softened for a fraction of a second before she looked up at Kallen’s face. “He is nice to puppies, but is he nice to you ?”
“Yeah,” Kallen said, getting a little impatient. “Just because he’s... Because we play together, doesn’t mean he is a bad person.”
His childhood friend made a highly sceptical noise, and Kallen made the concerted decision to let it go. What did it matter anyway? Levy was all the way in Jiro, and Analisa would go back up north herself soon. They were never going to meet, and all Kallen had to do was keep the puppy pictures to himself.
Anyway, it wasn’t like it could last. He didn’t see how long they could keep it up, Levy with the innocuous sharing, and Kallen enjoying the little warmth he still got out of it while he walked further and further away from a life where they could be together.
AT FIRST, THE VERY notion that someone had not only noticed but spoken publicly and loudly about what was wrong with how omegas were treated in sports beggared belief. He didn’t know why, he’d grown up in a world that had outlawed the practice of omega sharing. Some cities had taken longer to get around it, but it’d been several decades since it’d been legal anywhere in the continent. So as a society, they’d long ago decided it wasn’t healthy or right to ask that of someone.
Except if that someone wanted to play a team’s sports professionally. He’d spent his whole life ignoring the issue, and for all that he’d taken the flier, he’d been so close to tossing it away the moment he’d understood what it was. Wasn’t he doing enough reporting them to the police and setting a lawyer after them?
He didn’t want to think about any of that, he wanted... he wanted the team to fucking apologise, and for it to be over. All of it.
And it was impossible, so the next best thing was not thinking about it.
But maybe deep down he knew what a bad idea that was because he’d given Analisa the flier the next morning when she’d come back to drag him on yet another aimless dog walk.
Analisa growled at the phone in her hands. Kallen wasn’t sure about inviting her to the meeting, but she was an omega, and she was studying to be a lawyer. Besides, she’d sat on the passenger seat of his dad’s car and read him from the organisation’s website so he wouldn’t show up completely ignorant.
It turned out that many people had tried to argue the way sports teams worked wasn’t legal. But the sports associations had just designed contracts that got through one loophole after another. It was still legal for an omega to contract his heat to more than one alpha, after all, they’d argued. Never mind that was an arrangement done out of either convenience or love, and that in the whole continent there were two documented cases of an omega choosing four alphas, which was very much not thirteen, and only about a thousand cases where the omega had selected two. The courts hadn’t found a reason to restrict the number of alphas an omega could freely choose, which in turn meant teams offering an omega a contract that included them freely choosing to give a team the power of selecting who they spent their heats with was perfectly within the bounds of legality. He was too afraid to ask how they’d got breeding rights too.
“It’s such utter bullshit,” she spat, and glancing at her as they reached a red light, Kallen caught sight of her white knuckled hands on her lap.
She was right, of course, he knew that. But he still found it strange how angry she seemed to be. “Did you want to... Like play baseball professionally?”
Her look of utter disbelief made him close his mouth with a click of teeth. “What? I need to want it for myself to think it’s medieval to do that to a person?” She shook her head, frown deepening. “I mean—” She visibly cut herself off. “You are the one who asked me to come to this,” she told him. “Aren’t you angry?”
The lights changed and he had an excuse to look forward again. He tried the words in his head first, to see if any of them made him feel anything. He’d been angry at the police station, and when he’d first met with Mr Evans. But now... Now, he was tired . He’d been fighting for his place in hockey for years, and now he’d lost it. Or walked away from it, but grief wasn’t made any easier when you were breaking your own heart—in fact, it made it worse because he knew he could have gone back any time he liked. Except for how he couldn’t do that either, he’d fall to pieces the moment he stepped on the ice with McKinley, probably end up paralysed again or sick in some other way.
So he was stuck here, in this limbo where he wasn’t a hockey player any longer and he wasn’t anything else . Where he was nothing. And he’d thought that at least he could make a difference, sue the team, tell the truth about what had been done to him and get something done. Maybe get what these people were fighting for, step in a swoop of bravery and excruciating humiliation and win it for his new team.
But of course he hadn’t prepared for a legal battle like he had for hockey, and even on the ice, he’d rarely been able to make such a definite difference. He’d scored game-winning goals once or twice, provided assists a bit more often. But that hadn’t been his accomplishment alone, he’d always had helped.
He’d never been alone.
He’d just felt like he was.
“Mostly I’m tired,” he admitted. “Like I can’t do it anymore.”
“Oh.” Analisa’s voice had lost all its edge. “So you are quitting...?”
Kallen nodded. In a lot of ways, it felt like he already had. Finding out the White Cats had lost from the telly, for one, because none of his teammates except Levy and Benny talked to him anymore. Because he didn’t care.
Her hand on his elbow startled him enough he had to turn the steering wheel the other way to keep the car on its lane.
“Fuck, sorry!”
“It’s fine, I’m... a little screwed up.”
“Well,” Analisa replied with a stubbornness that hadn’t changed since she’d been six and using every single tool at her disposal to convince everyone to play baseball with her. “At least you know that.”
And Kallen couldn’t keep from snorting. It was true, for a long time, he’d pretended he was just a guy getting screwed over . Now he knew it was him, his choice, and that he could choose something else.
THE MEETING WAS A CIRCLE of chairs instead of the auditorium he’d been imagining. Analisa had said it was for those who wanted to find out more, but apparently that meant they’d be asked things such as what had brought them there. The moment the facilitator, a middle-aged black omega man with a kindly smile, asked the person to his left to share their name, phenotype and what had brought them there, Kallen almost shot to his feet.
Analisa reached for his hand and tugged him back down without even looking, like she’d been expecting it. It stung, that she thought he was such a coward, but it also made it impossible to get up without making a scene.
He dropped his eyes instead and listened. There were a lot of omegas, but also a few betas and even an alpha woman with a young omega child who was determined to play football.
“She’s only eleven,” the mum said and if he hadn’t known, Kallen couldn’t have said she was an alpha, her voice went thin at the end, like she was barely holding back tears. Presumably, the lady could have used will to control her child, it wasn’t even that frowned upon when it was a child, who was supposed to obey anyway. And it would be to keep her safe, surely that could have been enough justification.
Instead, the mother was here to maybe... Change the world? The sole notion made Kallen want to laugh bitterly.
The whole story distracted him enough that he didn’t realise it was his turn until Analisa poked him on the knee. She’d let go of his wrist at some point. “Um, hi. I’m Kallen. I’m an omega.” He stopped there, eyes flickering nervously in the direction of the facilitator.
“Hello, Kallen. What made you want to come today?”
“I...” He pressed his lips together, swallowed, but no matter how hard he pushed his throat muscles, he couldn’t seem to make another sound.
“Maybe you can tell us later?” the guy suggested, and it made him grit his teeth, but what was he supposed to do? He managed a jerky nod.
Analisa didn’t mention him as her reason for coming, talking instead about her interest in the law and how the way omegas were treated in sports teams made her blood boil. She blamed it entirely on the teams wanting to make money and control the players, and on the alphas literally getting a free ride—no wonder she’d reacted that way to Levy texting—but the person who spoke after her didn’t draw the line there.
Staring at the floor as he was, Kallen couldn’t tell what their gender was, they’d just said they were an omega and introduced themselves with a short moniker that didn’t tell him anything. But he could feel their fury and their disdain. “Like, I get loving sport,” they said. “That’s why I’m here, I want to play, but debasing yourself like that?”
“Suri.” It was the first time the facilitator—Taylor—had interrupted anyone, and Kallen tensed up even further, nails digging into his palms, jaw clenched painfully. “This is a good example of how we work here. We do not judge omegas, or even alphas, for how the system works. There are many reasons someone will make a choice to participate in a system that is highly problematic. As an organisation, it is one of our core principles not to ask people to justify those choices. What we want is to give them better ones.”
“But don’t they have to get they are making the wrong choice first?” Suri demanded.
Taylor made a noise of acknowledgement. “Let me tell you a story,” he proposed.
Suri didn’t say anything, but they must have given some signal that they were willing to listen.
“I grew up in a team house. My father played for them, had played with them for ten years when he met my mother and she agreed to marry him and move in. I knew some of the kids there were my half-siblings, but I mostly stuck to our apartment and my two older brothers. We played football, of course. Everyone did, and we got organised into teams for day-long tournaments over the holidays.” Taylor shrugged. “But our school did similar things, albeit with more varied activities. To be honest, football was my favourite part of every day, and I was good at it. It’s a bit of a cliche, but it made my dad notice me and I loved that. When I was about eight or nine, he started taking me out for extra practice. Just me . My older brother was an alpha and he didn’t much like that, which... wasn’t great. But my mum intervened, made my dad take him out too and after that, he went back to mostly ignoring me.”
Taylor glanced away from them for a moment towards a wall, full of posters Kallen could tell he wasn’t looking at. “I didn’t know anything about what being an omega meant. In the team house, everyone talked to the omegas with the utmost respect, opening doors and offering to carry their stuff. And in our apartment, my dad would always defer to my mum in front of us. If one of us got in real trouble and needed to be disciplined, it was my mother who’d decide on the punishment. I was a kid anyway and all I wanted to do was score. No one was stopping me from playing and no one said anything about there being only one omega in a team. There were lots of us who liked to play, even if only one other who was as obsessed as I was...” He swallowed, glancing around the circle. “What I want you to understand here is that I had a great childhood, I was loved and well-cared for, nurtured in my gifts and helped with my weaknesses.”
Kallen found himself pressing his lips together, neck aching with tension. It wasn’t going to end well, it couldn’t, and wasn’t it even worse when the people who betrayed you were your own family? At least he’d had the option of going back to his parents’ place.
“I figured it out, eventually. There was a point when other children in the house learned about it from somewhere and half a day later everyone over the age of ten knew. I was thirteen.” He paused. “It sounded awful, and I was actually a sensible child, so I thought it couldn’t be true. I went to my father, because he was always patient with me when he taught me things and he praised generously. But he wouldn’t talk about it himself and he took me to my mother to explain. And she did, she told me everything. More than the kids had said, that it wasn’t just sex an omega who played in the team was expected to have with his alpha teammates, but children . That a lot of the children around me were just that, the product of business arrangement between a team omega and one of the alphas in his team.”
They’d all known all of that, obviously, but the silence felt heavy and thick, nonetheless. After all, they were all also desperate to escape the all-too-real nightmare.
Kallen realised he was half-praying Taylor had backed off, that he’d told them all to fuck off and funded this organisation and...
“Now I realise that she was hurt that my father wasn’t loyal to her, even though he’d never agreed to be. It must have been hard for her to see the children he’d had with the team’s omega, to know that he’d helped him through his heats. Or maybe she wanted to scare me off.” He offered a rueful smile and Kallen’s stomach fell. “It didn’t work, anyway. Instead of running away, I leaned in, finding out everything I could about sex from the older kids, books and eavesdropping. It was like they’d told me that I had to learn to dribble instead of...” He sighed. “I became sexually active at a very young age, convinced that if I practised, I could control my body in the bedroom the same way I could out in the field.”
Kallen didn’t want to know, but he was biting his lip not to ask anyway. He’d straightened on his chair, trying to contain his eagerness. It felt like watching an accident in slow motion, knowing it was coming and yet unable to stop it, or look away.
“I joined the reserves at eighteen,” Taylor said. “My father had injured one of his knees beyond repair, so I was allowed. And the team’s omega had just returned to playing after delivering his third pregnancy, which everyone knew meant he was one injury away from being done for good. In fact, he was one of the lucky ones, he retired voluntarily two years later.”
Kallen’s heart jumped.
“And then it was my turn.”
Someone made a low sound of distress to his right, but when he turned his head, there were about three people who looked like they could have done it. Of course, as much as he was trying not to show it, he himself kind of wanted to scream.
Taylor paused. “I stayed for three years. Before I became team omega, I’d enjoyed sex and even heat, so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem for me. I knew I couldn’t stay long enough for them to activate the pregnancy clause, but in my head, I convinced myself that I could have five years, make a lot of money and then walk away, maybe work coaching the next generation of kids.” Kallen watched his throat work. If he was doing the math right, the other omega must have left his team at twenty-three, and he looked to be a good twenty years older now, but the memory still held enough power to make him retreat into himself as he shared it. He must have worked on it, to be able to share it at all, but the scar remained. “Obviously sex with someone you have chosen is very different than sex as duty, no matter how heat high you are and sharing my heats with adults I’d grown up with was deeply... upsetting.”
Someone got up and stumbled away towards the toilet area, but no one else reacted.
After a moment, Taylor went on. “I loved playing, and I loved feeling special to the team. But I started to dread my heats. If it hadn’t been for anti-doping checks, I’m pretty sure I’d have started using something to dull the experience. As it was, I started reducing the hours I allowed myself to sleep in the nights preceding the peak of my cycle. Somehow, I became convinced that if I timed it just right, I’d pass out from exhaustion when I needed to go the Heat Room. Mostly, I was too exhausted to fight the heat, which meant I was even more vulnerable than an omega in that position normally is.” He took a sip of a cup he kept by his side, though Kallen suspected more as a bid for time than to alleviate his thirst. “I didn’t feel good, and I didn’t look it either, the trainers complained I lost weight, for one. But no one in my family said anything about it. My parents tried to help, making food I liked and talking about training, but I don’t think it crossed their mind to ask me if I was happy.”
“I know this is shocking to hear.” His eyes briefly flashed towards the toilets. “But I’m not telling you to shock you. I want you to understand that I was aware that there was a problem, but I couldn’t see a way out without giving up something I loved, something I thought defined me . And in my case, I’d been raised to see what was happening to me as normal , so everyone around me expected me to cope. It’s a bit like when a coach asks you to run ten suicides. You do it because you think it must be possible.” He shook his head; a half smile that seemed to both chastise and forgive his past self for his naivety rising on his lips. “In a way, I had to get pushed past my limits to discover that I was something besides a football player, and even a member of my family. That when it came down to it, I could choose myself over anything and anyone else. But it took me three years to get to that point, and maybe some of you got there sooner and I know there are omegas who haven’t got to that point yet, and what do we know? Maybe one in a thousand won’t get there at all. What I know is that if I hadn’t found people who’d support me despite how long it took me, who told me I was worthy of respect and love even if I hadn’t always known to ask for them... Well, I wouldn’t be here today,” he concluded with a smile.
Kallen stared at him, because he didn’t think the man meant in this room in particular, but in the world at all. Maybe he was making it up, because just thinking about three years was turning his blood to ice in his veins, but...
They’d had a tea break after that, with a promise to the two people who hadn’t introduced themselves of getting back to them afterwards. Kallen didn’t get up with everyone else, and it wasn’t until she slumped against him that he noticed his friend hadn’t either.
“ Damn ,” Analisa said in a whisper. “That was—” She shook her head slightly against his shoulder and Kallen lifted his right arm and put it around her back, squeezing slightly.