The Alpha's Brat - MM Dark Omegaverse

“Salicia, huh?”

Flick braced, thighs tightening with a lurch of fear and heady anticipation when a deep voice rumbled through the thin plywood barrier separating them.

Round two.

It was set to be a long-ass night.

“Yeah, baby, that’s me.” Flick smoothed anxious hands over his chest, shutting his eyes tight with a stifled gasp when fingertips brushed over his toes. All around him he could hear muffled sounds: panting, gasping outcries, some pleasure, some sounds of thinly veiled discomfort, but all anonymous.

He felt exposed—on display even if no one could see his face in his little cubicle, and, in turn, all he could see on the ceiling of his rut box was a number: 3.

It was, ironically, his third Friday in the small room. It was big enough for him to stand up in; he could touch the walls on either side. There was a padded bench, a cutout in the wall for his legs to fit through to the chest, and this had become his Friday nights lately.

It was already grating on his brain like digging fingernails, clawing at him with anxiety, and yet, this box had been feeding him and giving him cash for a room to shower in once a week.

His skin rippled with hyperawareness when the strangers’ unseen hands slipped over his knees and parted his thighs. “I’m glad you’re available, baby. I got a soft spot for the male Omegas, especially.”

Flick flung an arm over his eyes, nodding almost to himself, chewing his lower lip over the sudden intimate touch that slid between his legs, then braced himself for the next ten minutes of his life.

He was thinking this would be a night he cut out early.

~

Flick had never been more grateful to get his hundred bucks and fucking leave the club’s sleazy, neon-lit interior. Thankfully, the Orphelia did have a back exit, one that wound past private rooms for parties and skirted behind the front-facing legit strip club facade. The Orphelia’s dance stage was a pretty front, so the club had a reason to exist beyond just being a rut house for the authorities to raid.

In truth, he could have made more in any of those rooms or on the stage.

The Orphelia had a backstage as well that made his skin fucking crawl, sections called bidding rooms, where pretty Os stood up on a center dais flaunting their bodies while in beautiful masquerade masks; low light, red furniture—very seductive, but in reality all it was was wealthy men buying better-paid whores.

The party rooms Flick passed were terrifying, with O’s taking on multiple-member parties behind shut doors, but if you signed up for it, the establishment would pay you a grand a night.

The rut box was undignified, but at least no one could recognize him later; that, and he didn’t have to look at the reality his life had become. There you got paid by the client, not the night, and so far, Flick had managed to work himself up enough to do the last few Fridays, two people a night. He could have worked the whole night, a few hours at least, and walked out with some decent cash, but every single week got worse for him mentally.

It was soul-crushing work, was all he’d say about it.

That night, when Flick slipped out into the soft drizzle of the evening, it was around 1 am. His money was burning a hole in his pocket while he fished his backpack out of the dumpster behind the club, swung it on, and took off at a brisk stride in case cops or predators were lurking around.

His first night, he had nearly walked out directly into a drunk patron taking a piss in the back alley, and barely skated by after being aggressively solicited.

Either way, he was glad to leave it behind.

Flick paused his journey long enough to run into a 24-7 convenience store, snagged two protein bars and two bottles of water, and threw them both in his backpack before he started wandering towards his home base.

It wasn’t much but a tiny claimed section under an overpass about a mile away, but it was familiar, and a lot of other homeless folks avoided it because the noise level was atrocious at night.

He could only assume that was probably why people picked parks, or alleys if they hadn’t already tried to cram into shelters.

A growing issue by the day. Already the end of October was brutal in Olman. They were high in New Mexico, close to Taos and ski lodges, and the nights had turned brutally cold once fall had moved in. Flick had gone from feeling like he could manage the weather, maybe throw himself on the mercy of shelters, only to find they began to rapidly fill before he ever got through the door. He had lucked out a few times during the months he’d been in Olman, but it was harder and harder to snag that bed.

His other option was a pay-by-the-day motel, some shitty garbage deal, but it had running water, and it was only twenty bucks a night.

God knew the money he had saved and stolen away with six months ago he had long since burned through. Panhandling sucked, but sometimes fed him, but safe to say Flick had found out swiftly that his dreams of starting a new life in a big city had been fucking tragically misguided.

There were almost zero opportunities for runaway underage Omegas. He had no cosigner, no financial backing, no money, and didn’t have his birth certificate or Social Security card. At this point, he was lucky to buy a monthly phone card so he could keep tabs on the weather and check daily to see when and if his father would ever drop the fucking bounty he had on him. Until then, he couldn’t even provide his legal name to employers without getting flagged.

It had been a disastrous plan from the beginning, and still somehow, it was better than being home.

Even thinking about his old life pissed him off. It had been six months, and even having to be a fucking whore sounded better than being around his piece of shit dad, Meryl.

Flick slipped out onto the sidewalk, submerging into the remnants of Halloween pedestrian traffic. The downtown section of Olman was quieter now than it had been when he had gone into the Orphelia, but there was still evidence of the holiday all over the place. The city had done a parade earlier, so confetti, decorations, and crushed solo cups littered all over the street. He passed several stoops boasting jack-o’-lanterns, and a few bars that were still open, thrumming with active nightlife.

Everyone around him looked alien.

They were all clad in deflated costumes, smeared costume makeup, and most were hammered, trying to do end-of-the-night pickups. The reek of Alphas’ bleeding hormones from those locations was strong, melding with softer Omega scents and morphing into a cacophony that then mingled with the smell of booze, cigarette smoke, and city smog.

The soft rain was cold enough that most of the Os and Beta females had abandoned looking cute in favor of bundling up while they rolled out of establishments in heavy winter coats. They were laughing, enjoying their night in gaggles, chatting excitedly about their evenings in passing.

It was like they all lived on a different planet than Flick did.

He blinked out of it before cutting across the street between a few oncoming cars, kicking a can of Monster out of his way before he dipped into the mouth of yet another alley.

After six months, he had his routes down pretty well, but tonight, he was trying to avoid cops on the corners scoping for holiday DUIs, and Flick found himself emerging onto another block that he was less familiar with. Still, it was quieter, not residential but more like a line of shops, cafes, and restaurants long since closed down for the evening.

Here in the void of early morning, even the Halloween decorations looked tired, with only a few storefronts that had opted to keep their decorative lights on.

Frankly, Flick wasn’t feeling the fucking festive spirit.

He hit a fast stride across the street, pulling his hood low before swinging his backpack around while he located tonight’s target.

It was a loan office called Howitzer & Son Loan Star.

Corny ass shit, but Flick wasn’t there for a loan. Every time he had passed by these places, he was reminded starkly that it was something he couldn’t get; that had he walked in, they would have laughed him out the door, asked where his daddy was, and then contacted CYS to narc him out as soon as he walked out the door.

Flick hated the system that had screwed him and dozens of others exactly like himself haunting the fucking streets all across the goddamn country.

So, while he wanted to take a brick and smash the windows out, he also didn’t want to go to jail—not yet, but maybe he would soon when winter started to hound him down into an early grave.

Right now, spray paint would have to do.

Honestly, Flick was sure most people would have called him stupid for spending even ten precious dollars in his situation on black spray paint, but it was Flick’s last gasp of remembering literally anything that he enjoyed doing in his life.

Tonight, while he paused just past the front of the building and twisted to gauge visibility from incoming pedestrians, he was happier to put his little bit of dwindling spark onto something solid.

The subject matter tonight?

Halloween, of course.

His lips curved as he shook the remnants in the can, and probably had about one picture worth left, but he was going to make it count.

It took him ten minutes to spray paint a cat head, its Cheshire mouth flashing predatory shark teeth in a grin while its clawed little tootsies dug into the head of a ghost-faced pumpkin.

It was rough, not his best artistic piece, but it felt really good to deface this pristine building for no other reason than that he was bitter, it was amusing him, and he was thinking he’d maybe make it two weeks once the snow began to fall before he became yet another body pulled from under one of Olman’s bridges.

A faceless statistic to be labeled John Doe, so why not leave his mark where he could?

True, he could luck out and snag a permanent bed at the shelters somewhere, which was the goal, but the risk became the social workers who haunted that arena looking for runaways exactly like himself to reconnect with wayward families.

Well, Flick wasn’t having it. He’d be a corpse before ever going back to Trenton, New Mexico, and that was a vow he was sticking by.

He paused long enough to step back and admire his cat, vigorously shaking his can to get it to pump out paint for the last touch. He had wanted to put Happy Halloween under it in graffiti art, but was thinking he was just about on E.

Still, he was struck by inspiration, and rapidly, in the boldest letters he could manage, wrote only four letters instead: WEEN.

…Flick thought it was funny.

He was grinning fully when he chucked the rattling can into the alley before turning, adjusting his straps to make the long walk back to his cardboard paradise, but paused in his tracks when he saw just a few buildings down the dimmed outline of a batwing.

The sign stretched across the top facade of a brick building and looked handcrafted, wooden, and painted black and gothic, with blood-red lettering that popped with a white outline reading “BATWING TATTOO”.

It was a standout, adjacent to a pawnshop and a legit coffee shop, and otherwise dominated the corner of the block.

Curiously, he jogged over.

It was clearly closed; black curtains had been drawn over the large windows on either side, but when Flick cupped his hand around his face and peered in through the door, he found himself looking at a small entry foyer, another glass door, just making out a long counter, dark aesthetics, and a shitton of flash on the wall.

Instantly, he caught the vibe of high realism, probably portrait and illustration art. The skulls and daggers he could see were fucking beautiful, but his eyes hit and stuck on a beautiful design of blood-red roses clustered around a sugar skull like a flair of windblown hair.

It was stunning, but the roses were what Flick was eyeing up.

It made him reach up and brush the unfinished work on his neck absently, an ongoing piece he had been getting done for cheap from a shop many, many blocks away but had recently closed down. It was where he had gotten a lot of the sticker art all over the rest of him, but the roses had been his first big piece he had truly been infatuated with.

The sudden sound of wheels crunching over pavement whipped his face down the street.

“Fuck.” Flick hurriedly turned on his heel and bolted back for an alley to vanish when he spotted the cruising undercover idling at a red light not even a street away.

The last thing he needed was to get picked up and discovered by the cops, especially with paint all over his fingers while snooping around some person’s shop.

Still, before he vanished, he glanced back at Batwing and made a mental note to come back.

Who knew?

Maybe he’d be able to get his roses finished after all.