By Zephyria 
On the day he received the test results confirming he had manifested as an Omega, the doctor had explained with a look of pity that conceiving would be difficult for Haon. Because he suffered from abnormal heat symptoms, the doctor said Haon’s body was different from that of a typical Omega.
Having his secondary gender change overnight, Haon felt nothing upon hearing the news of his infertility. He had simply been in a daze for a while, shocked by the fact that he had become an Omega.
Even as time passed, he never once felt sad about the fact that he could not have children. If anything, he thought it was a relief. He was already overwhelmed just taking care of himself.
“So, please don’t worry.”
Haon spoke as if to reassure the man. This was because there had been Alphas who, driven by their own anxiety, had tried to force him to take emergency contraceptives.
“I really don’t need to take them.”
In truth, there was a reason why Haon stubbornly refused the medication. Due to a severe drug allergy, taking medication recklessly would cause his esophagus to swell and hives to break out immediately. For that reason, he couldn’t even take the painkillers the man had prepared for him.
“Then get some more sleep for now.”
The man, who had been looking down at Haon in silence, rose from the bed. He turned on a small bedside lamp and walked to the window to draw the curtains. Fidgeting with his fingers and toes under the covers, Haon watched the man’s back with an anxious gaze.
Is it really okay for me to stay here longer? In his heart, he wanted to get up immediately, but his body, riddled with muscle pain, welcomed the bed. Besides, it was obvious that if he tried to stand now, he would collapse after only a few steps.
“I’ll be in the living room, so tell me if anything hurts.”
“The living room…?”
Haon’s eyes widened as he glanced at the door. He had naturally assumed that was the front door. All the motels he had visited until now were far smaller than this room.
“Make yourself comfortable. I won’t come back in.”
The man added the words to put Haon at ease, but the listener was instead immersed in a new shock.
To think a space this large is just the bedroom. Then… just how much is the nightly rate?
Haon’s expression turned grave as he looked up at the luxurious ceiling lights and squeezed his eyes shut. It felt like the amount would be an unimaginable sum. Until the very end, Haon believed this place was a hotel. He didn’t entertain the slightest hope that a strange Alpha would let him into his home.
The Alphas Haon had met in the past didn’t take him to intimate, warm spaces like a home, but dragged him to cheap motels. They would ask him to split the cost of a room he didn’t even remember entering, and after Haon’s heat ended, they would claim it was now their turn and hold him until they were satisfied. Whether it was bad luck or not, he only ever met that sort of crowd.
Because of that, Haon had come to think it was normal. Because the first button had been fastened wrong.
“Are you sure you’re not hungry?”
The man, having opened the door, looked back for a moment. Haon pulled the blanket up to cover the lower half of his face and simply nodded. He wasn’t in a state where he could put anything in his mouth right now. Immediately after a heat, his aversion to food became severe, and it usually took a few days before he could eat a proper meal.
After confirming Haon’s intent, the man closed the door and left.
At the sound of the door closing, Haon pulled the blanket down to his chin and turned his gaze toward the nightstand. As he pushed the boxes of medication he couldn’t take with his fingertips, a small tube of ointment appeared behind them.
What the man had applied to Haon’s backside wasn’t gel or lotion, but ointment. A white ointment used for pain.
Recalling the cold sensation of the foreign substance seeping deep inside, he pulled his knees together. The ointment, now absorbed into his body, was no longer cold.
* * *
Haon’s mother was a single mother. On the fifth birthday of the son she had born in the cold winter, she took Haon to a small rural village. It was her hometown, a place she hadn’t visited in over ten years.
At the time, young Haon was simply happy to be on his first trip with his mother. He was so excited that he hummed to himself while carefully eating a piece of whipped cream cake his mother had bought him at the train station. In contrast, Haon’s mother only gazed silently out the distant window.
‘This is really delicious.’
Haon repeated how delicious the cake was until his mother looked at him. When she tried to give him a piece of cake on a plastic fork, he accidentally dropped it.
I should have eaten more quietly.
After dropping the cake, Haon didn’t open his mouth again. He just sat there as if dead until the train stopped. He wanted more cake, but he couldn’t eat any because his mother had already cleared it away with the trash.
Still, it was good. The first trip brought great excitement to young Haon. The thumping of his heart calmed slightly when they arrived in front of his grandmother’s old house, but it quickened again the moment his mother, after setting down the luggage in the yard, embraced him without a word.
The longer the hug lasted, the louder Haon’s heartbeat became. Thump, thump, thump. The violent beating, now devoid of excitement, began to pound against his fluttering chest. Instinctively, he sensed that his mother was about to leave.
Haon clung to his mother and murmured that it was cold. Instead of asking her not to leave him, he repeated only those words while gripping her clothes tightly. Not knowing what to do with the anxiety surging in his chest, he buried his face deep in her embrace.
‘I’ll be back soon.’
However, the woman eventually bid farewell to her young son.
Haon couldn’t cling to his mother any further. He feared she might find him more burdensome.
Seeing her son blinking his gentle eyes with reddened rims, the woman’s own tears burst forth. Telling him to listen to his grandmother, she kissed his tender forehead and cheeks until they were smeared with saliva and tears.
‘Promise me.’
Taking a crumpled piece of paper from the pocket of her purple coat, the woman held out her pinky finger to Haon. On the small piece of paper torn from a notebook, her phone number was written.
‘You must only contact me when it’s absolutely necessary. Understand?’
Haon held the paper preciously in his small, fern-like hand and asked where she was going. He didn’t ask when she would return or why he couldn’t call often.
With a wet sigh, the woman took out a ballpoint pen and wrote an address beneath the phone number. Perhaps the pen, distributed on the street, wasn’t working well, as she scribbled several times on the corner of the paper before completing the letters. Then, she held out her pinky finger again.
‘You mustn’t come looking for me.’
Don’t look for Mom. I’ll definitely come back in three years.
The woman left behind a promise to return in three years, leaving only the note with the pressed number and scribbled address.
After that day, young Haon suffered for three full years. Without missing a single day, he suffered and suffered. Until his mother’s cozy scent vanished from the tip of his nose, he frequently suffered from high fevers and threw up the food he ate.
Every time, Haon’s grandmother would fret, wrapping her sick grandson tightly in a thick cotton quilt and patting his chest all night. If it weren’t for his grandmother, Haon would not have survived that long period.
After suffering from minor ailments every day for three years, young Haon gradually changed. He no longer looked at the calendar every day or stared blankly at the empty yard. He also laughed more and became less shy. As Haon regained his vitality, the quiet country house also became lively.
‘Our Haon is a real blessing. A real blessing.’
The old woman cherished the grandson left by the daughter she had been estranged from as a precious gift. The villagers also adored Haon, who looked like a doll.
Haon grew up receiving plenty of love from his grandmother and the simple village folk. In a rural area with few children, the sociable Haon was practically the prince of the village.
Among them, Seong-gu, who lived across from Haon, cherished him like a real younger brother. He would always have the frail Haon sit in the shade and play games that weren’t dangerous. When they went to catch fish, he would hold Haon’s hand tightly and let him dip his feet in the cool stream.
Despite being only three years older, he acted as if he were dealing with a much younger sibling. He often carried Haon on his back and sang to him when he was sick.
It wasn’t just Seong-gu; everyone was like that. Because he smiled often and only did things as lovely as his face, Haon was a loved presence wherever he went.
Haon liked the countryside too. In this place, which was his mother’s hometown and had become his home, he wanted to live with his grandmother, Brother Seong-gu, and the neighbors for the rest of his life.
However, in the year he turned twenty, his grandmother passed away.
After burying his grandmother in the ground with the villagers and returning home, Haon stayed up all night and suddenly decided to go to Seoul.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Seoul.’
Expecting the village elders to stop him, he told only Brother Seong-gu about his plan to move to the city.
Until the day before Haon left, Seong-gu came to visit and strongly urged him not to go. He even tried to scare him with exaggerations about how cold and scary the people of Seoul were. But Haon was adamant.
‘I’ll come back in three years.’
And so, hooking pinkies with Brother Seong-gu, he came alone to the strange city. Carrying only a large backpack and the note his mother had left behind.
* * *
Waking up with a start, Haon instinctively brought his legs together before relaxing them. He was alone on the bed.
Rubbing his eyes, he put on the white robe the man had left at the foot of the bed and stood up. He couldn’t see where his original clothes were. He decided he would ask the man for them when he saw him.
I wonder what time it is.
First, he tied the robe’s belt tightly and walked unsteadily toward the window. A bright sunlight had clearly been streaming through the window earlier, but now it was pitch black. He must have slept much longer than he thought. Thanks to that, the muscle pain had diminished significantly.
Haon looked at the night sky, where only the moon hung solitary without a single star, and then indifferently lowered his gaze. At that moment, he flinched and stepped back.
“What…?”
Leaning hurriedly against the wall, Haon’s eyelids fluttered rapidly. The silhouettes of people and cars visible below the window were as small as dots. Even the buildings, which seemed quite large, looked petite.
Surprised by the night view of the high-rise buildings he was seeing for the first time in his life, he stood there blankly for about ten minutes. His stunned expression soon turned into admiration, fascinated by the glittering lights of the city.
But that didn’t last long.
“Wow… I’m really in trouble.”
Returning to reality, Haon’s expression became grave. To think it was a high-rise. It seemed he was in a much more extravagant hotel than he had worried about. The estimated lodging fee soared endlessly.
Pale, he wiped his face with his hand and tried to calm his racing heart. First, he looked for a clock to check the time, but he couldn’t find one. It was strange that there was a bathroom, a TV, and even a small refrigerator, but no clock.
Let’s go out to the living room first.
He swallowed hard and headed for the door. Because his limbs were still stiff, his stride was narrower than usual. In particular, the area where the man had applied the ointment stung, causing his upper body to lean slightly forward with every step.
It had been quite a while since he had been this sore after a heat. He didn’t remember, but contrary to appearances, the man seemed to enjoy rough acts in bed. His voice and expression had been infinitely gentle and kind.
Recalling the considerate man, Haon’s shoulders slumped slightly. The pain in his lower body seemed to rise into his heart, beginning to prick at him. How sudden.
“Whoa.”
As he slowly opened the door and stepped out, a small gasp escaped Haon’s lips. He had expected a spacious living room, but he was so surprised by the structure that exceeded his imagination that he couldn’t move his feet.
It was a two-story house with an incredibly high ceiling. There were as many as three rooms on the first floor alone. There was another door at the end of the long hallway, but it wasn’t visible from where Haon stood. That was how large the house was. Not a hotel, but a home.
Letting out an exclamation, Haon covered his mouth, further surprised that this was a house. It was too wide to be a hotel, and above all, the reason he was certain it was a home was because of the picture frames.
Inside a massive cabinet in the hallway leading to the kitchen, many picture frames were placed. Because of the distance, he couldn’t see clearly what the photos were.
“Are you awake?”
Just then, the man’s voice echoed.