Chapter Text
"You know he won't return your feelings right?"
Yuri's frustrated eyes bore into him, with an air of faint pity and all the righteousness of an agitated young man just out of his teenaged years.
"Yura..." Nikolai tried calming his protégé.
"No, Nikolai! It looks and sounds like you're going to spend the rest of your life pining away like one of your dumb operas for someone who will never feel the same way."
Fully on a tear, Yuri's voice rose in frustration.
"He's a beta and you're an alpha! Not saying that it still couldn't work out, but you and I have only ever seen him with omegas—the very thing you are definitely not."
Nikolai was a little taken aback. Was he truly this obvious even little Yurochka could tell? He inwardly cringed. He did have it horribly didn't he.
Yuri continued on, unheeding of his lost audience. "Kolya, please. You've treated me as a brother. No. Like a father even." The younger man's eyes glistened with unbridled emotion.
"I can't bear to see you hurt this way. Why can't you just move on and find someone who will love you back?"
"Yura, I can't."
Yuri sniped back. "You mean you won't try."
"Look Kolya," The younger man ardently continued.
"You can still help Lieutenant Price with his missions and supply him necessary backup and intel. Hell! You can still fund and outfit the man with everything his heart desires and not make a dent to your bank account. That doesn't have to change."
Yura's voice turned consoling in tone. "I understand following the man. His cause and sense of justice is among the finest I've seen. I can't argue that John Price isn't a great man because he truly is someone to admire. But just because he saved your life that one time doesn't mean you have to devote your personal life towards him too. A man like him, does not have space in his heart for softer pursuits."
"Yuri Petrovich." Nikolai's face hardened. "I ask you not to disrespect John Price in front of me."
Yuri grimaced in exasperation. "Kolya, I'm just trying to say..."
"That's enough Yuri! My affairs are my own to deal with."
The younger man looked away in glum dejection.
Nikolai softened. "Oh, Yurochka..."
The older man gently pinched Yuri's cheek in understanding and affection.
"One day I pray you might find someone that you'll love truly and fully with every fibre of your being. John is that person for me. He's my sun and stars and night sky."
Nikolai continued, "It doesn't matter if he'll never feel the same about me because it won't change how I feel about him. From the day I met him, he became my new constant. What new person could I devote myself to when it would only hurt the both of us as I strain towards my magnetic north. Hmm?"
Yuri grumbled under his breath. "But he could make you happier if he tried."
Nikolai snorted. "John makes me happy just by letting me into his life. He trusts me with his life and the lives of his men. I count myself privileged everyday, to be his closest ally and friend."
The younger man could only stare at Nikolai with begrudging acceptance. His exhaustion apparent now that the argument was closing to an end.
Nikolai sighed. "Yura we can argue this point all you want but we both know I can be as stubborn as a donkey about matters."
Yuri weakly smiled. "Doesn't that also make you an ass, as the English say?"
Nikolai pantomimed a dagger to the heart.
"Ahhh little Yurochka, I didn't know you were progressing this far in your english!"
Yuri grinned with glee. "Old man, you've got nothing in your head these days."
"Ah don't I know it Yura, don't I really."
Nikolai had spent the last decade or so fruitlessly loving a man who would not and could not love him back. Since the day they met all those fateful years back, Lieutenant John Price of SAS infamy and legend had held his heart in the palm of his hand.
Growing up, Nikolai's mother had forced him into watching endless reruns of old tired operas. He had hated listening to the shrill sounds of the sopranos and the long sustained vibratos that grated on his ears. Without his mother's patient commentary, he was lost in a sea of mostly italian, sometimes german, sometimes french and he couldn't help but hate it a little. He could barely understand english and somehow his mother expected him to understand all those other foreign languages! Ridiculous.
Were these silly, melodramatic romantic plotlines supposed to be taken seriously? How was this supposed to be the height of romance? After all, what kind of idiot would just fall in love at first sight and then just die for them because of the one time this wishy-washy love interest smiled at them? It was all just one big joke he had felt at the time, time that was better spent elsewhere. But his mother had loved it and so he had stayed and watched them with her.
It was only years after the fact as a grown man of 28 and his mother long laid to rest, that he truly understood her love for them.
No: it wasn't stupid to love a man for their smile after one glance and Yes: things like that could really happen. It was then that he begun to take solace in the sheer spectacle and drama. He could relate just too easily with those fainting heroines and dashing heroes singing their feelings out about the one just out of their grasp.
When you get right down to it, he was living proof wasn't he. For all the many years that had passed and the wealth he had accumulated operating his own little intelligence group that had plenty of power and loyal men, he still felt as weak and powerless as ever in the face of his love.
Nikolai was very much so not an omega, the only ones John Price were interested in, and that unchanging fact had killed him slowly every time he thought on it.
Nikolai was an alpha and had all the physique and mental characteristics of one. This fact had never bothered him before; above all, alphas were considered the cream of the crop.
They were the leaders and thus the top of the pecking order. Alphas were thought as the strongest secondary gender both physically and mentally and were accordingly afforded better careers and positions than their two other counterparts, betas and omegas. The only problem was that they were exceedingly rare with them sharing a population percentage of 15% along with omegas, making up a total of 30% of the total population give or take.
Alphas and omegas went into bi-yearly ruts and heats where biological imperative took hold and made them mindless. They also had mating glands which tied a alpha-omega pairing til death upon biting. Sense of smell was a huge factor for them as both used it to smell out their highest physically compatible mate for them.
Betas on the other hand made up most of the rest of the population with a limited sense of smell compared to alphas and omegas as they didn't experience heat or rut. Nor did they have the alpha characteristic knot which tied them to their partner during mating and increased chances of conception.
Amongst betas, primary sex rules applied when it came to procreation. Alphas of both genders could impregnate omegas and female betas, and omegas of both genders could accordingly become pregnant by either gendered alphas or male betas. All viable couplings could produce any type of secondary gender but it was thought that alpha and omega pairings had a higher chance of having alpha or omega children.
Alphas and omegas had medication to manage their respective heats/ruts though many considered it an aberration for omegas to deny their heats.
Many also considered it an attack against God and society to have couples who were not biologically compatible. Most concerning for Nikolai was that his desired mate most definitely fit under that category.
Now Nikolai did not care less about biological imperative and all that. He spat on that thought. His private business was his own and no one else's. Though society would condemn his heart's desire, Nikolai privately thought that it was only natural to love John Price.
John was his shining light, his own compass to guide his actions. He may not be the perfect person by any standard, but the beta was the closest he'd seen any person go, be it alpha, beta or omega. In the face of someone who would always do the best he could for the betterment of humankind—gender and nationality be damned—and regularly saved scores in operations so black that the page was one darkened blob. With all that, how could anyone resist John's charms?
Nikolai certainly couldn't, and that wasn't even counting the fact that John had saved his life that fateful day. The memory was still fresh in his mind, imprinted like some indelible tattoo on his soul.
His only problem was that for all of Nikolai's newly found wealth, for all of his relatively high appeal in society as an alpha male in his prime, the fact remained.
John Price held no interest in alphas.
John seemed to only care for omegas and while Nikolai could sympathize to a degree, omegas were largely a chunk of population that he had very little to do with.
Omegas were a rarefied group that were generally cloistered at a young age. Most societies viewed them as the weaker sex meant for taking care of familial duties and child rearing. The western world allowed them to have jobs but the jobs they could choose were restricted to non physical ones with as little stress as possible. Families with omegas in them that didn't come from alpha/omega pairings were often sold off to the highest bidder to breed alpha children for them. In russian society, omegas remained a status symbol for the rich and powerful.
Nikolai who had been a child of an average working class beta family had never met an omega growing up and even with his status as an alpha male he wouldn't have come close to them unless he too was part of the rich elite of Russia.
The russian had spent his whole life devoted to the military and his beautiful ugly country. And in the military he had found nor met any omega closely until recently. His new found wealth and thus respective clients from his business led him to dine with that russian elite he had so resolutely denounced in his earlier years. Hah. If his younger self could see him now, he would call himself a fool neither sown or reaped.
The alpha had no qualms with omegas working any type of job. To be honest, he didn't really have much of an opinion outside the general intellectual thought that omegas should be allowed more freedoms. At the end of the day, it was just another sad horrific point of their world: the sky was blue and omegas would most likely be treated like second class individuals. What could he do about it? One man couldn't change the way a society thought, nor enforce a better and freer world for all. He picked his battles smartly and fighting for a whole population group was something he barely had the time for. Let alone with his work, plus whatever wild plot John had cooking that most definitely meant all guns blazing.
Nikolai supposed that was why John was so drawn to them. John for all his gruff voice, his height and his substantial muscles that often got him mistaken as an alphas, was a bleeding heart for the downtrodden and enslaved.
John would often find the beaten down omegas left in the end result of the many, many dismantled militias he was sent in to destroy and he would try to help them in whatever manner they needed.
John was also a little bit of a hero, despite the man himself fervently spitting vitriolic fire if the fact was ever mentioned to his face. Of course he couldn't help but emulate the storybook alpha prince of the old childhood tales. He was just that sort of person. He even had a storybook omega to woo and charm into a happily ever after of sorts. Well as much as their world could support it.
And those storybook omegas that he found loved him back for it. Every time the alpha saw it, he couldn't help but see the starry eyed look those omegas held for John. Their grasping hands holding and being held by Price. Price's precious personal space that he guarded jealously like a grouchy dragon, opened freely for the sake of those omegas.
He couldn't begrudge them of the fact. John Price was a man worthy of all the admiration one could heap onto any person. He deserved it all and more.
Just.
Did Price have to do it so often when Nikolai was there? Was the lieutenant trying to tell him something ? Was this just one of Price's kind ways of letting Nikolai down gently?
Nikolai held no illusions on how obvious he was to anyone that knew him. He knew his eyes betrayed him despite his best effort. The situation with Yura only baldly demonstrated it. And little Yurochka was just barely a man grown. He was still in that cute overgrown puppy phase of sort of not quite settling into his oversized paws. If the baby beta could see it, then the russian shuddered to think what his enemies would think of it. Not to mention the fact that his business often had to take cuts for John whenever he came calling. Nikolai accepted that. He accepted that his love just like Liu's love in The Turandot for Prince Calaf would go on unanswered and barely acknowledged. Just that he wished...
Nikolai didn't know what he wished for exactly.
God he needed a drink and soon. Yura's little argument was truly digging up some things better left alone.
Nikolai went scrounging for the hidden compartment of his desk for his best vintage of vodka. Some days were just like that he reflected. And he needed some time to not think about John. If he thought any further, he would make himself go mad in circles.
His burner phone vibrated madly. Nikolai yanked it out of his pocket.
John needed him. For what? His mind raced.
He did not know what it could be but Nikolai hoped fervently that it wasn't something life threatening. He couldn't think of any current missions the beta had going on that would warrant Nikolai providing exfil.
John
Nik I need you now. Come to 78.569.1. you know the one. Code violet.
Nikolai couldn't help but be worried now. John usually didn't have him come to the safehouse near the beta's base in Herefordshire without prior notice. Code violet did mean it wasn't life threatening though.
It was bizarre and out of character. Nikolai would best be off as soon as he could. Something wasn't right here.