Chapter Text
Jun walks into the ONER building that day filled with an immense, soul-crushing, immovable sense of dread, and not even the sight of P’Po coming into the elevator after him is enough to dislodge it.
Normally, getting to spend time with P’Po is a surefire way to brighten Jun’s day. Ever since he first met Po, he’s felt… intrigued. His bandmates seem to think it’s a crush—and sometimes Jun thinks they might even be right—but ‘fascination’ is perhaps a better word for it. Sure, MARS’s new documentary filmmaker is attractive, and kind, and all of that, and Jun has no doubt that he could fall for Po easily if he wanted to. But he’s much more preoccupied by the fact that he has no fucking clue how Po feels about him in return.
Jun is so used to getting an immediate read on everyone around him, picking up the subtle shifts in their scents as they react to his shameless flirting, his patented brand of overconfident, practiced alpha charm. He knows when someone finds him hot, or annoying, or intimidating, or too cocky to take seriously. He knows how to adjust his behavior in response, knows how to navigate social situations and industry events and the overwhelming experience of being an idol with a semi-global fanbase. And even if some people are much better at disguising or controlling their aromatic emotions than others, he can usually get at least something, at least a hint.
But with Po, he gets nothing.
“Good morning, Jun,” Po says amiably as he comes into the elevator, pressing the button for the correct floor—the one Jun hasn’t bothered to press himself.
Jun has been scrolling aimlessly on his phone, but he looks up and pretends to jump in surprise at hearing Po speak. “Geez, P’Po! If you’re gonna wear o-masks, you have to at least warn a guy before you sneak up behind him like that.”
Po frowns and rolls his eyes, unimpressed. “I’m standing in front of you.”
Jun merely shrugs, as if his point still stands.
Out of habit, he pays close attention on his next inhale, trying to catch any faint traces of P’Po’s scent—but, as usual, he can’t smell anything.
It’s not unheard of for people to prefer wearing pheromone blockers in public, especially at work—and especially these days, as the idea of someone’s designation being a private matter becomes more and more popular. Most people, though, don’t go so far as to block their smell completely. Odor masks are mostly for those who work in dangerous or sensitive jobs—or for people with rare medical conditions.
But Jun doesn’t think P’Po is sick, and the entertainment industry is certainly a place where not participating in olfactory social cues is suspicious at best and actively harmful to one’s career at worst. There’s no good reason that Jun can think of for someone like Po to repress his scent entirely… and the fact that Po choses to do so anyway is endlessly intriguing to him.
Even more intriguing: Po clearly isn’t trying all that hard to stop people from figuring out his omega status. He calls himself phi with the MARS boys, just like most of ONER’s staff, but Jun has heard him using omegan personal pronouns when speaking to his superiors on multiple occasions, and his particles are absolutely omega-coded.
With a lot of practice, it is possible to get so used to hiding your designation linguistically that it becomes effortless—and Jun would know—but P’Po doesn’t even seem to be trying. If he doesn’t care whether or not people know his status and he isn’t sick, then… why the o-masks?
On any other day, Jun might have spent the rest of the elevator ride trying to needle P’Po into giving him some other kind of reaction. If he can’t smell how he affects Po, he can at least try to scrounge up as many other clues as possible—facial expressions and changes in body language and exasperated exhalations of Ai Jun!
But today, Jun is feeling suffocated by an impending sense of doom that only seems to grow as the elevator rises, bringing him closer and closer to his fate.
P’Po notices. “You’re suspiciously quiet today,” he says, after the doors close and Jun returns to looking at his phone instead of teasing him or asking prying questions.
“Just bored,” Jun lies.
“Why are you here, anyway? I thought Khun Pemika had canceled basically your entire schedule.”
“Voice lessons,” he says flatly. “She didn’t cancel everything. We still have to prepare for the concert.”
It’s not entirely untrue—they do still have fittings and practices and all of that for the concert—but aside from one or two group practice sessions, all of their meetings with the voice coach have indeed been canceled. No need to keep giving lessons to a group you plan to dismantle in a matter of months, after all.
Vocal training, however, has always been the cover story for this particular part of Jun’s schedule, and there’s no canceling it, even if this time around, it fills Jun’s entire being with dread.
Once every three months, one of his individual voice lessons is actually an appointment with a highly specialized, highly discreet reproductive endocrinologist. He always knows which lesson it is because P’Mick will text him the date and time with three microphone emojis. These are meant to be a code to distinguish the reminders from those for his regular vocal training sessions, but since these appointments are the only things on his schedule that P’Mick ever bothers to text him about in the first place, the emojis are kind of a moot point.
(“That’s not my job. Talk to Ming or Tae,” Mick had once told the group when asked about sending more consistent schedule updates and reminders—even though it is absolutely his job.)
Normally, Jun doesn’t mind the appointments. They tend to be quick and—aside from a simple blood draw—relatively painless. But today, he knows exactly what the doctor is going to say, and he knows exactly what cure she will prescribe for the symptoms he’s been experiencing lately. A rash on his scent glands, low-grade fever, irritability…
Well, more irritability than usual.
“Are you okay?” P’Po asks suddenly, his gaze a little too perceptive for Jun’s liking. “You smell… off.”
Shit. The thing about hanging out with someone Jun can’t smell at all is that it makes him pay less attention to controlling his own scent.
“I’m fine.”
He is relieved when the elevator dings at that very moment, depositing them on the correct floor—but when he tries to dart through the doors and away from Po, he finds Po following instead, keeping pace with him.
“Something’s wrong, I can tell.”
Jun stops abruptly in the middle of the hall, almost causing Po to crash into him.
“Aww, you do care about me!” he teases, turning and reaching out to tickle under Po’s chin.
Po grabs his hand in midair and gives him a withering look. “I just want to make sure that Thame is okay. And, y’know, everything with our… project.”
Right. Jun sighs internally, feeling a small kernel of annoyed disappointment worm its way under his dread. Of course he’s worried about Thame.
“Everything’s fine. The project is going great. Thame is as handsome and busy and heterosexual as always.”
Jun’s feelings about Po might be ambiguously called a crush, but Thame’s are about as subtle as a neon sign, even if Thame himself had been oblivious to them at first. As far as Jun or any of the other members know, Thame has never felt this way about anyone, of any gender or designation, and so it didn’t take long for them to figure out the cause of his strange behavior. When Jun first agreed to come back and fight for MARS again, he’d seen immediately how Thame trailed after P’Po with a look in his eyes that could only be described as dreamy, acting soft and possessive and attentive in a way he’d never been before with anyone else. Jun knew straightaway that his best friend had fallen and fallen hard—and that Jun was going to cause as much chaos about it as he possibly could.
Mildly gaslighting P’Po over the whole thing is, in part, a way to push Po’s buttons, see what reactions he can pull from the scentless wonder. And yeah, maybe some of it comes from his frustration that he’ll never get a chance to see if something might be possible between Po and himself, and perhaps even more of it comes from the pain of realizing, after three long years of repressing his own secret hopes, that Thame does indeed want that sort of love in his life—just not from Jun. And most of it probably comes from the fact that being the group’s resident annoyance-in-chief is easier than looking too closely at any of those other feelings.
Right on cue, Po huffs in exasperation. “Don’t be an ass.”
Jun flashes him a shit-eating grin. “Too late!”
He turns and keeps walking, thinking that might be the end of it—but no, of course Po continues to follow him down the hall.
“When did you want my help with that thing?”
“What thing?” Jun asks, glancing over his shoulder to wiggle his eyebrows suggestively.
“Knock it off! I mean the…” Po pauses and lowers his voice. “The MV concept.”
“Ohhh, that thing.”
“I just need you to tell me if we’re meeting tonight or not. P’Mick suddenly gave me a bunch of extra work to do, so you can’t schedule things last minute.”
“Trying to get out of work, huh, slacker?”
Po merely rolls his eyes.
“Fine,” Jun continues, when it becomes clear Po will not be taking that bait. “Not tonight. Dylan and Thame still need to finalize the lyrics. We can meet up tomorrow evening.”
They arrive at the door to one of the spare practice rooms, the one always set aside for Jun’s special appointments, so he pauses and spins around to face P’Po head on.
“That is, if your busy schedule allows, khun director,” he adds, laying the snark on thick.
“Wait, first I’m a slacker and now I’m too busy? Which is it, exactly?”
“I mean, you’re the one following me around instead of going to work at your actual desk. The answer seems pretty obvious to me.”
Po fixes him with an annoyed glare, but the taunt works, and he finally, finally turns to walk back in the other direction, away from Jun and the secret doom that awaits him in the practice room beyond.
“Whatever. Just let me know where to meet you,” Po calls over his shoulder.
Jun considers throwing out one last innuendo about having Po over to his room, but his heart isn’t in it.
Instead, he steels himself to face the doctor—who will certainly have some… questions—and opens the practice room door.
*
“And when was the last time you experienced your cycle without suppressants?” Dr. Ran asks, after jotting down the list of Jun’s symptoms. He’d considered lying to her about them, but she’d noticed the fever when she took his temperature, and from there, it had only taken her a few minutes to catalogue the rash, the dilated pupils. There was no use lying about the rest of it—yes, his muscles are achy. Yes, he feels irritable. Yes, he’s vomited several times recently.
“It’s been… a while,” Jun says cautiously. Fuck, he does not want to be having this conversation.
“Can you estimate it for me?”
Jun closes his eyes and sucks in a breath, his lungs suddenly feeling tighter than normal. “A year and a half.”
Dr. Ran tsks and sets her clipboard aside. “Jun, you know there can be adverse side effects after ten months. Your body needs to reset everything and go through a cycle naturally at least once a year.”
“I know. I just… Things got busy.”
She gives him a somewhat disappointed look, and Jun swallows down the shame that bubbles up in his chest. He knows that he shouldn’t have let things go on for so long, that he’s been incredibly lucky not to have any symptoms before now, but the thought of going through all of that again…
The truth is even worse than he can admit to her. He can claim his last cycle was a year and a half ago because that’s when he’d first gone to Dr. Ran for the prescription suppressants, but in reality, it’s been much longer than that. By switching between several over-the-counter varieties and then finally moving on to the more effective prescription version when those started to fail him, Jun has managed to suppress his cycle for more than three years. The last one he went through had hit him during his second week as a trainee, and the experience was so awful, so embarrassing—and so dangerously close to revealing his secret to everyone else in the dorms—that he’s done everything he can to avoid living through it again. The fact that his body hasn’t revolted before now is a fucking miracle.
But it couldn’t last forever—and he should have known that his plan would come back to bite him in the ass during the one time he really and truly does need to be there for his band.
“You’ll need to wait at least three months before starting up the suppressants again, and I’d suggest waiting even longer if possible,” Dr. Ran tells him. “It should take about two weeks for your cycle to hit. It will probably be a bit more intense than usual after so much time on the suppressants, so you’ll want to budget out a day or two more than you normally would.” She pauses, frowning, and then continues more carefully. “I know your company doesn’t like for you idols to date, but… if you’ve got someone you trust to spend it with this time around, it might help.”
Jun huffs out a bitter laugh. “Trust is one thing. My NDA is another.”
And even without it, he thinks, it’s not like anyone would want to do that for me anyway.
Dr. Ran purses her lips and nods, seeming almost sad on his behalf. “Right.”
The rest of the appointment is quick and efficient: checking the rest of his vitals, drawing blood, renewing prescriptions. This time, however, Dr. Ran only renews one of his medications: the biweekly injections that allow him to keep his secret. The other—his suppressants—won’t be refilled for several months.
Even though his scent glands are itching like crazy and he’s felt more than a little sick for several days now, for just a moment, he still considers trying to go back to one of the OTC pills, still desperate to avoid what he knows is coming for him—in two weeks time, apparently.
Fucking bliss.
*
Jun has now learned a fun fact about bodies: if you suppress your cycle for more than three years, against the explicit advice of every medical professional in existence, then your cycle will not take two weeks to resume after you finally stop taking the suppressants.
In the end, it doesn’t even take two days.
The following evening, he brings P’Po to his favorite underground bar to work on the MV concept, knowing that they won’t get anything done at the group house with Thame and Po making eyes at each other instead of concentrating on the project. Po seems suspicious of his intentions, hesitantly following him to a secluded corner booth and watching warily as Jun orders them some drinks.
Jun already feels lightheaded and shaky, and he knows he probably shouldn’t drink if he wants to be able to drive them home at the end of the night, but he doesn’t want to worry Po by acting differently than normal—and normal Jun doesn’t think twice before downing a glass or two.
“Alright, show me what you’ve got,” he says, rubbing his hands together and nodding at Po’s laptop.
He is genuinely curious to see if Po has come up with anything interesting for their new MV.
Unfortunately, Po is struggling to think of ideas that haven’t already been done a hundred times before by other groups—and it’s not just that Po is inexperienced with this sort of thing. Jun’s own brain has also hit some kind of mental block, and at this point, scolding at Po is more a strategy to cover up his own lack of ideas than anything else. It really shouldn’t be so hard, but one round of drinks becomes three as they sit and talk themselves into circles, unable to land on anything that might work.
It’s just a song about trying to flirt with someone who takes your breath away, and in theory, MARS shouldn’t have any trouble finding a concept that works for those lyrics, the song’s style, and their own brand. Their group chemistry, Jun knows, translates well on camera, and they’ve been told again and again how they hit the jackpot with their flexible, widely appealing dynamic, one that tends to work well across a whole range of different concepts.
That dynamic is part of why they were grouped together in the first place—and part of why MARS got so popular so quickly. It’s a perfect mesh of different personalities: there’s the three alphas, each with their own unique flavor of charisma. Thame is sweet and gentlemanly, a real boy-next-door alpha straight from a romantic movie, while Dylan is aloof and mysterious, the strong-and-silent type, and Jun is their resident flirt, radiating confidence as he charms his way through the world. Then, there’s Pepper—a caring, practical beta, the gentle all-rounder who acts as their de facto older brother. Finally, Nano is both maknae and omega, adorable in every way, always beloved, protected, and spoiled by the rest of them.
It’s a dynamic that works, and it shouldn’t be this difficult to think up a concept that would take advantage of their personalities in a lighthearted, flirty way for this particular song. But Jun keeps coming up empty, and Po isn’t faring much better.
He’s not sure why Po is having issues being creative, but as for himself, Jun wonders if the problem is in his own biology, unmedicated and unrestrained for the first time in three years, reminding him in no uncertain terms that their special, popular, oh-so-perfect group dynamic is founded upon a lie—and it’s all his fault. He can’t seem to get it out of his head, and every concept he thinks of immediately feels contaminated by the headache that’s building behind his eyes. Liar, liar, liar…
“Are you okay?” P’Po asks him, pulling Jun back to awareness. He’s not sure how long he’s been sitting there, zoning out while Po looks at him with concern—but even now, the lights across the room blur in a way that doesn’t feel connected to the alcohol he’s had.
“I’m fine,” he says, or tries to say, but the words barely make it out of his mouth, his tongue feeling too fuzzy and unwieldy to function properly. Jun feels entirely too warm, his skin flushed and damp with fever, and between his legs…
A sneaking suspicion begins to dawn on him: his body is betraying him, in the worst possible way and at the worst possible moment. After three whole years of trying to suppress his cycle, Jun’s hormones are kicking in faster and harder than usual, and where he’d normally have almost twenty-four hours of gradual build-up to warn him of his impending doom, Jun is now facing the reality that he has perhaps an hour, at best, to get out of this public place and find somewhere to go through his inevitable nightmare.
“I need to go,” he declares, standing up so suddenly that P’Po flinches in surprise. “I need to…”
The room sways around him, and when Po grabs his arm and pulls him back down into his seat, Jun can’t even bring himself to protest.
“Just… sit here a sec. Let me pay our bill and then I’ll help you, okay? Don’t try to walk on your own.”
Jun nods, unable to muster up the energy to be stubborn. He’s distantly aware of Po waving over a waiter and digging in his bag for his wallet.
“Here,” Jun manages to say, pulling his own wallet from his back pocket. “Use mine. Blue card.”
P’Po gives him a strange look, but he thankfully takes Jun’s wallet and pulls out the right card without any further fuss.
A few minutes later, Po walks him out into the parking lot, one arm wrapped around Jun to hold him up until he can safely deposit Jun in the passenger seat of his own car.
“Are you sick?” Po asks, a note of genuine worry in his voice as he slides into the driver’s seat. “You smell…”
Jun knows his odor must be incredibly strange and confusing at the moment. The shifters coursing through his blood do an excellent job of making his pheromones smell exactly like an alpha’s, but even they can’t mimic the distinctive scent of an oncoming rut. Instead, Jun’s body is producing two clashing scents at once, and the odd combination is becoming more overpowering by the moment.
“My cycle,” he mumbles. “I’m…”
P’Po frowns. “Why did you decide to go out if…?” He shakes his head and starts the car. “Never mind. I’ll take you back to the house.”
“No!” Jun is filled with a sudden panic at the thought of going back to the MARS house like this. There’ll be no hiding it from the others in such close quarters, and the secret that he’s managed to keep from them for the past three years will be out in the open. They’ll all know that Jun is a liar, that despite how close they’ve become, despite everything they’ve been through together, he’s never trusted them enough—never been brave enough, really—to tell them the truth.
They’ll hate me forever.
“No, I can’t…”
“Well, you can’t have your rut here,” Po says, clearly frustrated.
Po’s not wrong, but Jun can’t go home—he just can’t. He casts about for another option, desperate, and then…
“Can I go to your place?” he begs.
Po physically recoils from him a little, leaning back towards the driver’s side door. “What? No! Jun, I’m not… I won’t…”
Jun realizes then what it sounds like he’s asking P’Po to do: spend a rut together.
“Not with you,” he rushes to clarify. His brain feels soupy and slow, and he sends out a prayer to whoever might be listening to let him just get through one more conversation before he loses coherence completely. “I’m not asking you to stay with me, I just mean… You can go stay at our house if you want. Crash on our couch. The others won’t mind. I just don’t… I can’t… do this around them. Please, P’Po.”
He watches some—but not all—of the tension drain from Po’s expression. “What do you normally do when one of you hits your cycle? Aren’t you used to each other by now?”
And the answer to that is complicated, because sure, the others have a system for letting each other know when they need to take a few days, retreating into their individual rooms and running a scent neutralizer at full blast to keep from disturbing the rest of the house too much. But Jun hasn’t had a real cycle since he moved into the MARS house, and as far as the others know, he always times things out so that he can spend his own supposed rut at his family’s house outside the city.
Even if he could begin to explain all of that to Po without combusting from the embarrassment of admitting just how long he’d been on suppressants, his brain isn’t cooperating, and all that comes out is, “Please, P’Po.”
Po sighs, rubbing at his temples with both hands. “Jun, I just… don’t think it’s a good idea for an unmated alpha to spend their rut in an unmated omega’s space. Especially not mine. Even if I’m not there, you’ll be able to smell me, and to be honest, my smell is kinda…”
P’Po trails off, and if it were any other day, Jun would probably be jumping at the chance to learn more about Po’s scent and why he covers it up completely. But at the moment, he doesn’t particularly care about anything except convincing Po to let him spend this cycle in his condo, away from the rest of MARS, and if the thing that’s stopping Po from agreeing is the idea that Jun would be going through a rut…
He’s not entirely sure why it feels different to consider telling Po the truth. The thought of his members finding out that he’s not really an alpha makes Jun feel sick, like his entire body is slowly turning into concrete, but with Po… Perhaps it’s because he hasn’t known Po for very long. Unlike with the band, Jun hasn’t spent years beside Po, lying to his face at every turn. Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a huge betrayal for Po to find out that Jun is the sort of idol who uses a stage designation. Or perhaps it’s because Po already seems to think of him as the most annoying person in the world. It’s not like Jun would be losing any kind of good standing in Po’s eyes, not like he would with MARS, with Sphere, with anyone else who actually likes and admires him.
Of course, his NDA doesn’t differentiate between people who will hate him if they learn the truth and people who won’t—he’s not supposed to tell anyone, ever. But his NDA also doesn’t account for situations where he’s trapped in a small, enclosed space with his cycle rapidly destroying his ability to think properly and his dead-giveaway scent ratcheting up by the second. It won’t be long before Po puts the pieces together himself, and if telling him the truth will convince him to let Jun stay in his apartment for the next few days, then it might actually mean getting to keep his secret from more people in the long run.
The growing, painful pressure at his crotch tells Jun he doesn’t have long, so he makes up his mind.
“It’s not a rut,” he says, steeling himself for Po’s reaction.
“It’s not…? What do you mean? You said your cycle…”
He can feel Po’s eyes raking up and down his body, as if he can find the answers just by looking hard enough.
Wrong sense. Looking won’t help, but if Po will just take a breath, think carefully about what he’s smelling… Because if Jun’s cycle doesn’t smell like a rut and doesn’t smell like a heat, then…
“Jun, are you… are you a beta?”
Jun closes his eyes, exhaling with the sudden mix of both terror and relief he feels at hearing it said out loud.
“Yes.”
He sits for a moment with his eyes closed, waiting, wondering what P’Po will ask first. Surely, Po will have questions, and Jun is already dreading trying to figure out how to answer them when his whole body feels a few degrees away from spontaneous combustion. Maybe he’ll want to know about the idol audition process, about how Jun was required to sign the contract stipulating his stage designation before he could even begin as a trainee, before he even knew if he’d get far enough to actually debut. Maybe Po will ask about the shifters Jun injects every other week—temporary pheromone alteration therapy, the doctor calls them—or about how he’s learned to lie through his teeth to almost everyone in his life. Maybe Po will be curious about how Jun manages to convince all of his casual hookups that he’s really an alpha, or perhaps he’ll just want to scold Jun for being a liar, a fake, a terrible human being…
However, all P’Po says is, “The others don’t know?”
Jun shakes his head miserably. “I’m not allowed to tell them.” Suddenly, his eyes fly open as he thinks of something. “You can’t tell them, either. You can’t tell anyone. I signed… I mean, I’ll get fired if anyone finds out.”
“I won’t say anything, I promise.” Po tilts his head, almost sadly, and adds, “I’m sorry you’ve had to go through this on your own. It sounds hard… and lonely.”
Jun feels his throat get tight. He doesn’t need Po’s pity—of course it’s hard and lonely, but it’s his own damn fault. Jun is the one who decided to put his own dreams above any sense of integrity or honesty. Jun is the one who signed the contract. He has no one to blame but himself.
“It’s fine,” he mutters, but his voice trips up at the end as a sudden wave of painful arousal hits him, turning his words into a grunt. “P’Po, please…”
“Right, yeah, you…” Po pauses and swallows, looking concerned. “You can have your… bliss at my place, I guess.”
Bliss. Jun instinctively grinds his teeth at the word as Po says it. Whoever decided to call a beta’s cycle bliss is his least favorite person in the history of the world. What a fucking misnomer. Despite the number of times he knows he’s going to come in the next couple of days, Jun also knows that far from being “blissful,” his cycle is really his own personal nightmare: an inevitable, unfairly painful, biologically-induced bout of selfishness that takes over every cell of his body without his permission.
“Thank you,” he grits out through the growing pressure behind his eyes.
As P’Po pulls out of the parking lot, Jun leans his head against the cool window and tries to breathe through it. The next few days are going to absolutely suck, and worst of all, he won’t be able to do anything to help MARS pull together their long-shot comeback. He can’t help with the MV or learn the choreography or record his verse. He can’t even hang out at ONER to distract their staff by being as obnoxious as possible.
It feels like the beta part of him is pacing in a cage, desperate to get back to his core responsibility in life: taking care of his band, his pack. But he can’t, because the beta part of him is also insisting on a stupid, multi-day bender of self-serving pleasure that doesn’t even come with a reproductive imperative to justify it.
Jun closes his eyes again and tries to focus on his breathing, needing to keep it together until they can get to P’Po’s condo. Almost there. Just a few more minutes.
At the very least, he tells himself, with one last push of coherent thought before his bliss drowns him altogether, maybe getting to visit Po’s home will finally give him the clues he’s been looking for to figure out why the hell an otherwise average documentary filmmaker is hiding his scent.
But as arousal burns through his veins, he thinks that it’s a pretty shitty consolation prize.