Chapter Text
It didn’t happen often, but when it did there was always chaos. Or so Levi had heard.
There hadn’t been an Omegan evolution in his lifetime. Until now.
Only a few hours after waking up in near-blinding pain and surrounded by a strange, sickly sweet aroma, Levi found that he was different. He wasn’t just human anymore. And there was a name for what he was, what he had become, but it hadn’t happened in hundreds of years.
The word for him now was Omega. Although some people had other words for him, nasty words like whore and slave. Or demon.
Omega was the official term.
There were stories about them, not quite legends. Little more than conversations for round the campfire nowadays, to freak out children and make them grateful for the lives they had. Levi had heard them, everyone had from time to time. Tales of a different sort of human. Beings called Omegas that had existed once in abundance, all over the world in fact. Humans with extraordinary fertility, a secondary status that paid no heed to gender. These were the beings that helped colonies spring up, bringing many children to otherwise dwindling families. Back in the days where mankind’s population had been much less sparse, Omegas had been great treasures. Gifts from the gods.
Opinions of them had changed, and not for the better. Somewhere along the line humanity had grown a conscience, and their sense of what was right and wrong was set in stone. Unwavering.
Villages no longer welcomed the presence of those who did not conform to society’s norms, even against their will. Levi didn’t think it was that strange of a development. After all, Omegas did not stick to any one gender – anyone could hold the Omegan gene. No matter how open minded a person was, it was downright weird for someone you knew to go into lustful frenzies. It was more easily hidden amongst the females – people had a tendency to just write them off as whores. That in itself was tragic enough.
When it happened to the males…things were a little easier to figure out. Collapsing and gasping usually led to people trying to figure out what was wrong. There were certain symptoms that were hard to miss.
Before long fingers would start pointing. Then that word would follow.
One little word capable of upending lives. Omega.
It had never been a frightening word until today because it was no longer just a tale. Levi was living the story, the symptoms he’d read of.
Feverish warmth had taken over his body, cramps pulled at Levi’s insides and twisted them up so that it felt like his stomach was being strangled by his intestines. At the same time he throbbed shamefully. Arousal tugged at his gut, the barest touch of even his clothes enough to rile him. The pain of it sought to cripple him, making movement impossible for long and agonising moments. Levi had never felt more vulnerable, or awful. The raven’s very being was against him, skin too tight and itching. Begging for contact, even through the discomfort. Levi’s lungs shook and he tensed, panting as shocking urges made themselves known and tried to pull him to his feet and out the door to the nearest source of relief.
Levi staggered out his front door and onto the dirt of the road, almost landing face first in the dust as he swayed on shaky legs.
There were lights in the windows of nearby houses. Odd, given the late hour.
Oh, Levi realised. He’d been screaming. That was right.
The same urges that drove him to move evaporated at the first sign of danger. His whole village was stirring, people pulled from their beds by his agonised wails, the panicked shouting of one of his own family members waking the rest of a town that was rapidly turning to anger.
Anger born from fear. Fear born from the unknown.
Levi was the unknown to them now and no familiar face could be seen as friendly.
It was remarkable just how quickly he had been found out. One of his own kin had already turned for help the moment Levi had stumbled back through his door, searching for help. Only to watch his family flee in horror from him. Like Levi was some sort of monstrous, nightmarish thing. He listened to them, numb with shock at the screaming. Voices howling into the night to wake the others. He had to go, turned and fell instead. There were no helping hands to get Levi on his feet, no familiar face to usher him out the door.
Despite the pain, Levi made it out the door on his own.
Driven by a bone deep urge to flee, Levi’s agony ceased to paralyse him. It was still there, pushed from the forefront of his awareness by adrenaline. None of his pain or sudden, overpowering desires mattered in the face of the stirring village. They all knew. He could hear the shouts already, orders of capture and execution alike.
It was always the same – some wanted study, others wanted to cure. Whatever that meant.
Most wanted the new threat to their simple, normal lives dead.
Monster. Freak. Abomination.
Some wanted to do worse.
It was only evolution, an abnormality that Levi couldn’t have helped if he’d tried. But there was no trying anymore. There was only running.
He knew that staying in his home was not an option. It was a former home now. Levi knew that he couldn’t foolishly hope for mercy from his townspeople. They weren’t bad people, necessarily. Just simple folk, with straightforward lives.
This…this was anything but straightforward. Levi could forgive the betrayal later, though. First he had to make it out of here. Escape was the only liable option if he didn’t want to experience a whole other world of suffering. Levi was no longer welcome in the village. One option lay before him – he had to flee. There wasn’t a friend he had that would risk harbouring him now. Too dangerous. No one could be trusted; not even his own family. With nowhere nearby to seek sanctuary, Levi charged from the cluster of houses that made up the town and bolted for the dark and ominous tree line.
It wasn’t that close to the village. Close enough, though. Levi wondered somewhere at the corners of his mind if this was the fastest that he had ever run through the meadows that stood between his village and the great wood. Through crops and tilled land he fled, tumbling over fences. So fast it felt like he might fly at any moment, and Levi didn’t know how he could feel so weak and manage such a pace.
Before him the thick and shadowed wood loomed, everything turned shades of midnight in the deep hours of the night. His vision silhouettes of gloomy green and blue and purple, and an overarching, diamond-studded sky.
Closer and closer the trees came, until their branches seemed to be reaching out to embrace him.
Levi stumbled into the forest, already gasping for breath. He wasn’t tired, exactly, but breathing had become cumbersome. The raven blinked watering eyes up and took in the gloom between thick trunks.
A chill stole its way through his body, shaking through Levi’s spine and ending painfully in his toes. He’d only gone into the woods a sparse few times before, only ever to hunt on the edges of the more scattered trees in search of foolish rabbits. Few dared to venture further, and for good reason. Dark threats laid in wait in the deeper reaches of the forest. Violent things that chased and tore, and patient things that crept and lurked. Always waiting. The jaws of death could be around any corner, and always the forest sought to trick the eyes and fool the mind. Leave wandering souls lost. Alone to die.
Levi had heard enough stories to make him never want to set foot past the tree line ever again.
And yet there he was, staggering through the murky undergrowth in a fear-fuelled flight. Ferns tickled against his face as he hastened through them. The whisper of rustling plants constantly in his ears. He expected the gnarled roots of trees and leafy foliage to trip him up. Instead his path seemed to clear, the darkness swallowing him up and leading him away from the shouting of his former townspeople.
The forest itself was quiet, and yet alive with muted sound. It hushed all but the immediate noises, a muffled soundtrack always playing on the mind.
He kept running.
Levi didn’t have a plan outside of hiding himself away in the woods. It was a feared place and Levi hoped that the stories and stigma attached to this forest would be enough to keep the villagers from chasing him too far.
With luck Levi would be able to outlast this…condition. When he felt normal again, if he ever felt normal again, he could travel to a new village and gather some supplies. Maybe start a life as a fucking hermit somewhere.
That wouldn’t be so bad. Levi had always liked the idea of solitude.
But the hunters weren’t giving up yet. Shouted orders echoed in the air, muffled by the distance, but Levi could still hear the words. They were tracking him as best they could. Had Levi been in his right mind, he might have considered climbing up the trees and moving through their branches to escape being tracked along the ground. Alas, in his addled state it was difficult to think of anything besides the blinding panic that drove him onward. Levi had never felt this kind of panic before. It was pulling him forward from the core of his being, a fear that made him run even as every molecule seemed to beg for him to stop.
His gut felt jarred. Everything hurt in its own way. The worst were the cramps, a terrible pain that reached its way from his guts down into his legs, trying to trip him with agony. As it was the pain sent him sprawling mid-step, collapsing against trees only to jerk forwards again.
He had to move. Had to run.
Self-presentation was still a number one priority, Levi found. Apparently it was more important than whatever else he was feeling. The pain was worse than anything he had ever felt, like his bones were eroding from within, some unknown part of him awakening, and yet somehow Levi was able to keep his legs moving. Keep going. Keep running.
The already gloomy woods grew ever darker as the raven ran onwards, the deep shadows smothering the twinkling starlight above.
By that point Levi felt two warring fears. There was a strong desire to stop venturing deeper in the never-ending maze of trees and moss. To keep going was to risk injury or death, but to turn back was to hand himself over to either imprisonment, torture, or certain death. Possibly all three.
They thought he wasn’t human anymore. They thought he was a freak. They thought he was a monster.
So, with terror facing him on both fronts, Levi fled to where only monsters would go.
The trees seemed to welcome him, eerie and foreboding as they have ever been and yet somehow whispering to him that he’d come to the right place. No human felt at home here, so maybe Levi wasn’t human anymore. He wasn’t one of them anymore; one of the normal, average human beings. He was something more, now. Or maybe something less. Levi wasn’t entirely sure how status worked among his…kind.
He had a kind now. A kin, he supposed. Although Levi knew he would never get to meet another Omega, never get to ask them what the fuck was going on with his body, because all of them were hunted.
As he was hunted.
Dead or captured, experimented on or sold to noble families for good breeding, a secure line of heirs.
Most Omegas were killed, like that could somehow put an end to them altogether. It was a mostly dormant gene that lived in countless people, but only a few ever became the real thing. There was no way of knowing who might carry the gene. The killings were pointless and barbaric. No one ever did anything about it, though. Those who managed to become an Omega and live probably wished their fate had been different. Levi had no intention of becoming an addition to some crazed scientist’s career, nor did he plan to be sex slave to an entire village of brutes. So he would run, or he would die. Or perhaps he would run until he died.
Around him the woods closed in, swallowing him up from the supposedly civil world and enveloping him in the cool gloom. The air seemed stuffier, like a burst of pollen to the face only Levi smelled no accompanying sweetness. The bitter cold of night was held at bay by branches. For that, Levi was grateful for he hadn’t had the time nor thought to pack. From the sound of things, the hunters weren’t giving up; their shouting voices chased after him, echoing and distorted as snippets floated through the crowded trees. Levi let his feet carry him forwards, finding it easier somehow. Gravity was aiding him, even if only a little – he was on a gradual, downward slope. The truly dank and dark places were this way, in the deep parts of the forest where cold streams ran and dripping caves burrowed into the stony ground. The rolling earth pulled Levi onwards, easing his effort while he bore with his pain.
It lingered in his guts now, a hot, heavy pain trying to coax his limbs into sluggishness. Convincing him to slow, to stop and plead for help. Levi’s skin tingled all over, itchy and irritated. His mind was clouding, a fog of pain and weariness and lust towards nothing in particular.
The hills were growing, slopes becoming more dangerous. Beneath his feet grass and dirt gradually became stone, buried boulders and cold rock. A covering of cool moss tickled the soles of his feet, slippery with damp. And it was right about then that Levi lost his footing at last, and gravity took care of the rest. He slipped on a spot damp earth that turned out to be the ledge of a steep slope and from there the Omega went tumbling down the side of it, accompanied by a rush of upset soil and leaves. Levi gave a shout as he tumbled, his eyes blinking wide as he went right off a ledge of mossy rock.
A cliff, in fact.
Below a heavy darkness yawned, like an endless, starless midnight. Levi found himself faced with a drop that was far enough that in the dark he could not see where he would meet his end, and he wondered if oblivion would look so empty. Gravity yanked the raven’s body down into that pit. Wind whipped at his hair, forcing grey eyes to tear up. Levi screwed his stinging eyes shut and hoped for a quick demise.
He slammed into something. Not the ground, though. No, this had too much give for that. Air escaped Levi in a wheezing rush and he was left dazed and coughing. His eyes were still wrenched shut, his lungs raw as he gasped in air.
Whatever he had landed on was enough to leave him winded, but it wasn’t…hard. Not earth or stone or a riverbed. Not water, or even a tree branch. Something…stretchy?
Something wet. Something sticky.
Levi forced his eyes open, breathing hard after the colossal scare of what he’d assumed was him falling to his death. Apparently not though, for he was still breathing. Still alive, and in no small amount of panic.
His heart beat wildly in his chest, pulse thrumming in his ears. The blood in his ears seemed to echo the previous roaring of the wind that had howled at him as he’d fallen. Below him the drop carried on; it really did look endless until his eyes began to adjust. Pale shapes stood out just barely amidst the gloom, stretching beneath Levi out and across the gap. It was dark down there, wherever there was, but Levi could make out pale, stringy shapes weaving about him. He was caught on something, some sort of net that was strung up between the two cliff faces either side of Levi. Below, much farther down, there was probably some ravine. Maybe this was a weird bridge?
Levi pulled with one of his arms, intending to try and sit up. He felt a pressure holding him back.
It wasn’t a bridge. Levi tried for many long minutes to free himself from the stuff only to learn that the more he struggled, the worse he would be stuck. The white, cord-like strings stuck to him like honey-covered vines. Thinner strings were woven carefully around, wisps of stickiness that clung to him like the tightest rope. There was no escaping them.
And just as Levi had wrapped his head around that thought…he realised what he was caught in.
It was his own fault, really. He’d made the decision to run off and go blundering through the forest. He’d known the sorts of creatures, the sorts of monsters, that made their home in the murky recesses of the trees.
A spider’s web. He’d fallen into a spider’s web.
Not an everyday spider, fuck no. Levi could’ve brushed that shit off him like dirt. These enormous, thick strands of viscous web stretched from cliff face to cliff face and stuck like a curse to his skin. Whole cords of it, like white, gooey rope. Each strand as thick as a finger, with finer strands like wool woven masterfully. An intricate trap that spanned the gap between cliff faces. The creature that made this web…was a great deal bigger than the average arachnid.
Levi didn’t have any desire to meet such a creature but the more he struggled, the more entwined he became. A clever trap. Well-laid. And in Levi’s panic he hadn’t even seen the cliff ledge.
He was caught. Condemned to be prey. Unless one of the villagers came to rescue him.
As if by some miracle, a voice sounded from above. Then another.
Levi had been found, although he hadn’t made up his mind if that was a good or bad thing yet. For the moment, his options were shitty on both ends. Becoming arachnid chow or being hauled off by humans…at least if the humans took him they might do Levi the courtesy of carrying him.
Who was he kidding? Levi was as good as their prisoner by this point. They would make him stumble all the way back to the village.
But that was better than being digested alive for days.
Rescue it would have to be.
Voices echoed down from above, as if summoned by Levi’s fear, and the furious hunters became the raven’s impromptu saviours. The only path down was right over the ledge, and any misstep could lead to the same fall that had landed Levi in this mess to begin with.
Despite the danger, the people clambered over and began making their way down. It was a terrible idea, but these people weren’t about to let a once in a million chance freak escape them so easily. Over the ledge they went, others keeping watch from above. Picking their way down footholds in the stone, grasping for purchase in the rock – cracks and gaps, jutting edges. Making their way gingerly down the rock face, knives held between teeth. Their eyes held wariness and determination. No one in their right mind would approach such a trap – the owner of which would already have been alerted through the vast network of webbing that cascaded over one side of the chasm.
But these people weren’t in their right mind. Not anymore.
Levi ached and shook. He couldn’t run. Couldn’t move. These people were his only escape now. He had to trust them for the moment and pray that they wouldn’t do worse to him than whatever monster was likely headed their way.
The hunters descended, slow and careful, about five of them making their way for the web. Atop the ledge others waited, keeping a lookout as best they could in the dark.
Torches glowed like lost, little stars in the night, trying their hardest to let their bearers see.
Levi wasn’t sure how exactly the villagers planned to get him out, watching with strain as the first reached an outcrop of stone near some of the thick strands of web. He set his blade to the stuff, hacking with enough effort behind it that Levi could see the strain evident in the muscles of the man’s arms. That man, their town blacksmith, had once held no ill will towards the raven currently strung up in web.
Now none of their past interactions mattered.
Two people were hacking at that same cord now, puffing in the chilly night air. Their breath left them in little, steamy clouds and despite the cold Levi felt too warm. He needed to get out of his clothes and the thought of that heated the raven’s face. He almost didn’t care that these people would judge him.
His insides throbbed, along with other areas. There was a nasty ache settling in his shaft, the taut flesh straining to be freed. Levi desperately wanted to touch himself, almost crying when he was reminded that all of his limbs were bound and tangled in web.
Web that was jostling about now under the interference of blades.
Levi shifted further, ignoring the hissed reprimands of those trying to free him, and squirmed as much as possible. At last he found some relief, twisting until one of the cords, strung tight across the chasm, was pressed against his crotch. He whimpered, a sound very unlike him, and rutted without thought. Pleasure assaulted him, bolts of it shooting up his spine and tingling in his guts, and it wasn’t quite enough to soothe the twisting pain Levi was feeling but it was more than enough that once his hips started moving they couldn’t stop. It was tricky, being so well stuck in. Levi squirmed in his sticky prison, gasping when his pants soaked through from the front and behind, and the ropey web was left stickier than before. It shouldn’t have been that easy to cum and Levi realised that somewhere in the back of his dazed mind.
A string came loose, cut through at last by several blades. The cord snapped, and Levi yelped as the entire web shook. He heard a shout of alarm, unable to see as the cut strand of web went whipping back with enough force that it knocked one of the hunters right off of his feet. The villager screamed as he tumbled over the edge, making the rest of the web net shudder violently as he landed on a few strings.
Levi gave a shout as his world shook, the whole web shivering under the impact of the new prey and the shifting support from the cord being cut. The net held, though, easily strong enough to endure. The tremors petered out, travelling along the cords that stretched on out of sight, leading who knew where.
The raven swallowed. If just one cord being severed was enough to give off such large vibrations, then there was no way that something hadn’t been alerted to the activity here.
If not, then the alarmed racket would surely draw attention.
Somewhere near the newly fallen man was still screaming, clearly not accepting his fate.
Levi wished he could cover his ears. It was so loud. And terrified – a piercing shriek. A moment or two later, Levi realised why that was.
There was more than one voice screaming now.
The chasm was especially dark as a shadow skittered overhead. The web shook. Levi bounced in his sticky binding. Two more men fell into its gluey grasp. More screams, this time from above. Levi could see one of the faces of the fallen in his awkward position. The eyes were glazed. Lifeless. Blood oozed from the man’s nose.
Levi blinked through wide, watery eyes. There was no mistaking it; the man was dead.
Something jolted the web right next to Levi’s head. The cord thrummed, vibrations running along the straining strand. His shout of alarm was cut off with a choking sound as a sharp, stinging sensation struck his left thigh. Levi was numb moments later, brain clouding, and a low chittering echoing in the space by his ear.
Something shaky, like the uneasy rhythm of a rattlesnake’s dance, kept sneaking into Levi’s ears as he drifted in and out of consciousness.
A voice, maybe…but whatever those words meant weren’t for Levi to understand.
Something deep and animal echoed about him. Levi could feel the sound rattling around in his skull, filtering in his ears and remaining trapped in his memory. Played back over and over again until nightmares took shape.