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Dick should have realised something was up the moment he noticed he was the only beta at Spyral.
No, he had realised. He’d just written it off as them making an exception for the former justice-league-level vigilante, and done his best not to show how icked out he was. In general, but especially at the casual bioessentialism of the organisation's belief that alphas and omegas were somehow more complete, more fully people, than betas.
Between that and the general disregard for concepts like consent and bodily autonomy, there was an authoritarian undertone to the place that was creeping him out.
…Spy organisations operated on a necessary hierarchy, yes. But this was decidedly more than that, and there was a reason this organisation had been setting off red flags for B.
Didn’t mean he liked that he was here, even before he realised what was happening.
Part of Dick was surprised they’d bothered concealing the drugs in his food. It wasn’t like he was in a position to refuse if he was called into medical and given a mystery shot; that had happened several times already and he’d only found out the contents of the injections by hacking his own file.
He’d barred the door, but realistically it wouldn’t do more than give him a few seconds warning if someone forced it.
Which would feel unsafe under normal circumstances, never mind an induced presentation fever.
It felt wrong. Dick had already presented, age 15, glands developing their adult scent and kicking off one of his last growth spurts as his body’s second gender settled. Those same glands were now oily to the touch, pushed to produce more and more as the drugs drove his body towards developing in a way it wasn’t meant to. Oh, sure, he had the vestigial traits everyone did, but there’d been no natural lead up. No background development of knot or uterus for months, if not a year leading up to presentation.
He wasn’t sure those few seconds of warning would do much; he hurt. Enough he wasn’t sure he’d be able to move from where he was curled under the bed, animal instinct to hide overriding better positioning for fighting. He wasn’t in any state to fight.
Forced presentation was banned across most of the world. It had been created in Europe, during the war, and the laws were most comprehensive on that continent. Because it’d seen close up the horrors of the medical experiments involved and also - on account of being the first to know - had had more time to make laws around it.
There were always people who found ways around the law. But the horrors of its creation weren’t the only reason it was banned; the risks were…there was chances of stress induced heart failure, or organ rupture from them being forced to mature unnaturally quick, fever boiling the brain, and that was only what Dick could remember off the top of his head. And the older the victim, the larger the death percentage.
Maybe he should drag himself to the medbay. Spyral probably wanted him alive, right?
Dick looked at the distance between him and the door through eyes watering with pain, and decided against it.
He wondered which way they’d gone. Which stereotype they’d decided fit him enough that they’d slipped a chemical cocktail into his food and forced a second presentation; it wasn’t natural, and the drugs were slightly different for alpha or omega presentations. The pain in his groin and abdomen didn’t really help there; it could be either the rapid expansion of the sperm reservoir and rearranging blood vessels that supplied a knot, or ovaries and uterus waking up and trying to age 23 years in a few hours. It was too generalised to tell, right now.
Dick bit down on his arm to prevent himself from screaming, fangs digging in and tasting blood because the forced presentation had destroyed his control and he couldn’t get the teeth to retract. Fuck them. Fuck spyral, fuck everyone who produced and smuggled the drugs involved, and fuck Bruce especially for forcing him here.
Unable to stop a whimper as another wave of pain hit, Dick grimly considered his options.
It was too late to stop it. So he had to ride it out, and maximise his chances of being alive at the end of it.
He wasn’t in a safe place and didn’t have any pack around to guard him, which were the two main ways to reduce stress during a presentation. Not just mentally; familiar scents calmed the nervous system down and made it less reactive. There were studies that showed graphs of statistically significant autoimmune flare ups, allergy symptoms, and such, and how that varied with to the number and intensity of familiar scents.
Dick’s heart had stopped only a few months ago. He knew damn well that that increased the risk of cardiac complications.
No pack. He could still make a makeshift den or nest; structurally they were pretty similar. Would probably help with the instincts of the presentation heat-or-rut he was about to be thrown into.
Dick waited for the current wave of pain to subside, then inched his way out from under the bed, wobbling to his feet with one arm wrapped around his abdomen and one clutching the bedpost to stay upright. Okay. He was not leaving his room, so what supplies did he have?
Half doubled over, he shuffled across the room (it was small, and he’d never been so glad Spyral billeted its agents in shoeboxes), stopping several times as dark spots ate his vision, gathering his small first aid kit, spare clothes, a couple of towels.
His gun, too. He wasn’t - he couldn’t defend himself like this. Not with acrobatics and martial arts. And even a scrap of safety might make the difference between palpitations and an actual heart attack.
It all made a pathetic little heap on his bed. Dick eased himself down beside it, and did another breathing exercise in an attempt to not pass out.
Okay.
He kept snacks and bottled water in his nightstand. Nothing fancy, just a box of crumbly, sticky granola bars, but he’d chosen them because he could stuff one in a pocket and it could work as an emergency meal. He’d been picturing something going wrong in the field, but they’d work for now too.
Den/nest materials. Food and drink. Pack scents weren’t an option - though, struck by a thought, Dick shakily scented some of the pile, trying to project reassurance and protection. His own beta scent might register differently; there was some speculation about alphas having more ability to detect sweet notes in scents, omegas spicier notes, betas herbier ones. Hormone levels impacting olfactory system development. Might or might not apply to him, given he was already full grown.
Den/nest materials. Food and drink. Scent, maybe. Weapon. (If he couldn’t feel safe, feeling secure in his ability to defend himself would have to substitute, and he’d deliberately played down his skill with it in front of the other agents.) Spare ammo. First aid kit; he downed a couple painkillers, judging the risk of drug interactions less than the risk of passing out unexpectedly. Also, pain stressed the body out, and his needed as few extra stressors as possible right now.
That had used up all the energy he had. Dick slumped around the pile, and closed his eyes, still shakily counting breaths.
Dick gnawed on a spare t-shirt, mostly so he didn’t scream.
There was a pressure building behind his balls, and he knew that meant they’d gone for the omega cocktail. Whether because whoever made that call thought it fit or because they just wanted to fuck him, he was trying not to think about.
At least he knew the basics of nest building. With how much pain he was in the result was as pathetic as the clothes pile that preceded it, but there was a raised edge made from the bed’s duvet, and as much soft fabric lining it as he’d had on hand.
His own scent on the things wasn’t registering as another person, but he appreciated the reassurance from his past self whenever he smelled it anyway, so Dick was counting that as a win.
His current clothes felt…bad. Which was a sign, and also they were soaked in the fear-and-pain scent he’d been overproducing for hours now, so probably not helping.
Didn’t change that he needed to take them off. So he could see what was happening, and if he needed to help anything along.
He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to be part of what they were doing to him, but it might be the difference between life or death, so he needed to be able to see.
Moving hurt. Undoing his belt hurt more, his vision flaring white as the pressure changed on his abdomen. Stretching might reduce the change of something attaching in the wrong place and causing problems, he remembered vaguely, but it hurt too much to even contemplate. Dick was no stranger to pushing through pain, but when it got to levels where his body kept threatening to pass out…he’d be defenceless if that happened. No.
Moving his hips to ease off his trousers and underwear had him hissing swears, but kicking them off and out of the nest was manageable, comparatively.
His glands were all swollen, inflamed and irritated and hot to the touch. Dick crossed his fingers and hoped it wasn’t some sort of adverse reaction as he made sure the t-shirt he was easing off didn’t brush them.
Between the hot-and-cold-flashes and the shivering, he was definitely running a fever. Being naked both helped and didn’t; the shivers wracked up but the coolness was a relief.
The vestigial pucker behind his balls was looking a lot less vestigial. Dick used a hand mirror from his medkit to examine it, because moving at all hurt, and any movement involving twisting his torso hurt more. It was already taut and aching, not just with the rapid changes but with the build up of slick with nowhere to go.
Like he’d been afraid of, the scar tissue seal wasn’t breaking on its own.
Of course it wasn’t. There hadn’t been the lead up that male omega usually experienced, the gradual development that allowed for an only mildly painful presentation. And without that…stretchy or not, there was a limit to how fast and how far the still-underdeveloped organ could expand before it ruptured and he bled out internally.
Hating every second, Dick fumbled for his medkit again.
Scalpel in sterile packaging. He felt for where the (swollen, pulsing with fluid build up and the beginnings of a presentation heat) pucker felt watery rather than fleshy, the taut scar tissue sealing the opening stretched as pressure built, and built.
Bracing himself, Dick propped the mirror against his pitiful nest wall, double checked he had the right spot, and cut a vertical line through his flesh.
Blood gushed. Dick cried out, dropping the scalpel over the side of the bed as his abdomen cramped harder than ever, registering the movement of built up fluid and evacuating it now it could do so.
Dick collapsed onto his back, both hands pressing on the cramping area in an attempt to relieve it at least a little. He kept his legs spread wide; however awful and mortifying the position it kept the incision he’d just made open, preventing the two sides scabbing together and needing to be separated again.
It took a long, long while for the flow to subside.
Dick lay there, in a puddle of mixed slick and blood, exhaustion crashing over him as the cramps finally waned. Everything felt bad; drying fluids tacky against his skin and staining the nest, violent shivers coming back as he realised how icy-cold he felt, inside and out.
The mirror had fallen over. Dick wiped it on a mostly-clean bit of duvet-cover and checked there was nothing obviously wrong, then dropped it and snagged the only blanket-like-thing he could reach without moving- a medium sized towel - and tugging it over his body.
His heart was racing. Fast, too fast, but steady about it, so Dick hunched around his gun, half lidded eyes on his door, and did breathing exercises to see if that’d slow it to something less dangerous while he waited for the next blow.
It was Tiger who eventually broke the door down.
Dick squeezed the trigger, recoil slamming into his arms as he fired, but Spyral’s number 1 agent had already jumped back out of sight.
“Oh good, you survived,” came the greasy tones of Mr Minos, stepping calmly into the open door. “You smell much nicer now, agent 37.”
Dick kept the gun trained on him. “I smell of blood and stress,” he snapped back. “Don’t come any closer.”
Minos tutted. “So ungrateful.”
He stopped in place though, so clearly Dick’s threat had some impact. “What do you want?” Dick demanded, sharp and hoarse. There was something. Minos so rarely ventured into the residential part of heir headquarters, and Dick sincerely fucking doubted he was just checking in on Dick’s health.
“To celebrate.”
There was an emphasis to the word that took a moment to sink in, something slimy and possessive. Dick fired, bang bang bang in rapid succession rippling through Minos without touching him, and Dick realised with a jolt of terror that Minos had used Hypnos to fool Dick about his position and Dick hadn’t noticed-
“Tsuchigumo.”
Darkness.