Chapter Text
11 Years before the Coma
The world had always been too loud, even then…yet never quite loud enough in the right places for Alpha.
It wasn’t a matter of volume in the literal audible sense and while the hallway during his five-minute passing periods with all the locker door slamming, the screeching rubber of the sneakers on cheap linoleum flooring and the high pitched, chitty-chatter of the teenagers came quite close to it, it never was the right kind of ear deafening noise his brain secretly longed for, only an exhausting reminder that there is a hidden script everyone else seemed to have memorized upon birth while he was handed a blank page.
For Alpha, the noise he craved was deep, supposed to settle into his chest and rattle his bones till they drown out his own thoughts once it crawled up the back of his neck into his skull.
His spine was pressed hard against a cold brick wall, his knees pulled up tightly towards his chest when he sat on the low concrete radiator cover in the secondary hallway.
He, even then had always tried to disappear, it came naturally to him, it just never worked with his kind off slightly too tall frame. He thought, maybe if he kept his eyes anchored to the floor and his hands jammed strictly into the pockets of the jacket that should feel like a shield to him like he begged it to numerous times, then the world might mistake him for a permanent fixture of the architecture.
The school environment was an endless sequence of rigid, unyielding boxes. You had to sit in that one specific assigned chair, respond to your given name in a specific mannerism and mimic the casual, unbothered posture that everyone around seemingly stuck to. To fail at any of it – to let your eyes wander mindlessly too long, to speak too slowly or simply freeze under the weight of another unwritten rule – was to invite scrutiny and that was something he tried to avoid. It only brought on the eyes of peers who smelled the difference on you like a shark an open wound.
He is not self-conscious by any means, never has been, he just preferred to stay out of the sight of such cruel world.
Alpha’s throat felt dry, the air tasting heavily of dust, floor wax and the collective anxiety of three hundred kids trapped in a building that nobody wanted to be in. He could feel the familiar, dark tide of isolation rising. It was the reoccurring crushing realisation that he was entirely on his own side of a transparent wall, looking out at a society he didn’t understand, that had no intention to understand him, to make room for him.
Then the concrete radiator cover vibrated, dragging him out of his head. Someone had dropped a heavy, overstuffed backpack onto the floor right next to his feet with a loud, unmistakable thud.
Alpha didn’t dare to look up immediately, his defense mechanism has always been immobility, if you don’t move, the thread might pass.
The thread did indeed not pass.
Instead, a pair of worn out, scuffed black boots stepped right on the floor scruffs, into his line of sight, completely blocking his view of the linoleum tiled floor.
“You look like you’re waiting to get executed” a voice said.
The voice was high, loud, and entirely unbothered by the stifling atmosphere of the crowded hallway, completely devoid of the sharp, mocking edge Alpha had learned to expect when talked about behind his back.
Alpha blinked, his gaze slowly travelling upward. Past the worn down boots, past a pair of uniform- pants? Were girls even allowed to wear those? Not that he minded, he couldn’t care less about clothing. -past the school’s blazer that looked like it’s been in use for a decade too long until he was looking at the girls face.
She was leaning back against the thick brick wall right next to Alpha's spot, her arms crossed over her chest, a crooked, way too casual smile playing on her lips. The dark coloured hair pulled together in a hightail keeping her face free of stray strands.
There was no hesitation in her posture, she hadn’t looked around to see if anyone was watching her talk to the strange, quiet kid sitting in the radiator. She simply was suddenly there.
“I’m Delta.” The girl had said, shifting her weight and looking down at Alpha with a sort of stubborn, relentless curiosity. “You're in some of my classes, you sit in the back and look ready to murder the chalkboard.”
Alpha’s mouth opened slightly, but no sound came out of it. His internal processing system, usually so hyper tuned to threats, completely stalled. The script for talking to girls who actually notice you was missing from his mental archives.
Where was the catch? Where was the joke?
People didn’t just walk up and initiate contact without reason, especially not girls. They didn’t just cross the invisible boundary line Alpha had spent months drawing around himself.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to sit here” Alpha finally managed to mutter, his voice raspy from lack of use. It was a weak defense, a pathetic attempt to give Delta another chance for exit before the interaction built enough tension for outsiders to notice.
She laughed. It was a barked, short laugh of amusement that cut through the ambient of the hallway noise. “Allowed? Who’s going to stop us? The hallway monitor? He’s 5’2 and cries when people drop their trays? Move over.”
Without waiting for an invitation, Delta slid onto the narrow concrete ledge, Her shoulder pumping hard against Alpha’s. The contact was sudden, solid and entirely real.
Alpha tensed, his breath hitching as a boundary was crossed, he didn’t even know he had. Waiting for the punchline, waiting for Delta’s friends to pop out from around the corner with a camera or a collective sneer, but nothing happened.
Delta just leaned her head back against the brick, closed her eyes and exhaled a long sigh. “This place stinks of old cabbage.” Delta observes casually, eyeing his collar. “Anyway, what are you listening to?”
He hesitates, his thumb twitching over the pocket where his cheap MP3 rests. Before he could answer, her fingers were already reaching. They brushed his neck, cool and only brief, sending a physical shockwave straight down to his spine.
Alpha who usually tensed at any touch, sat frozen.
She plucked the earbud from where it dangled over the button up uniform and jammed it into her own ear, leaning slightly to accommodate the short cable cord. The music was raw, a cacophony of unstructured, aggressive synthetic wall of noise that Alpha generated on his laptop, an auditory representation of his daily anxiety.
He tensed, waiting for her to wrinkle her nose and hand the bud back with a pitying smile. Instead, she sat in absolute silence for a bit, before nodding her head with the barely there, underlying beat while the discordance buzzed through her system.
When she pulled the earbud out and left it to dangle on the thing cord by his neck, her eyes were wide, the easy smile replaced by an expression that was terrifyingly focused. “Well, it’s weird, I love that.” She said, her voice dropping a tad. “Sounds like the inside of my brain during algebra, car crash in slow motion so something. You make this?”
“Yeah.” Alpha whispered, the word feeling too small for the weight of the moment.
“Well,” Delta replied, her smile returning as she reclaimed her space, “I have just decided that I am never leaving you alone again, let’s go.”
From that day forward, the solitude was forcefully, stubbornly occupied by her. The friendship, while fierce, was never simple, but neither of them minded.
For Alpha, having Delta was like suddenly having a translator for a world that spoke a foreign language. When teachers asked questions that paralyzed his mind, turning his thoughts into a blinding white blizzard of panic, Delta was already speaking before the silence became humiliating. “Maybe you should ask me, since I, for once, actually read the pages.”
She ran interference, she created a bubble of acceptable strangeness around them.
The days that followed blurred into a new kind of rhythm, one where Alpha was no longer a solo traveller navigating an alien landscape. They became, by some unwritten law that Delta seemed to enforce by pure willpower, a Duo of their own.
Where Alpha was, Delta was there.
In the cafeteria, they no longer hovered at the edges of the room looking for an empty table where they wouldn’t be noticed. Delta would walk straight to the centre of the room, claim a bench with a proprietary slap of her hand and look around as if daring anyone to question their right there.
“Look at them.” She would mutter over a lunch tray of lukewarm, soggy fries, nodding towards the ‘popular’ tables where kids sat in rigid, practised poses, laughing at jokes they didn’t find funny, just to stay within the circle. “They look like they’re performing a theatre play they didn’t rehearse. It’s exhausting just to watch it.”
“They’re just doing what they’re supposed to do.” Alpha said, his eyes fixed on his chocolate milk carton. The concept of ‘supposed to’ was a ghost that haunted him every hour of the day. He spent so much energy trying to calculate the exact distance his feet should be apart when he stood, the exact amount of eye contact that was considered polite but not aggressive, the exact vocal inflection that wouldn’t make him sound like a machine.
“According to who?” Delta scoffed, reaching over to steal one of Alpha’s fries. “Some guy who died fifty years ago and decided everyone should wear the same shoes, uniforms and have a miserable corporate job? Fuck that, we stay here.”
For the first time in his life, the internal vibration in his skull began to settle, if only slightly, when Delta was around. If Alpha went quiet for two hours, staring out the window of a tram while they rode around aimlessly around the city lines, Delta didn’t ask what’s wrong or why he isn’t talking. She would simply lean her head against the glass, pull the hood over her eyes and mirror Alpha’s silence with a comfortable, respectful silence of her own.
They never branched out. Other kids tried, occasionally, to invite Delta to birthday parties or hangouts, Delta was funny, she was loud and carried a natural, effortless charisma that people wanted to be near. But aside from the birthdays she declined their requests with a lazy wave of her hand. “Got plans.” She’d say, not offering an explanation.
The plans always looked the same.
They spent their weekends in Alpha’s bedroom, surrounded by the debris of their shared world, old amplifiers, notebooks filled with Alpha’s spidery, calligraphic handwriting and Delta’s sketchbooks. They didn’t need a larger group, the social dynamics of secondary school where a minefield of shifting alliances, gossip and performative cruelty, neither of them had the patience for that.
For Alpha, Delta became more than a friend.
These hours were refuge, the place where he could almost believe that Delta’s protection was strong enough to keep the dark thoughts, the internal whispers of non-conformity that would eventually lead him toward self-harm, entirely at bay.
But the isolation the constructed didn’t just keep the world out, it also intensified what was building insider the room between them. There was no other audience, no one was watching but them.
Inside Alpha’s bedroom the curtains were drawn tight against the grey afternoon light, a low doom metal riff droning out of a single desktop speaker, that armor came off piece by piece.
Alpha sat on the edge of his mattress, his long legs bent, his eyes fixed on the frayed edge of his jeans. The struggle with himself wasn’t something he had words for yet. His body, holding a certain hardness, a certain way of taking up space, a trajectory that felt entirely like a trap. He felt hollowed out at the effort of figuring put how to exist comfortably in his own skin, let alone a society that demanded rigid self-categorisation.
Delta was the only person who didn’t look at him like he was a puzzle to be solved. She was lying flat on her back across the other half of the bed, one leg kicked up familiarly over the headboard. He was jealous of her in a way, how she knew who she was, comfortable in a general genderless mind, presenting femininity like a weapon she had forged herself, rather than something handed to her. Their long hair chopped unevenly, their eyes heavily lined with smeared black Kayal, wearing his oversized flannels over torn tights and combat boots to round it off. Entirely comfortable in her existence, her own society non-conform identity. Because they didn’t care about rules, Alpha could breathe in her presence.
“You’re doing it again.” Delta murmured, her voice a low, gravelly vibration that cut through the bass coming from the speaker.
Alpha didn’t move. “Doing what?”
“Disappearing.” They shifted, the mattress creaking beneath their weight. She slid down until she was sitting cross legged right behind him, her knees bracketing his hips. The sudden proximity turned the air thick. Without asking they reached out and ran their fingers through his hair, their chipped black fingernails lightly scratching his scalp.
Alpha caught his breath, his eyes closing automatically at the familiarity of the gesture. Her touch was cool, but it felt like a matched dropped on dry grass.
Every single point of contact between them had begun to carry a terrifying, heavy charge over the last few months. It was no longer just comfortable friction of two outsiders holding onto each other, it had warped into a desperate, magnetic pull that left them both hyper aware of the space between their bodies.
“Your hair is getting long.” Delta whispered, their fingers twisting a strand of it near the nape of his neck. She leaned closer, her breath warm against his ear. “I like it, you should let it grow out, past your shoulders. It would really suit you.”
The suggestion sent a strange, sharp ache through Alpha’s chest. It wasn’t just a compliment, it was an acknowledgement of the softer, blurred lines he secretly craved, but was too terrified to express outside of these four walls. Delta saw the parts of him he tried to hide from the rest of the world, instead of pushing him back into a box, she pulled those parts forward.
“People already look,” Alpha muttered, his hands gripping the edge of the mattress until his knuckles turned white. He was fighting the urge to lean backward, to collapse his entire weight against their solid chest.
“Let them look then,” she said, her voice dropping into that fierce, stubborn register that usually belong to school courtyard and the public, but here, it sounded incredible intimate. “They’re boring, you’re not.” They slid their hand down from his hair, their palm resting flat against his collarbone, sliding beneath the wide neck of his oversized sweater. The skin of her soft hands was a stark contrast to the heavy metal jewellery she always wore.
Alpha’s heart hammered violently against his ribs, a jagged, chaotic rhythm. The tension between them wasn’t sweet or gentle. It was heavy, sharp and laced with the same raw, desperate, energy as the music they listened to.
Delta leaned their chin against his shoulder, their smeared eyeliner a dark contrast the pale clean skin of his cheek. In the reflection of the dark screen of the computer monitor they looked like a single, blurred shape, two distinct identities melting into a third singular thing entirely.
“Alpha.” She breathed, her lips brushing the side of his neck. The contact was electric. A shudder ran through his frame, his hands leaving the mattress to find their wrists, his fingers locking, pulling them tight around him to his chest, close to his heart. He just held her there, pinning her hands close.
The physical desire was a roaring engine between them, a heavy, suffocating weight that made it hard to think, hard to remember where he ended and they began.
Alpha didn’t let go of their wrists, if he did, the fragile gravity holding him together might completely collapse. Her skin beneath his fingers was hot, a sharp, living contrast to the cold, static numbness that usually settled into his joints by the end of a school day. He could feel the small, frantic gallop of their pulse against his palms, a reminder that for all their unbothered, sharp armor, they were wound just as tight as he was.
The low, distorted drone from the desktop speaker filled the silence, another track that felt less like music and more like a physical weight encouraging their encounter, forcing all the air out of the room. It was the only sound that made sense to them, slow, deliberate and entirely unconcerned with resolution.
The room didn’t just rise in temperature, the heat became thick and suffocating, vibrating in time with the low-end frequency of the black metal droning from the speakers, forcing its way through the floorboards and directly into the mattress beneath them.
Delta didn’t pull away from his grip. Instead, she leaned into it, shifting her weight until her chest was pressed against flushed against his clothed spine, the heavy silver rings on her fingers digging slightly into his hands. Their chin stayed anchored on his shoulder, their dark, uneven hair falling forward, brushing against his neck. It smelled of the stale tobacco she smoked and the cheap clove oil she used to soothe her piercings, an intoxicating, heavy scent Alpha had come to associated entirely with safety.
“If I let go, I won’t know where to put my hands.” Alpha said, his voice dropping into a rough, low register that sounded foreign even to him. It was the truth, his own body felt like an unmapped territory, an awkward, heavy thing he was forced to carry around to satisfy everyone’s expectations. He didn’t know how to occupy the space he had been given, but the moment Delta touched him, the margins blurred. With them, he didn’t have to be the rigid, stoic figure. He could exist in the heavy, dark warmth of the room, somewhere between the sharp edges of her kohl eyeliner and the oversized, frayed edges of his own black sweater.
Delta let out a slow, hot exhale against his neck, a sound that was half a sigh, half a growl. With a sudden fluid movement, she wrenched her right hand free from his grip. Before he could brace himself, she slid her palm upward, her fingers tangling in the hair at the base of his skull, forcing his head back slightly so he had to look at her.
Their face was inches from his, up close, away from the harsh fluorescent lights of the school corridors, their armor was beautifully messy. The black makeup around her eyes was slightly smudged at the corners and the small silver spike through her lower lip caught the faint, bruised light filtering through the curtains.
There was a raw, hungry focus in her eyes, a fierce kind of desire that didn’t follow any script they had ever been taught. It was clumsy, heavy and completely theirs. “Then don’t put them anywhere,” they whispered, the spike of their jewerly clicking faintly against their teeth. “Just let me.”
She leaned down, closing the remaining distance between them. Her lips were warm, tasting faintly of bitter black coffee, her teeth caught on his lower lip with a sharp, deliberate pressure that that sent a jolt of pure adrenaline straight to his core.
Alpha groaned, a low, trapped sound in the back of his throat and finally let his other hand slide off their wrist. His fingers found the heavy denim of her vest, bunching the fabric into his fists, pulling her down over him as he leaned back onto the mattress.
The bed creaked heavily beneath their combined weight. Delta slid over him, claiming him, their fishnet-clad knees settling on either side of his thighs. She pinned him down, her hands flattening against his chest feeling the chaotic, racing rhythm of his heart through the thick sweater.
The weight of their body on his was a massive, grounding relief, like a heavy blanket shutting out the rest of the world, driving out the lingering, cold static in Alpha’s head. She pinned his wrists down against the mattress, her fingers interlocking with his, her heavy silver rings cold against his knuckles before their combined skin temperature melted the chill away.
Their eyes, stark and ringed with smudged kohl, burned down into his with a fierce, demanding intensity that stripped away every single defense mechanism he had ever built against the outside world.
“Look at me.” She whispered again, her voice a low, rough rasp that was almost swallowed by the distortion of the music. “Don’t look away, Alpha. Stay right here with me.”
Alpha couldn’t have looked away if he wanted to. The proximity was dizzying, a pure, unadulterated sensory overload that made his breath catch painfully in his throat. He looked up at them, his vision swimming slightly in the dim light. She looked down at him with an expression that was fiercely proprietary, her dark hair hanging down like a curtain, isolating them even further from the house outside this bedroom door.
He wrenched his hands free from their grip, his fingers sliding up the rough denim of their vest, bunching the fabric into his fists before tearing at the buttons, wanting to get closer to the heat underneath. He needed to touch her- needed to feel the boundaries of her body to convince himself that he wasn’t drifting into one of his dark, hollow voids.
He pulled the heavy vest off their shoulders, letting it drop over the side of the bed, his hands moving with a sudden, desperate urgency to pull their shirt up and out of the way. His palms traced the smooth line of her bare waist, where the flannel shirt was discarded into the shadows. Their skin was soft but firm, a terrifyingly real contrast to the digital waveforms and abstract anxieties he spent his nights analysing.
Delta let out a low, trapped growl against his mouth, a sound that sent a heavy, liquid ache straight sown his spine. They dragged her lips down his jawline, their mouth trailing a path of fire to the sensitive hollow of his neck, where they bit down with a sharp, deliberate pressure, leaving a mark- a sharp spike of heat that made Alpha’s entire body go rigid.
Alpha’s head flung back against the pillow, his eyes closing as a ragged, helpless groan tore from his chest, his hips rolling upward into hers in a desperate, uncoordinated reaction to the spike of pure pleasure.
They didn’t stop. Her hands slid beneath the oversized hem of his heavy wool sweater, her palms dragging slowly, agonizingly up his torso. Their fingernails, chipped with black polish, lightly scraped against his ribs, sending an electric shudder through his entire frame.
Alpha tensed, a sudden wave of the familiar, confusing wrongness threatening to surge up from his stomach, the deep, quiet struggle of his own identity that always lingered in the dark. He hated being seen, he hated the shape of himself, he hated the rigid, predefined shape the world forced him into.
But beneath Delta’s hands, that hatred evaporated into pure, raw sensation. She wasn’t looking at him like he was a collection of wrong parts, she looked at him as if he were the only thing in the room that mattered. They weren’t holding a young man, they were holding him, worshipping the jagged lines of his skin with a quiet, fierce reverence that felt entirely sacred an entirely filthy all at once.
She pushed the heavy fabric of his sweater up, forcing him to lift his arms as she stripped it off and flung it blindly into the shadows of the room to join her flannel-vest. When their bare breasts pressed down against his chest, the friction was almost too much to bear.
Alpha gasped, his hands flying to her thighs, his fingers digging deep into the torn fishnets she wore over her short denim shorts, anchoring her hips over his. The coarse nylon of the netting dug into his palms, a sharp, textured contrast to the slick, burning heat where their bare torsos met.
The blast beats from the speakers intensified, the frantic, dark melody of the metal twisting around them like a secondary skin, framing the heavy rhythmic friction of their bodies. In the dim, bruised light of the bedroom, his usual hyper-awareness of his own awkward shape vanished.
Delta shifted, settling their weight squarely over his lap. Even through the coarse restrictive barrier of his heavy jeans and her own denim, the heat of her centre was a branding iron against him. They began to move against him with a slow, deliberate, torturous cadence, their hips shifting in a heavy, grinding pressure that left them both panting for air.
Every slide of her body against his was an agonizing tease. The friction of fabric, backed by the unyielding weight of their hips pressing directly into his hardness, was a slow burning fuse. It made Alpha’s muscles lock, his toes curling as his teeth ground together, fighting the desperate, overwhelming urge to trust up into her and break the agonizingly slow rhythm she was dictating.
The tension that had been brewing between them for months – built out of shared silences, touches on the school tram and fierce loyalty of their exclusive duo – finally broke. It was a heavy, claustrophobic kind of intimacy, a quiet rebellion against a society they both despised, play out in the dark to the sound of low frequency bass and the ragged cadence of their own breathing. The physical desire between them was a heavy, dark and entirely queer- an unstructured, chaotic connection that belonged only to them, played out into the absolute isolation of his room.
“Delta.” He chocked out, his voice snapping under the strain. His hands moved from her thighs to her hair, his fingers tangling in the dark, unevenly cut strands to force her face back up to his. His eyes were wide, dark and wild with a maddening, heavy desperation as his hips twitched helplessly beneath her, trying to find purchase against the agonizing rub of her denim.
“Please. Fuck, Delta please.” They smirked, a cruel, beautiful curve of their lips that showed they knew exactly how ruined he was beneath her, how close he was to the edge just from the heavy, unyielding pressure of them on his lap. She didn’t give him what he wanted. Instead, she leaned down, her lips brushing his ear, her teeth grazing the lobe before she whispered, “Not yet.” They slid down his body, their mouth trailing a path of torturous, wet kisses over his collarbone, down the centre of his chest, their tongue tracing the line of his breastbone until Alpha was arching off the mattress, his hands fisting into the bedsheets, his knuckles white as he tried to ground himself against the suffocating tide of pleasure they were unleashing.
Then, she reached down between their bodies. Her palm flattening over the front of his jeans, her fingers pressing down hard, catching him through the heavy denim and dragging upward. Alpha let out a ragged, strangled cry, his hips snapping up unbidden against her hand.
Delta didn’t let up, they kept their palm locked over him, grinding their weight down in sync with the rhythmic stroke of her hand, trapping his length beneath their own heat and the rough fabric of his pants.
The sensation was overwhelming, heavy and intensely crude, the friction of their clothes turning into a vice that dragged him mercilessly toward the edge. He was burning up, completely undone beneath her, his breath coming in short, harsh gasps as she channelled every ounce of his chaotic anxiety into pure, agonizing physical release.
With a final, desperate grind of their hips against her hand, Alpha broke, a low, shattered groan tearing from his chest as his entire body went rigid, spilling himself helplessly into his clothes while Delta held him down, riding out the tremors of his release with a fierce, proprietary grip.
She worshipped him with that slow, agonizing thoroughness until the sharp, electric adrenaline gradually began to slow, settling into a thick, lingering warmth. They stayed lost in that heavy, suffocating heat for what felt like hours, the world outside his bedroom door completely ceasing to exist.
Every touch was an unspoken promise, a solid, physical wall they were building together to keep the rest of the society out. It was a raw, intense peak of intimacy, an unholy, heavy thing- a chaotic friction of leaving them both trapped in a state of suspended, agonizing heat while the black metal roared on in the dark, cementing an unbreakable, desperate bond.
Eventually, Delta didn’t move away. They collapsed sideways onto the mattress, their head resting securely in the crook of Alpha’s shoulder, one of their legs still draped heavily over his thighs, their shuddered breaths a comforting sound between them.
The room was quieter now, save for the low, dying hum of the amplifier on the desk, Alpha lay perfectly still, his arms wrapped tightly around her waist, his fingers idly tracing the line of her bare hip. His chest rose and fell in time with theirs, the internal vibration in his skull completely quiet for the first time all day.
He looked toward the drawn curtains, watching the faint, grey twilight fade into total darkness. They were still just two teens in a messy bedroom, surrounded by broken guitar pedals and notebook sketches for future songs and covers, entirely isolated from the world outside.
They had built their sanctuary in the dark, a perfect, heavy foundation of two, clueless to the fact that the shadows waiting in Alpha’s mind were already deepening and that this unbreakable duo was the last safe harbour he would have before the tide would finally pull him under.