Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jisung is tired. 

So fucking tired. 

Every part of him is exhausted. His arms, his legs, his face, his brain. It feels like he’s spent the last three hours undergoing the worst interview of his life, but where the punishment for failing is not just a telling off by a manager or shitty headlines. 

No, this time, Felix’s life hangs in the balance and that is so much worse. 

Jisung looks up at the front of the courtroom and his eyes burn with tiredness as he tries to focus. 

The judges are gone. The bench at the front of the courtroom is empty and lonely, the seats vacant for the first time in hours. The judges left about fifteen minutes ago, saying they’ll come back with a decision. They said it in nicer, fancier words and talked about duty and ethical values and all that crap but the long and short of what they said was we’ll back with a verdict at some point in the future. Very conspicuously, they didn’t give a timeline, they didn’t say when they’d be back. 

Jisung foresees a long wait again. 

God, he wants an answer now. Every hour that ticks by is another hour that Felix is under strain, his body weakening against the tide of his oncoming presentation, and every hour that surgery and medication is delayed is another hour of risking damage - life altering damage at best. He doesn’t want to think about the worst case scenario because it’s too much, too soon. 

Jisung wants to fucking shake someone and say why is this so hard? 

What’s so difficult about saving a boy’s life?

Why is his body the battleground for a fight he doesn’t even know is happening? 

But nobody listens to Jisung unless he’s standing on tables and throwing shit and everybody important has left the room so it wouldn’t even be worth it. He’s too tired to do that anyway, his whole body left stranded without anger and violence and just sinking down in exhaustion. Jisung leans against the edge of the table, kneeling on the floor. He doesn’t quite know how he ended up down here - he doesn’t think someone put him on his knees but he can’t really be sure - and he’s not going to change it. 

“Hey, babe.” Chan is nearby and Jisung’s eyes are closed. “Are you with us?”

He sighs and doesn’t answer. He doesn’t want to answer. He can’t answer. It feels so hard, so difficult to even think about it. When he opens his eyes again, Chan is kneeling in front of him, front and centre, his entire body focused on Jisung. 

“Where are you, sweetheart?” He asks. 

Jisung shrugs and Chan nods. That, for them, was a conversation and Chan got what he needed to out of it. 

Jisung doesn’t have words anymore. He’s so fucking done with this, with the stress of having to scream and stand on tables and demand that he gets even one tenth of the attention and grace that a fucking alpha gets. All of his life has been about this - it’s only when he shouts and swears and throws things and threatens people that they actually attempt to take him seriously. 

He’s tired of fighting. 

The Jisung of four years ago wouldn’t ever believe such a sentence could come out of himself but Jisung is better now. He’s wiser and more grown and he’s had too many reports done on him talking about his violence problem to really think that fighting is the best way. He’s just trying to survive this night and he’s so scared right now. He wants their baby. He needs Felix in his life. 

“I know.” Chan says, and his hands are so gentle as they brush Jisung’s hair back out of his eyes. “I know.” 

Normally, Jisung would bite someone who said that. But he doesn’t. Because he understands that Chan does know, he does get how Jisung feels, how much Jisung is just… overwhelmed and drowning in the situation. 

Jisung wants so badly to come up for air, to breathe and to make the world stop for a while and he knows he can’t, he can’t stop the justice system (he’s tried before and got nowhere fast). He can’t think, can’t process, and he just ends up staring at Chan’s face, into his eyes, and his head is empty. 

“I think it’s time for a break, isn’t it?” Chan says, looking down. Jisung follows his gaze and it takes a long moment before the actual meaning of Chan’s words drift into his mind, before he understands. His hands are together, like he does when Chan puts him in his cuffs, and Chan knows what that means. He’s fought so hard and now, he just… he needs someone else to take over. His body knew before he did and that tells him he’s so disconnected from himself that he is vulnerable right now. 

“Let me help you.” Chan says, and in his hands are the cuffs that Jisung is very familiar with. Chan calls them his everyday carry and Jisung knows that they live in the pack’s rucksack, the one that comes everywhere with them. 

For a long time, Jisung did need them every day. Whenever he was in public, whenever they were doing anything outside of the apartment or Chan’s studio, those black cuffs were what he wore as a basic minimum. He hasn’t needed them for a long time but every so often, he just… he just stumbles. Maybe it’s a stressful comeback, maybe it’s a manager who is dead from the neck up, trying to force the pack down a route that they don’t want to go. Maybe it’s just life being stressful - appointments, his period, people needing things that he can’t give right now like eye contact. Whatever it is that’s caused him to fall down, if he can’t get back up by himself, can’t put himself back into balance, that’s at the point where someone else takes over for him. It’s usually Chan who makes the decision that Jisung needs a timeout and that he has to let someone else make decisions for him. 

Just like now. 

Chan doesn’t ask to put the cuffs on. He just takes Jisung’s hands, wraps the leather around his wrists, holding it there while he buckles it in place. His hands are warm and gentle as the work but he won’t be denied. He wants Jisung in his cuffs and that’s what will happen. 

The chain clinks and rattles as he works and the sound is familiar. 

Jisung knows where the sounds come from, he’s heard them so often, what the clinking of chains and the soft noise of the buckles sliding through meant for him. It’s not soothing - only his white cuffs at home, the ones that are so soft as they wrap around his wrists, lined with lambswool, and the mittens that stop him from even opening and closing his hands come close to being soothing - but these black cuffs with the short chain between them are still fully capable of drawing Jisung’s anxiety out and away from him. It’s reassuring to have something so consistent back again. Chan is quick as he works, his big hands holding Jisung carefully as he makes sure the cuffs are tight, seeing if he can slip his little finger between Jisung and the leather so he knows they’re tight enough. 

Jisung notes idly in the back of his mind that Chan never asked to put them on. 

But that’s never been how it worked for them. 

He never has asked permission from Jisung if he can put him in a belt, or if Chan can blindfold him, or if he can put him on a bed and dismantle him from the pussy out. He never asks if he can use his entire body weight on Jisung until he forgets there exists a world outside of Chan’s scent, the searing heat from his naked skin, the way that his entire self covers all of Jisung from head to toe. That’s when Jisung can really let go, his whole body just focused on Chan buried deep inside of him, to the hilt, pleasure building and taking his breath away. When Chan does that, that is all he is allowed to think about. 

And Chan does not ask for permission. 

It is not Jisung’s place to give consent. 

It never has been. 

He can stop Chan. He has his special word, the one he can say and Chan will back off, pull everything away, turn on the lights. He could say it now. He could say the word and Chan would make sure that he didn’t touch Jisung, that he would make everything bright and cold and make reality come true but Jisung knows it is going to hurt in a way that he isn’t ready for. 

But I don’t want to is not that word and Jisung is well aware of that. 

This was the deal they came to years ago, when Chan agreed to take him from his father. It was hammered out in court documents and in sessions with therapists and in between he and Chan because he cannot make good decisions alone. That’s what it came down to. He struggles so hard and it’s too much for him to think about and in the end, leaving him in control of himself doesn’t work when he’s being pushed and pushed and pushed by time, by hormones, by other people and by stress. It always ends badly. 

So this is the compromise they came to. 

Jisung gets his word and that’s it.

It’s Chan’s job to decide if he needs to be in cuffs. It’s his job to decide if Jisung needs a blindfold or a gag or a time out from himself. It’s his job to decide if Jisung is capable of working or if he needs to go home. It’s his job to decide if Jisung is in a vulnerable place and to pull him back to safety, no matter what managers or their staff or anybody else says. 

It’s Chan’s job to be in control at all times. 

It’s Jisung’s job to sit there, to take it, and to not be in control. 

It took a while for that to sink in, to really accept that Jisung no longer sat in the driving seat of his own life for a lot of things. Even though he had read the papers that his father had signed for him, the ones that gave him to Chan, he didn’t really understand it until he landed in Korea and figured out that nobody would give him the time of fucking day. He fought and he bit and he screamed at Chan and it never really worked and he couldn’t cope with the fact that he went from being a second class citizen in Malaysia to being exactly the same in Korea but this time he was older, he was fertile, and people kept provoking him because they thought it was funny. Right up until Jisung bit them and then they didn’t think it was funny real fucking fast. 

But never with Chan. Chan always had the upper hand - right from the beginning, Jisung understood it. He might not have liked it all the time but he got it. 

And the older he gets, the more he realises he needs it. Jisung needs to be able to trust someone else and Chan is that person for him. Decisions are hard and choices are complicated, and Jisung can trust Chan to deal with the world. 

Just like he’s doing now. 

So he sits there on the floor of the courtroom, quiet and calm, for the first time in hours as Chan buckles him into his cuffs, each one familiar and safe and Jisung likes that. The leather is soft, lined with a thick material that is comfortable over the bones in his wrists. 

When Chan slides the last buckle home, Jisung feels like he’s sinking down, so far down, and it feels safe. He might actually cry because it’s such a change, such a relief that he can finally trust again.

He has been feeling so fucking unsafe for hours. 

The courtroom, the judges staring at him from on high, the way that the guards are already on edge around him, knowing his past because of course they do, it’s all been adding up since they arrived. Having to stand on a table and scream at people to get them to see him, to get them to understand that he’s not just mad, he’s fighting for someone else with all the strength of his body and that has taken a toll on him. People second guessing him, thinking he’s not good enough, not smart enough, not right enough to stand up to them, it’s weighed on him with every angry word and defiant glare he’s had to give out into the world. 

He forgot that fighting like this takes so much out of him, how hard and dangerous and depressing it is. 

“You in there, sweetheart?” There’s a gentle hand stroking his cheek and he knows that voice. Jisung clocks back into reality and straight into a warm red gaze, with brilliant gold, and he falls, he falls into them, and he knows his own eyes are blue in response. He’s hardwired to respond to Chan and has been since the beginning. 

“There’s my Sungie.” Chan says, and he’s kneeling in front of Han. “Where are you, sweetheart?”He’s asking where Jisung is on his scale. They don’t often do this anymore - Jisung is usually calm enough to self regulate, no longer needing regular check ins on his emotional control range, but… not today. Today is special. “Can you tell me where you are, on your scale?” 

“A… a four?” he says. He’s guessing. He doesn’t know if he’s a negative number at this point, if he’s incapable of holding onto sanity, but four feels nice. It feels safe as a number. 

“Okay. We can work with that." Chan strokes his cheek and Jisung just stares up at him. "Do you need to go quiet for now?" 

Jisung can’t answer. His words might be leaving the building as well. 

Chan gets it. He understands why Jisung can’t talk. That’s why he’s looking at him so gently, so kindly that Jisung loves him so much. 

“I’m going to put your headphones on, okay?” Chan has them - the black ones, with the best noise cancelling that Chan could get - in his hands. He wears them everywhere outside - at the airport, in the bus, when they’re in public - just so that he can keep the world at bay. Chan knows that. It’s why he keeps them always on charge, ready to go at a moment’s notice. He slides them onto Jisung’s ears, making sure to not catch his long earrings in the cups, keeping everything gentle and careful because Jisung is slip-sliding down to a place where he’s liable to just… bolt if something scares him. It wouldn’t be the first time that someone had to catch Jisung, diving across tables and over chairs before he made it to the door and to freedom. This was why he had a jess for so long - he was a liability at every turn. 

But when the headphones go on, the world goes away. 

Chan hasn’t chosen music for Jisung - he never copes well with music when he’s like this, too easily pulled out of his headspace by tracking the drums or trying to predict what comes next, or thinking about what he likes and what he doesn’t. No, Chan’s gone right back to the start… 

He’s gone back to heartbeats. 

Jisung looks up into Chan’s deep eyes, falling into the gold and red swirling depths, and he feels like Chan sees him now. The sound in his ears is old and familiar and one that he loves so much. He’s heard it under his ear at least ten times a day since he was almost fifteen years old, and for a long time, it was the only sound that calmed him down. 

It’s Chan’s heart beat. Slow and steady, in both ears, in perfect time, and Jisung could listen to it for the whole night. Years ago, during one of Chan’s physicals, he had them record his heartbeat onto a USB stick. That night, he had gone to the studio, looped the two minute track in the studio, making a song that is just his heart, beating over and over and over again for hours. 

And that’s what Jisung listens to when he’s falling deep. 

They found out that he needed that specific sound when he first came to Korea - he was so scared and daunted by everything, he was always having to be in chains everywhere he went, heavy duty harness and gags because… well, he was quite eager to bite in those days. But the thing that nobody could work out was why does Jisung keep clinging onto his Prime? His therapist, his Omega Officers, even his priest, nobody could work it out. They thought initially it was Chan’s scent but giving him Chan’s shirt didn’t help, and then they thought it was body heat because Jisung cannot stand being cold but giving him extra thermal vests and socks didn’t do shit for him either. 

It was Chan who figured out why Jisung would always burrow under his clothes, trying to press his ear against Chan’s chest, closing his eyes and holding tight to try to soothe himself. 

He wanted to hear Chan’s heartbeat. 

And that’s what he needs now. It’s always been how Chan deals with him when he’s at the brink of holding on. He clocks out and Chan puts the cuffs on, and his headphones, and maybe a blindfold, and then he just puts Jisung somewhere safe and out of the way of other people. That is how Jisung needs Chan to protect him. He keeps Jisung safe and Jisung just… has a bit of time out from life for a while. 

For some reason, they aren’t retreating to the side room. Jisung isn’t sure why - it’s not his job to ask questions when he’s like this - and he doesn’t fight it. He just has to stay here, do what Chan tells him, and that’s enough for him. 

In the courtroom, Chan puts him under the table. It feels nice and small, the world shrinking down to everything under the heavy wooden table and the four pillars of the legs, Chan’s hoodie draped around him so he’s covered in his Prime’s scent, and he just… breathes. 

Minho sits close by. 

Jisung can’t see him but he knows he’s there. Minho’s scent is comforting to him - it smells like the forest of the full omega retreats that Minho has taken him to, deep in the mountains, far away from pain and struggle and suffering. In the mountains, the forest is old and it covers hundreds of kilometres, hiding everything inside it from the outside world. It’s strong and full of secrets, and that’s just like jagi, who feels like an old oak tree to Jisung, tall and strong with roots that anchor him to the earth and bridge the gap between the sky and the ground. Minho would never leave him alone like this, would never make it so he didn’t have someone there right beside him. He’s dealt with Jisung’s… inability to cope with life all too often. He doesn’t come near him, doesn’t try to touch because that would not be a smart move but he’s nearby, making sure Jisung is aware of him. 

Jisung curls up on his side and he just… waits. 

He doesn’t know how long they keep him under the table. Maybe an hour, it could be two. He doesn’t know. The world passes - people make conversation, he sees them walking to and fro, their shoes the only defining feature he can see. But he doesn’t know what they’re talking about and he doesn’t care. 

He just breathes and he tries to not cry. 

At the apartment, Chan and Minho sometimes turn the area underneath the dining room table into a den, just for him. They have a thick mattress to roll out on the tile floor and blankets to lay over the sides so it becomes dark and quiet in there, warming the small space with his own body heat. Sometimes, Minho will give him a heating pad, warm and soft in the plush case, and Jisung appreciates that so much. It’s always Chan’s job to go and bring him into the kitchen, where Minho is holding one of the blankets out the way. 

A time out, they call it, and it’s part of Jisung’s… not therapy (he hates calling it that), but his… normal routine. When it gets stressful at work, a comeback coming or his period raging, that’s when the blankets come out and he’s encouraged to be good for hyung, babe. 

Jisung always takes it. If Minho and Chan bring out the blankets and make a dark nest for him, they know he needs it. He trusts them with that. 

Often, Felix would join him later, after the first hour or so, crawling his way through the blanket curtains to bring Jisung a bottle of water and a handful of cookies or an apple. He wouldn’t ever speak to Jisung - Felix knew that under the table meant Jisung needed quiet and calm in a way that chattering away to him wouldn’t help with. He would just press his forehead to Jisung’s, tell him wordlessly that I’m here for you in a way that Jisung loved him for so much. Felix would curl up with him, tucked in close, pressing his nose into the crook of Jisung’s neck, and just… hold him. He would stroke Jisung’s belly or hold his hand, but he wouldn’t push or try to talk. 

He would just… be there for him. 

Jisung loved those moments. Felix would let Jisung wrap around him, rest on top of him, one leg holding Felix down because Jising didn’t want him to go away. Having him there was… reassuring. It felt right. They could be under the table for hours - the rest of the pack filtering in and out of the dining area, getting coffee or food from the kitchen, whispering out of deference to a full who needs quiet and Chan wouldn’t let anybody disturb him.

Jisung wants to be there again. He wants to be on the floor of their apartment, curled up in the darkness, warm and safe, far away from everything bad. 

He wants Felix. 

That’s not going to happen. 

So instead, he’s here, in a courtroom, fighting for Felix’s life and his future, and Jisung is now wearing chains because he’s losing control of himself and he’s so tired and warm and over everything that’s been happening but he can’t stop, he can’t think, he just has to…. To trust. 

“I know, babe.” Chan’s hand is in his hair, and Jisung hears him over the heart beat in his ears, gentle and familiar and safe. “It’s okay. Alpha’s here for you.” 

Jisung drifts, on the quiet sea of sleep.

He doesn’t dream exactly, but he has flashes of memories of Felix, of him coming to Korea, of their early days when Jisung was one of two people who could communicate with him and it was like having a secret language between them, just like between jagi and Jisung as well. He sees moments of life in the nest, of Felix sleeping between them, of Felix joining Jisung in the shower, of Felix making cookies and sharing them with Jisung… It feels like a waterfall of Felix, all the places they’ve been and the people they’ve seen all colliding together in Jisung’s mind, colours and lights and sensations crashing into each other like the worst car accident - sixty car pile on en route to Han Jisung’s memory banks - and he doesn’t like it.

It feels like it’s the end of something and Jisung doesn’t like things to end. 

It makes his heart hurt and he knows tears start to fall because he wakes up briefly - a flash of alertness in the quiet of the room, sees the others praying over the other side of the room, everybody gathered in a circle around Mr Seo, Changbin, Jeongin, Seungmin and the other lawyers gathered around him. 

But when Jisung tries to get up, go over there, because he thinks that he should pray, there’s hands on him, pulling him back to the ground by his jumper, rubbing his back, shushshushshush- ing him over and over again. He doesn’t like it, tries to get up and get away, but he can’t because there’s someone holding him down, their hand in the middle of his chest, catching both of his wrists and keeping them there so he can’t move, another person fixing the headphones around his ears, so the heat beat starts up again. 

When he tries to call out - Chan? Jagi? - there’s a hand in his hair, a voice in his ear that says sleep in that way that Jisung can’t avoid. 

Command is weird. 

Jisung has all the fucking words in the world to describe it and the best he can come up with is weird. It’s just weird. When Chan uses it, the words just sit in his mind, like a blanket over everything, soft and thick and heavy, invading every space, every thought, every single impulse of his suppressed down and down and down, until all he can do is what Chan has Commanded. Chan’s Command comes in many varieties, and Jisung has experienced almost all of them, but this one is familiar to him. He thinks of it like dripping honey, spreading out to fill all the cracks in his mind, sweet and thick and all consuming. 

It pulls him to sleep, drawing him down into the thick warm morass and Jisung loves Chan for giving that gift to him. He knows that jagi stays with him. He knows the feeling of Minho’s hand on his back, soothing him back down to sleep, the way that Minho never stops with that noise. He’s hardwired to sleep to that sound, too, his entire body knowing exactly what it means. 

Over the other side of the room, the prayer circle finishes, Mr Seo touching the shoulder of all the people who joined him, a way to pass along strength and respect, and Jisung irrationally - strangely - wishes that was him, too. 

Sliding back to sleep puts Jisung in the same place as before - the darkness under the table, the beating heart in his ears, the memories of Felix cascading through him like a fire burns through a forest. Jisung dreams of Mother Mary, of files and stacks of papers, of gavels and guns, and he doesn’t know why. His body burns and freezes and everything hurts and he wants to be free at the same time he feels lost without his chains. They’ve been with him for so long, he forgets how to exist without them, sometimes. 

He doesn’t know how long he sleeps, but it’s a long time. 

When he stirs, he’s not sure exactly where he is for a moment, confused by the wood floor instead of tile, and the wooden walls. It’s only when he rolls onto his back that he figures it out. He must have slept hard, falling into the kind of fitful sleep that he hates. It’s never truly restful. His body feels small and tight, as he’s all curled up. His head is resting on someone’s hoodie - he thinks it might be Seungmin’s - and covered still with Chan’s hoodie, the soft material of the hoodie tucked around his shoulders. 

His ears are warm and muffled - the headphones are still on, the heartbeat still going. There’s whispered talking going on that he can barely hear over the noise cancelling, and over the other side, Jisung can see a pair of slightly worn out brogues, the laces long and one of them almost frayed. The lawyer for the Lees then. Won-Dumb-Dumb. Jisung can’t remember his name properly but he’s all alone over there, his legs crossed under the table. There’s a wrapper on the floor next to him and a lighter as well, so the man is a pig as well as an idiot. Just goes to show just how quality the Lees hiring process was, Jisung supposes. 

Oh, he’s back and he’s starting to get mad. 

Jisung gets like this sometimes, where his feelings sit just below a thick layer of hazy, muddled calm, and he knows that he’s brewing that anger now, making it hot and strong, but he can’t help it. 

He’s so fucking tired of all the bullshit. He doesn’t get why the judges are even debating this - the baby is not a fucking toy that has a disputed owner. The Lees will kill him. The pack will not. It doesn't take a genius to make that connection and figure out the right course of action. Jisung could tell them for fucking free: G ive the pack their baby. They’ve had him for three years. He’s theirs. It’s school yard logic - at least what Jisung can remember because it’s been about eleven years since he went to a real school - but finders keepers always seemed like a fine way to deal with issues of ownership and if the Lees want a fucking pissing match, they will lose.

Jisung flexes his fingers back and forth, still lying on his back under the table and he wonders how long it’ll be before someone figures out he’s awake and he’s not doing so well. 

He turns his head to the side, debating whether to get up yet or whether to try to sleep but before he can make a move in either direction, two pairs of Oxfords appear beside him. One pair are smart black brogues, with thick laces, the soles painted well. They’re well made shoes - the stitching on the welt is perfect even though he knows that it has to be handmade. (So sue him, he binged for three months back in 2019 on how to make shoes on YouTube when he couldn’t sleep. He watched hundreds of videos and now he knows what leather painting is in cobblers terms and the difference between a brogue and an Oxford and really, they’re just two variations of the same thing oh, and now he’s obsessed with shoes again. God fuck it.) The other pair of shoes is a deep navy, with thinner laces, to match the dark blue suit with just a faint pinstripe in it. 

Mr Seo has always been a fan of pinstripes. 

So has Jisung.

“The judges are coming back out.” He hears Mr Seo talking to Myung-Ki, his face tight and worried. 

“A verdict? Already? It’s barely been three hours.” Myung-Ki sounds confused. 

“No verdict, apparently. They’ve asked for more files, a phone, and apparently, Judge Yi has been and got a laptop from her own office which… is curious. They’re definitely still processing through our documents. But… The courtroom officer said they have some questions.” 

“That’s… unusual. If they have questions, they usually send them out on a note and usually it’s just clarifying technical information.” Myung-Ki’s reaction is… not good. He doesn’t sound happy with the change in circumstances. “Why do they still want to ask more questions even after everything we’ve given them?”

Mr Seo leans in closer, probably to keep this private but Jisung is under the table and even though they’re lawyers, both Mr Seo and Myung-Ki are just like all other fucking alphas in the world - out of sight, out of mind when it comes to fulls like Jisung. “I think this means there’s some kind of… deadlock. Two sides, holding firm and needing to sway the third one. Which means we’re in with a chance.” 

“It depends who’s deadlocked though.” Myung-Ki whispers back. “If we’re trying to persuade Gye, I don’t know what else we can do. He’s really been quite receptive to the Lees, pushing for their First Prime perspective.” 

“We’ll… let’s see.” Mr Seo makes a little calming gesture, one that Jisung knows from his own court cases. “It might not be him. We might be persuading Min.” 

“You think we’ve got Yi?”

“I think she’s pretty safe.” Mr Seo sighs. “If we can hold her, we have a fighting chance. Gye… he was always going to be an issue for Chan and his pack. He’s hardcore fundamentalist alpha. I don’t think we ever stood a chance with him and he knows it.” 

“But Min is open to our case?”

“She’s conservative and a hard liner. Her record is very… strong when it comes to upholding tradition. But she’s quite… she’s fond of the little ones. If we can get her to see that Felix is one of those… then maybe it’ll help.” 

“Do you think she will see what we’re proposing?” 

“I think she’s the one we have the most chance of breaking to our side. Or at least, going part of the way. Min has always been like that - holding the line but open to… some negotiation.” 

Myung-Ki sighs again. His stance is tired and Jisung gets it. Oh, fuck, does he get it. 

But Jisung can’t listen anymore. Chan’s coming over, his trainers black and out of place next to the lawyerly shoes, and the conversation goes cold. Jisung knew it would - the lawyers were whispering for a reason - and for some reason, they don’t want the pack to know about the deadlock. 

Too bad. 

Jisung is reminded of Minho’s obahna’s favourite saying - little pitchers have big handles - and he’s never really denied it. Neither has Minho. They both have a habit of sticking their noses into places it doesn’t belong. He doesn’t know how useful this information will be but it’s got to be better than nothing. He files it away in his mind, and tries to focus on ignoring the ache in his belly, in his back. 

But Chan is reaching for him, kneeling to see under the table, with red and gold eyes and he looks so soft, so tired too that Jisung wants to be good for him. He knows this is taking it’s toll on Chan, too. 

“Hey, babe,” he says, and Jisung stretches out a hand for his Prime to take. He just wants to be quiet and peaceful, somewhere far from here. Chan knows that. He draws Jisung close, pulling him out from under the table, until Jisung is standing facing him. “How are you feeling?” 

Jisung doesn’t answer. He just looks up at Chan, lets himself blue up, and it’s long and slow. He knows that Chan can read that, like a book, and he can’t figure out the words to say it. 

“Okay. You still at a four?” Four isn’t… the best for him. Chan prefers for him to go no lower than a six, and it’s more usual for him to sit at about a seven - not necessarily content but capable of emotional regulation, confident in his self control, and well enough to be left without an alpha within arms reach. 

Below a six, and he needs someone to be right there with him, never leaving him unattended, because it’s too easy for him to fly off the handle. Anything lower than a three and he ends up back in some form of restraints. Based on the fact that he’s currently wearing chains, Chan is probably taking no chances and is correctly interpreting the fact that Jisung doesn't know shit about his own brain at the moment to mean maybe they go with the lowest possible rating he could give. 

Chan tries to guide him back to the bench seats, behind the wall, to give him some distance from the judges. Maybe he’s trying to prevent another case of Jisung standing on tables and yelling at authority figures or whatever but Jisung’s not doing that. He’s going to sit right here, on the table, in the middle of all the fucking paperwork and they can fucking suck it. 

Oh, there’s the anger. No, turns out it hasn’t gone away. It’s just... very deep down inside. 

Chan leaves him on the table. It’s not going to hurt anyone - everybody’s seen him misbehaving and being fucking rude already so this can’t be any worse than that. Jisung sits on the hard wooden top, his boot laces untying themselves by the second, and he doesn’t fucking care anymore. He doesn’t stand up when they ask for everybody to rise and he doesn’t sit properly, knees together, and demure like a good little full. He’s so fucking tired, so fucking done with all of this pagentry and showmanship and authoritarian rule. 

On second thought, the anger might actually not be as deep as he thought it was. 

He knows the fact that he doesn’t stand and sit and do all the bowing thing or whatever, it gets to the middle judge. He’s been pissy all night long, a lot of it focused at Jisung in particular, and he’s not entirely sure why. 

Probably, it’s a respect thing. 

A lot of alphas have a hard on for respect, insisting that they get what they think is their due long before they’ll even have a crumb of respect for people like Jisung. Fulls, he corrects himself. Before they’ll even have a crumb of respect for fulls like Jisung. Whatever it is that has got Gye’s bollocks in a twist, he’s not gotten over it since the judges left the room. If anything, he’s come back with more piss and vinegar, his facial expression pinched and unhappy. Well, if Mr Seo is right, Jisung can guess which judge is voting for the Lees to get Felix.

Not exactly fucking rocket science. 

The lawyers gather their papers, laying their folders around Jisung, and on the other side, Won-Numb-Nuts shovels the rest of his handful of sunflower seeds into his pocket (which is disgusting ), brushing the shells onto the floor from his trousers (also disgusting). 

Jisung sees Judge Min’s facial expression out of the corner of his eye, and she’s not approving of it, either. 

Once everybody is all present and correct (Jisung excluded), Gye bangs his gavel, calling the court to session. Jisung sits on the table, poor posture making his back ache but he refuses to give them the satisfaction. His cuffs are visible - Chan has pushed back his sleeves to make sure that the judges can see it and why, Jisung isn’t sure but it’s probably some bullshit alpha game. 

“Now, we appreciate that you were expecting a verdict,” Judge Gye says, holding onto his gavel. “We have been discussing at length all the evidence put to us.”

“Mr Park,” Judge Yi looks down at the man on the other side of the room, and Jisung wonders if she’ll throw something at him for being an idiot. He can dream. “We feel your case is quite complete. Doctor Goodman was quite amenable to answering questions and your paperwork is filed appropriately. Do you have anything you wish to add for Mr and Mrs Lee?”

“Only that my clients have this young bet - person’s interests at heart.” That’s a bad slip up for him, calling Felix a beta again. The judges didn’t like that before. “They want the best for him to reach the best potential he can with whatever condition his body is in.” 

“And your clients are confident that this is the best path for this little one?” Judge Min is making notes, diligently but Jisung watches the way that Mr Seo tilts his head at that. Little one. Interesting… 

“Of course, your honour. It is the only path. Mr and Mrs Lee were clear - the only way forward is to be righteous in how they handle things, to make sure that they adhere to the true path which he was supposed to be on.”

Jisung feels… that language is familiar. And weird. The judges look at each other, and the lawyers do, too. Something about that language has set everybody on edge, not just Jisung. Maybe that was a mistake, too, one that the Lees didn’t intend to make. 

“I see.” Judge Min turns the page and continues to write. “And his parents are aware of just how sick he is?” 

“Of course.” 

“And they still want to push through with these surgeries?”

“It is a risk. But Mr Bang has caused more problems for Mr and Mrs Lee, driving back the date that he can be airlifted out of Korea for the sake of filing this frivolous counterclaim of alphaship. It is only because of Mr Bang that we have such a dangerous situation on our hands.” Fuckface is pompous, pointing his finger at Chan specifically, avoiding any of the lawyers or Mr Seo. 

Because he’s afraid of Mr Seo, Jisung knows that much. He’s intimidated by Changbin’s father. Maybe he knows that they’re all better lawyers than he is. Wouldn’t be hard - Jisung is fairly sure even he could be a better lawyer than this twat but he doesn’t want to be one. Too much playing nice with people who he’d like to bite. 

“Thank you, Mr Park.” Gye nods his head. “Your case is… it is a radical one but with strong foundations. We appreciate the time and effort put into it.” 

“Thank you, Judge Gye,” Won-Asshat is a fool and Jisung hopes that he falls off a fucking cliff. He can take Gye with him. 

But it seems the Lees are done - the questions for them weren’t really questions at all, and Jisung knows that if the Lees have basically nothing to answer…. It’s the Bang side that the judges want to drill into more and that unnerves him. 

“And now, we come to you, Mr Bang.” Judge Gye folds his hands in front of him. Jisung watches him look at all of them, in their lack of suits, the way that Chan is standing in front of the pack to defend and protect them all, and the way that Jisung sits, at the back of the pack, cuffed and on the table. He meets Gye’s eyes without fear. 

Let the fucker look at Jisung’s blue eyes all he wants. 

But it’s not Gye who continues.

“There are… some questions that we have for you and for your pack.” The youngest judge, Yi, says, and she runs her hands through her hair, allowing the gold ribbon on her collar to be seen once more. It’s a vulnerable position to be in, neck bared to a hostile room, and Jisung wonders if she’s aware of it. “It is not to say that we will award Felix to you. It is just to help us to understand your position a little better so we may take that into account when we make our final ruling.” Jisung sees the spot of ink on the white strip in her robe, a mark from where she must have been writing furiously. 

“Of course, Your Honour.” Myung-Ki holds onto Chan’s shoulder, a reassuring gesture that Chan so clearly needs. 

“Judge Min, please.” Yi cedes her speaking role and Jisung wonders how the authority plays out behind the scenes. Yi is a decade younger than Min but… something about Yi is strong where Min keeps disappearing. Interesting. 

But Min takes up the pen and the file that Yi hands her. “Now. We shall begin with the alphas in your pack that are already trained. I believe there are two of you so… let us begin with Seo Changbin. Please come forward.” Judge Min looks up and down at all of the pack, her pen pointing at them all. 

“That would be me, Your Honour.” Changbin steps forward, hands folded in the small of his back. He’s remarkably composed. “Good evening.” 

“...My, you do look like your father.” She looks back and forth between Changbin and Mr Seo. “That’s - that’s remarkable.” She pulls her glasses down. She probably hadn’t noticed before, what with Han standing on the table and all, but Mr Seo and his son really are very… very similar.
“Like two peas in a pod, are they not?” Judge Gye says. “Are you just as loud as your father is when he is righteously arguing?”

“Yes.” It’s not Changbin who is answering but every other member of the pack, because Changbin is loud and he is very unwilling to compromise sometimes. 

“I am sure that is interesting.” Judge Gye laughs as well, and the flip in mood is… bizarre. Jisung can’t keep up with it. “Your father has raised you well.” 

“So has Chan.” It’s a small correction but one that makes the judges all tilt their heads. Jisung doesn’t. He knows what Changbin means. 

“So let us move on. Mr Seo, you are the Secondary Handler to Han Jisung, are you not?”

“I am.” 

“And how long have you been qualified for that?” Judge Min has a file open in front of her, her pen now diligently writing notes. 

“I qualified in 2017. I was eighteen years old.” 

“So you haven’t been doing it for very long.” Jisung feels like two and a half years isn’t that bad but it’s also not long when he thinks about how long these old people have been doing their work. They’ve been working in the courts longer than he’s been down as a trainee, and Judge Gye has been around for three times his age or more. 

“I think you’ll find being a handler for someone like Jisungie, it tends to teach you a lot and very quickly.” Changbin doesn’t flinch from her questions. 

“But he is also a high needs full, is he not?” 

“Yes. He’s a vulnerable full omega with complex needs. He’s also categorised with a lot of additional designations that make him especially difficult to handle. I know his history.” Changbin does know - he’s been there for almost as long as Chan. “He needs a lot of support. I’ve been helping with that for a long time.” 

“And you think you could handle another one?” 

“I do.” 

“We do not.” That’s a jarring, horrible thing to say, and Jisung feels it echoing in his ears. The wind has been sucker punched out of him.

What the fuck? 

Why? 

“Y-Your Honour?” Myung-Ki is thrown, too, and Jisung feels the panic from before kicking in again, flooding his system with anxiety and adrenaline. His hands are shaking. 

Is this their entire case gone down the drain? 

“Indeed, Your Honour!” Won-Fuck-Face has something to say and Jisung wants to throw something at him. He has a glass next to him. It would hurt and he’d deserve it. 

Unfortunately, his Prime is always three steps ahead of him. Chan slides the glass away and his hand on the back of JIsung’s neck is heavy. 

“Yes - these are young alphas! They are not in their prime of life! They do not have the ability to handle another person in their pack who needs a little extra help-”

“Mr Park, that is enough!” Judge Min looks motherly and quiet but her voice is loud and Won Fuck Face shuts up. “That is not necessary.” 

“I strongly disagree!” 

“And your opinion is noted. We will move on.” She bangs her gavel and the idiot subsides. 

“Thank you, Your Honour.” Myung-Ki looks like he’s still about to pass out but he’s holding up a lot better than the pack. “How - what do we do to assuage that feeling of yours, that Mr Bang and Mr Seo can’t hold two full omegas, Your Honour?”

“We have some concerns about the pack’s ability to deal with both if they are both in a crisis together. We feel it is likely - highly likely - that at some point, they will both be very distressed, upset, perhaps at risk of absconding or fighting. Do you agree that this is, in fact, something that could happen?”

“Of course.” Changbin’s scent is warm and deep, just like his father’s, and Jisung wants to reach out for him, to be close to that because he knows this is hard for his Second, too. To be told you’re not good enough is something that Jisung is used to but he knows that others don’t have that experience often. Not like this. 

“You have the basic qualifications.” Judge Min holds up a handful of papers. “You are certified in restraints, in diet, exercise, intimacy…” She goes through the certificates, calling out each qualification as she does so. “But you have never been certified to deal with two at once.” 

“I can be certified. I’m willing to go back to the Bureau of Harmonious Pack Life, do the next stage of training. It’ll take some time but there is an accelerated course. It’s in our petition.” 

“Is there a reason you didn’t have it before?”

“Minho-hyung doesn’t need that level of support. He’s… he doesn’t need me to bring him down or put him in cuffs or anything.” 

“From speaking to Minho-ssi’s Omega Officer, it seems that they agree with you. Officer Moon says that Minho-ssi is an uncommonly forthright full omega according to them, who is more than capable of self regulating their emotional state. ” She’s reading off her notes again. “Would you agree?” 

“Very much so.” Changbin nods to where Minho is standing beside the table, one hand near to Jisung - not on him, he’s not reached that point yet - but near him. “He… we talk and discuss and he and I do have a relationship as First Omega and Pack Second, but we don’t need… we don’t need to do what Jisung requires.” 

“Minho-ssi’s Omega Officer seemed to be of the opinion that he might do it to you instead.” Judge Min is absolutely toying with Changbin now, and it’s such a whiplash thing that Jisung doesn’t know how to react. 

Changbin does, though. He’s always been better at rolling with the punches than Jisung. “I’ll say nothing on that subject, Your Honour. Please, allow me some dignity.” 

“Of course, Mr Seo.” She smiles and Jisung doesn’t get it. What’s fucking new tonight, though? “But you never felt the need in case your Prime wished to add another to your pack?”

“We knew who we wanted in the pack.” A shrug, a nod to the pile of folders on the edge of the judge’s desk. “It’s always been Felix. Always. And at the time, he wasn’t known to be full. I know Chan-hyung has been certified for two - he had to be in order to take on Minho-hyung but at the time, I didn’t need it. It wasn’t logical to apply for it.” 

“And you are a logical person?”

“I prefer to act in a way that is rational. I don’t do things just because if that’s what you’re asking.” 

“Interesting.” Judge Gye says that, and with the way that everybody turns to look at him, it’s pretty clear he didn’t expect to be overheard. “I - I apologise, Judge Min. Please, continue.” 

“Certification for two full omegas is something that you will need anyway. If you are willing to go, that is a little bit towards what we were concerned about.” Judge Yi looks over at the other judges, as if she’s trying to see if the needle has moved for them. 

Jisung doesn’t think it has. 

“Here is our concern. It can and does take both of you to bring down this little full,” Judge Min says, pointing at Jisung with her pen. “And if you are both occupied with him, what happens to young Felix if he is also in need? You two are the only ones in your pack who have any certifications and you can’t be in two places at once.” 

“I -”

“There are only two of you and this little full here has a history of violence that is centimetres thick at this point.” 

“I understand.” Changbin’s scent is still steady and Jisung truly envies that self control. 

“You cannot control one dog. What makes you think you can take on another one?” Won-Tosspot in the corner probably didn’t expect his comment to fall into the lull between Changbin’s words and the judge turning the page on her notes but it was loud in the quiet of the court room. 

“The fuck did you say?” Jisung is pissed. No fuzzy haze now, just pure anger, hot and fresh in his veins. He’d throw another glass but Chan’s removed it from his reach and he’s just that little bit too far away from one of the lawyer’s mobile phones on the edge of the table. 

But Judge Min is there before he can even say another word. “Mr Park, that is not appropriate for the court room!” 

Won-Mega-Dick over the way freezes in place, as if he’s been caught with his trousers down. 

“I - Your Honour -”

“ That is never appropriate!” It’s not Command but that’s the most impressive anybody’s been all night and Jisung can say that with authority, having gone up against Chan, Mr Seo, and Judge Gye in the last twelve hours. “How dare you be so rude in my courtroom!” 

Jisung didn’t do any research on the judges - he wasn’t allowed to be involved as jagi wanted him to just take yet another nap (because when dealing a fractious and upset full, jagi resorts to treating them like they’re four and a nap will solve everything. Jisung has first hand experience in this). But he does remember something about Min being the biggest stickler for courtroom etiquette and rules. He’s been breaking them all fucking evening but apparently, him doing it isn’t as serious as an alpha being a fuckwit and just letting his mouth run. 

“I -” 

“I remind you that you are an officer of this court. You are expected to uphold the highest levels of decorum and self control and not succumb to insults! ” 

“I - he didn’t!” He’s pointing right at Jisung who raises his middle finger in return. He’ll be good and quiet but he’s not letting that slide. 

Disrespectful piece of shit. 

“He is not an officer of the court, Mr Park! He is a full omega, under a great deal of stress at this time with documented issues with self control around authority figures, and a long history of interventions! His reaction is entirely expected and accounted for!” Judge Min has a little red in her cheeks. Jisung still can’t get any scent from her - he thinks she’s probably wearing suppression patches - but man, she’s pissed. 

Chan’s hand fits around Jisung’s fist, pushing away his middle finger. It was up for long enough for everybody to see it, though, so Jisung isn’t going to argue. 

But Judge Min is still going. “You, on the other hand, Mr Park, are an officer of the court, you are supposed to have self control, and you are allegedly an adult.” The allegedly is doing a lot of work there. “Your reaction is deeply concerning for your professionalism and ability to advocate for your clients in a reasonable and respectable manner.”

Oh, shit, Judge Min is not having any of Won-Pissy-Piss’s bullshit. 

Good. 

She points her gavel at him - the first time anybody has done so at an alpha - and Jisung thinks that the Lees might have just made another fatal error in their plan. Judge Min isn’t finished though. “This court will not tolerate such disrespect and incivility from an alpha, never mind an officer of the court. Do you need a recess to find your self-control?”

“No, Your Honour.” Won-Human Garbage’s face still looks tempting for Jisung to throw a glass at it but he is good and he doesn’t. The look of wounded pride and shame on his face is enough for Jisung. “I’ll - I’ll respect the court’s decorum.” 

“If you have another outburst like that, this court will put sanctions on you.” Judge Min is having none of the bullshit the Lees side are putting out right now. “And you will not like them.” 

“Yes, Your Honour. I’ll remain professional.” 

“See that you do.”

Jisung looks at Myung-Ki and Mr Seo, the way they are both sharing a look that says mostly fuck him and his bullshit but it’s hidden from the idiot over the other side and that’s the difference. Quiet eye rolls versus stupidity in the face of people who are much more powerful than anybody else in the room. 

If Jisung has learned anything in his years of fighting, it’s always pick your target. Won-Arsehole hasn’t learned that yet.

The courtroom takes a moment to settle, the only sound rustling papers, and cloth, Judge Min placing her gavel back on the table and patting her hair to make sure it’s stayed in place. She’s still furious but her self control allows her to put that aside. Something about that insult, calling he and Felix dogs, has absolutely pissed her the fuck off. Why, Jisung doesn’t understand, but he can guess. 

Maybe calling fulls dogs doesn’t didn’t sit well with her. 

Only when Judge Min nods does the court pick up again. 

“Thank you. Where were we?” Judge Gye opens his folder again. “Judge Min, if you would be so kind?” 

“Indeed, Your Honour.” The nod of deference to the most senior judge is interesting to see. Both Min and Gye are Primes, and are both high ranking but even so… There’s clearly a little edge for Gye but he’s respectful in returning the gesture, too. Jisung wonders how long they’ve worked together to be that kind of familiar with each other.

 "Returning to our discussion, Mr Seo, Mr Bang… What do we do?” Judge Min speaks again. “If you, young Mr Seo, are occupied with young Felix, and your little full here loses his temper or needs to be restrained. It can sometimes take two of you to bring him to his knees, can it not?”

“Yes.” Changbin nods. “It can.” 

“So then we have a safety concern because nobody would be taking over for you with Felix. Correct?”

“I see your point.” Changbin tilts his head. He’s thinking hard, on the fly, and Jisung wonders if he’ll have an answer that the judges will tolerate. The lawyers are looking at each other, their faces nervous because they probably predicted this question and, based on the looks on their faces, they really don’t have a decent answer to it. Jisung feels anxiety begin to curl in his belly, raw and sore, like an open wound, and he doesn’t like it. Around him, Chan’s arms tighten, as if he can sense Jisung’s anxiety. 

But hope comes from an unexpected source. 

Behind Jisung, somewhere to his left, there’s the sound of papers rustling and then someone speaks. “What if there was a third one?” But it isn’t Changbin who asks that question. It’s not a lawyer or Mr Seo or even Chan who says it. “What if there was a third alpha who could help with Felix?”

No… No, it’s Hyunjin. He looks… shaky and nervous, his hands trembling as he holds them at his sides, but he’s stepping forward, deep into the well of the court to stand beside Changbin, to look up at the judges. This is the bravest he’s ever been. Hyunjin doesn’t like to jump first, doesn’t like to hold up and fight and it’s telling that now, he is trying so hard to overcome that nature. Jisung feels his heart go out to him. 

“What if there was a third alpha?” He asks again and he’s not willing to let this go. Hyunjin is holding the line for Felix. 

“And who would that be?” Judge Min rests her head on her hand, looking down at them. “Who among you would share that burden?” 

“Me.”

“You?” Won-Cunt laughs and for once, the judges don’t reprimand him. 

Jisung thinks that’s a mistake. Chan always says consistency is key - punish once and punish always for an offence. Then again, it was usually because Jisung was trying to bite that he got punished so… swings and roundabouts, he supposes. 

“You are not qualified.” Judge Min doesn’t even have to check her files. “You have never even attended a class beyond what was required to enter into your pack agreement, Mr Hwang.” That tells Jisung that they’ve looked - they know the pack’s rankings, their education, their qualifications. He doesn’t know if it’s good or bad that they’ve been doing their deep dive for hours and know all about them. 

“I could be. I can go to the classes, get certified just like Chan-hyung and Changbin-hyung. Felix - he won’t be coming out of hospital any time soon. We can afford the classes. I have the - the pack has the money to do it.” 

“How old are you?”

“I’ll be twenty in March.”

“You’re young…” Judge Gye waves Hyunjin off as if he doesn’t matter.

Jisung doesn’t buy it. The judge is still clearly listening hard, and something about this is making the judges listen. It’s too soon to say if it’s moving the needle but they didn’t expect for someone to step up for Felix. That much is clear to him.

“I’m older than Changbin was when he started to train.” Hyunjin is not giving up that easily. He’s nervous and his scent is struggling to stabilise but he’s not backing down. He meets the eyes of the Judges directly. It’s a change for him and Jisung knows that it’s taking everything in Hyunjin to do this. “I’m older than Chan was when he took on Jisung.” 

“And do you think you could do it?”

“I do.” There’s no second guessing there, no hedging his bets. “I want to do it.” 

“Why?” Judge Gye speaks up. “What’s in it for you?”

“He’s ours.” Hyunjin’s jaw is strong, and tight. He looks like the Prince even though he’s dressed in their old training gear. “He’s always been ours. ” 

“He will need a strong hand. Someone who won’t just give into him for sweets and late bedtimes and running amok in the streets.” Jisung rolls his eyes. Again with treating all fulls like children. Felix is the same age as him. Why are they so insistent on treating him like he’s five? 

“I can do it. I work with Minho-hyung to teach dance and to train the pack. I can lead. I’ve done it before.” JIsung watches as Changbin tilts his head in acknowledgement. 

It’s true. Hyunjin has trained the pack to dance and he can be a strict taskmaster, focused on the small details, the perfectionist in him making sure that everybody reaches their best potential. He even does it to Chan and Changbin - he’s used to taking control if it’s in an area he’s comfortable with. 

The judges are watching and their expressions are once again serious and dark. 

“And do you think you could train him? Do you think you could hold him down on his knees with just Command to keep him there? Could you put him in chains even if he begged you to let him go? Could you put his face against a wall when he is threatening violence or crying because he didn’t mean to hurt someone even if he did?” Judge Yi’s gaze is so direct and powerful that Jisung doesn’t know how the fuck Hyunjin is meeting it head on but he is. He’s not giving in to her. “Do you think you could still make him submit to you?” 

“If that’s what he needs.” Hyunjin's hands have stopped shaking, Jisung notices. He wonders if the judges have seen it, too. “I love him. I’ll protect him from himself and from everybody else, too.” That… is pure Alpha. Jisung hasn’t really seen this from Jinnie before. 

“Why didn’t you step up for the violent little full ?” Judge Gye points his gavel at Jisung. As much as the tone offends him, Jisung can’t be mad at it. It’s a fair question. Jisung has a reputation and has had it for years at this point. “He needed help, too. Why didn’t you decide to be a third rank alpha and live up to your expectations then?”

Why didn’t Hyunjin help him rather than spend months goading him into fights that only ever resulted in blood and tears for both of them? 

“Because we had too much… history.” Hyunjin rolls up his sleeve, shows the faint pink scar of Jisung’s fang that he put into Jinnie’s arm. “We were too close. Our age difference - I couldn’t be his hyung, and the fact that he didn’t see me that way. He wasn’t good with controlling his temper and I…. I fed into that. I was childish. Stupid. Unfair to someone I should have loved kindly, instead.”

That’s a huge dose of honesty from Hyunjin, his scent of a flower garden, roses and lavender opening in the air. He’s vulnerable - a flower garden is inherently delicate - but there’s strength in it, too. It’s deep and heavy, like a high ranking alpha’s should be, and Jisung wonders just when that happened. 

When did Hyunjin grow up so much?

“What made you stop?” Judge Min is writing again. “How did you resolve the differences between you?”

“Felix.” Hyunjin shrugs. “He came and… and me and Jisungie learned to be friends.” 

“He seems quite the peacemaker.” Judge Min turns to Gye and raises an eyebrow. That’s… different. Jisung doesn’t know what it means but maybe it’s something good? 

“He doesn’t like fighting. It made… He made all of us stop fighting.” 

“All of you?”

“We were teenagers. Stupid. Stressed.” Hyunjin’s eyes are just beginning to turn red, just a touch, as he turns to look at them all, gesturing to the entire pack. Jisung would bet actual money that Hyunjin doesn’t know that he’s redding up at all. The only guaranteed way to make Jinnie red up has always been getting him on the subject of Felix and it’s happening now. “We… we needed someone to help settle us.” 

“And he did that?” Judge Gye looks at them all. “It sounds very unstable and improper, Mr Hwang.” 

“We were under incredible stress, trying to figure out a debut. There was a lot going on - we were training sixteen or twenty hours a day at some points. We were all exhausted, hungry, and so tired. So so tired. Everything grated on us - touch, scent, even a look the wrong way.” Hyunjin’s hands are clenched into fists. He doesn’t like the insult. “It was a lot of work and we were young. We knew it would happen, took measures to help but it didn’t fix all of it. It’s impossible to not fight in situations like that.” 

“True.” Judge Yi nods her head and the other judges do, too. 

“But Felix… our Lix-ah, he came in, and he helped us to… to calm down. Right from the beginning, right from day one, he never liked a fight. Even if we couldn’t speak to him properly, he would hold our hands, stop us from fighting.” 

“Hold your hands?”

“Yeah. If he thought someone was fighting, he would hold the hands of whoever was involved, gather us close to him so he could be in the middle. Even when it was four or five of us going at it. He would come over to us, take our hands, tell us to calm down, calm down, in… bad Korean. He would look at each of us with big eyes… He would make us sit together with him, giving us a massage because he knew it made everything right. If we tried to talk, he’d say to us no talk because he couldn’t speak Korean properly and he didn’t want us to say things if he couldn’t understand when we were fighting.” Hyunjin laughs. “He… he did a lot for me and Hannie.” 

“And it worked?”

“Yes.” Han speaks for the first time in a long time, and his voice feels rough. He can taste the venom. “He didn’t understand a fucking thing about why we were fighting but… he didn’t like it. He would calm us down. And when we were… good together… he’d come over, cuddle us, tell us you’re so nice to each other. ” Actually, he would say good outlook nice people because holy fuck was his Korean bad at first but…. The point still stands. 

“And that worked?” Judge Gye is looking down and he no longer seems quite so... dismissive. 

“It did.” Chan presses a kiss to the side of Jisung’s head and then rubs Hyunjin’s shoulder. “We all needed someone like him to balance us out. He’s good at that.” 

“Even if he didn’t speak Korean?”

“He didn’t need to speak at all.” Jisung is not sure why it’s so important to tell the judges that but he wants it known. “He still managed to help us. He would sit there and look at us and it just… made fighting hard. It was easier to do what he wanted.” 

“Which was?” Yi is writing again. 

“To mend our relationships and work on them. Pack therapists, counsellors, my omega officer couldn’t get us to fucking kiss and make up…” 

“But he could.” 

“Yes.” Han answers Judge Yi. “He knew us. He knew how to be with us.”

“So Mr Hwang, you still think you could do this for the little one? Even though you have a record for shying away from being an alpha? You struggle to hold authority and you lack conviction sometimes?” Another sheaf of papers is held up, this time a bunch of photocopies and Jisung starts when he sees the one that says pack record: Hwang Hyunjin on the front in big letters. For some reason, Jisung didn’t realise that the judges have had those, too. He doesn't know why that surprises him - of course they would. 

There’s a moment of silence in the pack, looking at each other, but it’s not Hyunjin who answers Yi. “Jinnie and Yongbokkie are… close.” Minho is picking his words carefully. “They trust each other a lot. If I had to pick someone to be his handler, I think Hyunjin is the best option.” 

“Why?”

“They respond well to each other.” Minho holds his hands together, calm and steady. “Jinnie has… some issues with his alpha side, that’s true, but Yongbokkie brings out Jinnie’s alpha in the best way possible.”

“How so?”

“Jinnie’s alpha is most comfortable with Yongbokkie. He… feels more stable around him, and he’s always been able to use his authority better with Yongbokkie than with Jisung-ah. There was no history of violence between them at all. Yongbokkie is… He responds to alpha authority well. He is very eager to please. He… he minds Jinnie.” Minho nods towards Chan. “Not like he minds Chan-hyung… but it’s there. He has more respect for Jinnie than Jisungie ever did.” 

“Do you think you could guide him? He’s the same age as the little full over there.” Soon, Jisung is going to rip that gavel out of Gye’s hand and shove it down his throat sideways. Everybody else gets a fucking hand or a pen. Why is he the only one getting the stupid gavel? “Do you think he would obey you?”

“Yes.” Hyunjin doesn’t hesitate, not for one fucking second and Jisung is distracted from his dreams of making Gye eat his gavel. “I know I can.” 

Oh, that’s different. Jisung (and most of the pack) has always known about Hyunjin’s…. Not so secret wish to be hyung to Felix. The causal slips here and there, the way Jinnie’s alpha only gets comfortable around Felix… the way that Felix does respond to him more like Jeongin than like Han… Perhaps Hyunjin will finally get his wish. 

“And how is that?” Won-Twunt speaks up again. “An alpha who doesn’t know how to handle himself with a vulnerable young full omega? How’s that going to work out?”

“I’m capable.” Hyunjin’s eyes surge red as he glares at Won-Prick. “I’m third rank.” 

“You’re a child. ” 

“And?” It would be so easy to get into a shouting match, Jisung knows, by just taking the idiot’s bait but Hyunjin, for once, is smarter than that and rises above it. 

“Mr Park is correct. You are young.” Judge Yi is giving the lawyer for the other side a considering look and Jisung doesn’t like it.

“So was Chan when he took me on.” Jisung pulls his knees up, because he just feels… tired and vulnerable. He knows the others are all looking at him, but he doesn’t care. He just needs the warm arms around him and maybe a ten hour nap. “And that didn’t matter to us, either.” 

“You were in a different position.” 

“Still needed lawyers. Still needed a judge to give the okay for Chan to take me. Still got classified as vulnerable and all that shit.” Jisung shrugs. “Is it so different that there’s no similarities?” 

“That’s a very good point, little full. ” Judge Min looks down at him, her expression thoughtful. “You have been through the court system before.” 

“And paid the fucking price.” He holds up his cuffs, lets them see them in all their glory. “I’m special needs.” Jisung has spent a long time getting used to calling himself that. Chan doesn’t like it when he calls himself retard even though that’s what people use when they think he can’t hear. “So is our baby. Ain’t gonna to find anybody like either of us in ninety nine percent of cases.” 

“And do you think you could train up in time, Mr Hwang?” Min looks back to Hyunjin. 

“It takes three weeks to get the first stage of certificates. Felix isn’t coming home for a long long time…” Myung-Ki is reading something on a sheet of paper. “We could get Mr Hwang through the first stage of training before the little one comes home, get him at least trained on basic restraints, integration, all of that kind of thing. And he can continue to learn. There are a lot of courses he can take during any pack leave he’ll get and we will, of course, take any advice Your Honours can give us.”

“It takes years to be fully trained - even Mr Bang only had the first and second stage of qualifications when he bought Jisung home.” Mr Seo looks up at the judges as well. “Continuous development would, of course, be necessary, but if Mr Hwang was willing to do it… Jisung and Felix would both have a handler who only dealt with them, and Mr Bang is able to support whoever needs him most.” 

“Would you be willing to share your Prime like that? Or even in general?” Jisung watches Judge Yi who looks at him with golden eyes. God, she’s a good Prime if the gold is almost overtaking the red. 

“I have been for years. Me, jagi, and the baby.” He points to Minho and then to the paperwork around him, all scattered across the table. “We’ve always shared. I like sharing Chan.” 

“Yet you felt it was wrong that Alpha Moon Ji-Myu tried to shake hands with your Prime?” Judge Min holds up a sheet of paper, the red tag on the top of it a Aspect Three violation. “Back in 2018, just before you debuted. I’m sure you remember.” 

“I do.”

“So tell me about it.” She isn’t letting him get away with this. “An Aspect Three violation is one where you demonstrated violence against another person. It seems odd that you say he helps you behave when you still did things like this.”

I remember what happened. I also remember that she tried to kiss Chan-hyung after she shook his hand. That made a lot of difference to me. We were supposed to work on some music for the trainee program and she was going to do some vocals for us.” 

“And did she?” 

“No. It never got that far because she came to visit when she was in rut and then she tried to kiss my Prime in our studio.” Jisung is very clear on the missing aspect here that the judge conveniently left out. “That was fucking rude and she knew it. She did it deliberately.” 

“And you felt the need to drag her out of the room by her hair?” 

“Chan asked her to stop. The manager asked her to stop. And then I did.” Jisung shrugs. “And then she didn’t listen to all of us so I asked her again, in my own way, and funnily enough, she listened to me then.” 

“Do you think it was appropriate?” 

"I didn’t bite her, if that’s what you’re asking.” Jisung knows it’s not but he’s also not going to back down on this. 

A lot of alphas think that fulls should be quiet and stay out of their way. They think that if an alpha wants to make a move on another person, then a full should shut up and sit down because it is not their business to intervene. Fulls should expect that if they’re the victim of cheating, then it’s their fault for not being a good enough partner and it’s an opportunity for self reflection, not blame on the alpha who strayed, nor the one who pulled them away. 

Jisung disagrees. 

Chan used to have an open pack, allowing them to seek relationships outside of their members, if it was discussed and agreed on in the pack. They didn’t tell JYP about it - he does not like people dating and getting involved with each other, thinks it’s all too complicated and will damage their ability to work together. Chan disagreed. He ran his pack how he wanted to. There were… quiet bonds, relationships with people that Chan trusted and had vetted for the pack, the people who would keep their mouths shut when needed. 

After… After Woojin, he closed the pack. Their hearts couldn’t take any more. 

But even when it was open, there were other rules at play, around consent and permission from everybody and you know, not fucking disrespecting someone like Jisung by trying to make out with his Prime in front of him? That was never going to fly. 

“Do you agree with that assessment?” Judge Gye pulls his glasses down his nose as he looks at Chan.

“After the third time of asking someone to do something, it’s no longer a mistake, it’s a choice to act that way. There are rules in the training program about heats and ruts.” Chan is still holding onto Jisung and his scent is calm and deep. He’s not affected by mention of her and that is calming Jisung, too. 

“And what should she have done?”

“Gone home. She was staying with her parents. She should have gone back to them and waited out her rut. Coming into the office was against the rules. So was coming into my studio. ” 

“Yours?”

“Jisung slept there. It was a safe space for him. It was always included in every briefing for new trainees - both about going home when you are in rut or heat and not to come into my studio like that. Jisungie was vulnerable and the studio was his sanctuary away from managers and the expectations of the trainee program. It was well known. There was a sign on the door. She was older than both of us and she had been a trainee for a long time. She should never have come into work in that condition and she knew it.” 

“Why do you think she did it?”

“I have no idea. I just know that it was wrong to come to the office in rut, it was wrong to come to my studio when she was in rut, and it was especially stupid to try to kiss me under any circumstances. She knew Jisungie was mine, that our pack was not looking for new members, and we did not stray. We were taken, including me, in all aspects, so why she did that in front of him, only she knows. Same with the manager who escorted her up to the studio.” 

“What happened after that?”

“Jisung got some time out in our pack room. He had a right to not be insulted but hair pulling and violence wasn’t the way to do it. Miss Park got sent home. I think she left the training program after her rut ended.”

“And the manager?”

“Got fired.” Chan’s teeth are just a little longer, a little sharper at that. “If you can’t trust your managers, who can you trust?”

“What if the little one does that?” Gye is looking back at Jisung who, frankly, is over this conversation already. “What if he kisses your Prime when you’re there in the room with him?” 

“It’s cute when he kisses Chan.” He doesn’t get why everybody turns to stare at him with that. “He’s always done it. I like it. When he and Chan are together, they’re sweet.” 

“He… kisses your Prime. And you let him do that?”

“I don’t get mad when jagi kisses Chan either. I think it’s hot.” 

Mr Seo and Myung-Ki both turn away, the expression on their faces like they’re going to burst out laughing. Jisung doesn’t get why. He’s made no secret about it over the years - he thinks that it’s hot when Chan and Minho are together. He and Minho are synced up when it comes to their heats after so long living together - it helps Jisung to get through it seeing his jagi be treated so nicely by the rest of the pack and by Chan in particular. When he says as much, Ko-Woon hides his mouth and Tae-Hyun chokes on his water, but the pack don’t deny it. That means it’s true. Jisung knows how this fucking works. He needs to be honest and that means not hiding anything. Won-Crap-Sack over the other side of the aisle looks sour and unhappy but maybe it’s because the number of times he’s had sex in the last decade could be counted on one finger and that includes wanking in the office bathroom. 

Jisung knows men. He knows what kind of man Won-Fuck-Nut is. It’s written all over his face. 

Chan runs his hands through Jisung's hair, and he doesn't say anything. Therefore, Jisung knows it was the right thing to say. He's not going to second guess his Prime. On the other hand, Gye looks like someone slapped him with a fucking trout. Maybe someone should - it’s better than the pissy look he’s had all evening. 

“You… don’t have an issue with them kissing your Prime.” Yi is holding a pen but she’s not writing. "Or..." 

“Or anything else.” Jisung shrugs and Tae-Hyun dies a fucking death in the corner. “I’ve never had a problem with it.” 

“You, the full omega who took down half a unit of Omega Officers because you were denied the right to see your Prime during one of your lock downs… were perfectly fine with other people kissing someone you love and care about?” Yi looks down at him, eyebrow raised. 

“I’m okay with it happening with people who are inside the pack.” Jisung points at the folders for Felix and Minho for… well, Minho. “I like it when they’re with Chan. It’s cute when Felix does it and it’s hot when jagi does it.” 

“I… Well…” Nobody quite knows how to respond to that and Jisung doesn’t get it. Ask stupid questions, he’ll give them the answers they deserve. 

“You asked.” He shrugs. “I told you, I like Felix. I want him in this pack.” 

“He’ll have heats. He’ll want to have your Prime to himself then.” Judge Gye is throwing it back to him and Jisung is so tired of people trying to catch him out with sly questions. He’s not a fucking toddler. He knows how to handle shit. 

“And he does now.” Jisung feels the hand on the back of his neck tightening again. “They go off to Australia to visit his parents. They have schedules together. Chan takes him swimming or to a cafe or what the fuck ever. I don’t care. I love Felix. I love Chan. I love them both together.” 

“And if he got another handler?”

“We’ll get matching cuffs and collars and we can wear them together.” He’s being flippant and it’s very rude - Chan’s hand is tight now, a beginning of a True Hold and Jisung can’t find it in himself to fight it but his mouth is still smarter than it should be. “Everybody keeps fucking going on about how he’ll need time with your Prime, as if we’re children who can’t figure out how to share. Guess what? We’ve been sharing Chan for three years. If I had a problem with him and Chan, I had three years to deal with it.” 

“He’s a full now.” 

“He was always a full. ” Jisung can’t throw something - Chan has one hand looped around his upper arm to make sure of it, but he isn’t going to back down. “He was always a full.” 

“All of his papers said he was a beta.” Gye is staring him down and Jisung isn’t giving in. 

“And I called bullshit. I called bullshit from day one. ” 

“You knew? You didn’t just suspect something was wrong, you knew he was full?” Won-Douchebag doesn’t know when to stop. “You’re a liar as well as violent, little full and that’s a bad thing to be -”

“I have eyes. I don’t need a fucking degree to look at his teeth and see that he had fangs. ” Jisung’s own fangs are long and sharp as he bares them at the idiot who cowers in shock at them.

“Fangs?” Judge Yi flicks through the papers on her desk, looking for something. “You said he had fangs from the beginning?” 

“He always did.” Jisung doesn’t put his own away and he’s lisping just a little bit but he doesn’t care. “He always had them.”

“And that made him full for you?” 

“Of course he was full. It wasn’t just the fucking teeth that gave it away. It was everything.” 

“So why were his fangs important?”

“Because they were visible. People could see them. I could see them. I could touch them.” Jisung’s fangs are starting to draw the venom down again and the taste is pissing him off more than ever. “There was proof in his fucking mouth that he was like me. Everybody else was all he would know as if that meant shit. I knew. He was a baby. He was our baby and he was full and I knew that right from the beginning.” 

“Tell me, Jisung-ssi.” Judge Yi puts down her paperwork. Her entire posture says it all. She’s the first person who has called him by his name this entire time. Jisung looks up at her, at the way her body language is open and welcoming, entirely non-judgemental (which for a judge, is a weird contradiction), and she’s waiting for him to speak. “Tell me how you knew.”

“I -”

“You keep saying you knew. How did you know? What about him made him your baby?” The way she says your baby doesn’t feel insulting to Jisung (first time someone in power has been civil to him for a while). It sounds… like she understands it’s a special name - that it means something that Jisung thinks of Felix as our baby. 

“The first time I met him, in person, I knew. I knew what he was.” 

“How?” The other judges put down their files, too, and the lawyers are all looking at him. Jisung shifts, aware of his cuffs, of how Chan is holding him close, of how he is the only person sitting on the table, inappropriate and uncivil like he prefers to be. 

But they’re still looking at him. They’re still paying attention to him. 

So Jisung will speak. He’s got a lot of memories. He’s been holding onto these thoughts for a long time and it’s only in the last day that they all finally make sense, where his mind can finally put the last puzzle pieces into place. 

Han remembers what it was like, on that first day, the first time he got to see Felix in person. 

He’d seen him on videos before, both pre-recorded videos, uploaded to YouTube, and in SKYPE chats, the image pixelated and the colours a little flat, at strange times because Felix had school in Australia and Han had… Han things to do in Korea. Mostly sitting on the roof in the rain and waiting for Chan to come and find him to bring him food and tell him all the reasons why people were mad at him all over again. 

Back then, it had felt like a pipe dream, strange and impossible, bringing Felix eight and a half thousand kilometres to Seoul. It had taken so much work, so much time and effort, Han laboriously filling out paperwork for Chan as he was the one with free time while Chan earned the money to pay for all of it. He went through so many ink pens, so many practise forms until he figured out what the government was actually looking for. 

Why they couldn’t just write a plain version of the form, without all the government bullshit legalese, Jisung doesn’t know, but that was the reality they had to deal with. 

Mr Seo had helped in the evenings a few times, because the paperwork was just too complicated. Changbin had invited Jisung and Chan into his family’s fancy apartment, offering them dinner and time with his father, and Chan had accepted. They would eat European food, made by the live in help in the kitchen (Changbin swore them both to secrecy after that) and make polite conversation with each other while Jisung tried to not swear and offend Mrs Seo who was so kind to offer him chocolate cheesecake after dinner every time. 

He could be civil for cheesecake. 

He felt it was a fair trade. 

Mrs Seo would run her hands through his hair, tell him you’re welcome, dearest, and Jisung never wanted to disappoint someone who… who was so kind to him. She was strict - her table manner expectations were insane - but she was kind and understanding, and when Jisung turned up with cuffs on and a spit gag because he’d been so difficult at work, she didn’t bat an eyelid. 

She would pat the sofa when he came in, offering him the corner space on the oversized, overstuffed thing because she knew it made him feel safer to be in the corner. She would always offer him a new book that she had carefully picked out, just for him - because she knew he liked to read - and a blanket that was soft and always freshly washed so it never smelled like another alpha or the standard omega who kept their house. She never commented on the cuffs or anything else, never made a big deal out of it. When Jisung had questioned her on it, once (awkwardly because he’s never been good with mothers or people who had power over him), she looked at him with Changbin’s eyes and said, a good host understands her guests, no matter how they come. 

Changbin is a carbon copy of his father but his mother… She's there in him, too, and Jisung may have fallen just a little bit more in love with them both at that point. 

After the meal, when Mrs Seo and Changbin’s sister retired to the lounge, to play card games, Chan and Han would go upstairs, following Changbin and his dad. They would sit in Mr Seo’s office, Jisung sitting on the floor next to the coffee table and the alphas in the comfortable armchairs. Mr Seo had read the papers, helping Jisung to fill in each page as he leaned over him, telling him what to write in each box as he smoked a cigar and offered alcohol to Chan and Changbin. They would talk about alpha things while Jisung diligently copied down what he needed, and he wasn’t… excluded from the conversation but it was made very clear to him that it wasn’t his place to interrupt. 

That room was probably the one place in the world where Jisung kept to traditional ways and it… it worked for him. There were clear rules and expectations, and Chan would keep his jess on, so Jisung didn’t feel disconnected from his Prime for a moment. 

Chan would sample the whiskey, calling it deep and fiery or oaky or whatever whiskey was supposed to taste like (a burning tree, apparently), and Changbin would be busy cultivating a love of gin, talking about how smooth it was, but Jisung wasn’t allowed. Not even a sip. Mr Seo would put out a bottle of almond milk for him (from an expensive supermarket), and one of his cut crystal glasses, and it was… clear where JIsung stood (or sat) in that office. That was… tolerable. Mr Seo was and still is a traditionalist - he was never going to give a full alcohol and the milk was fine. 

Letting him into the alpha only space of Mr Seo’s office was already a step of progression for Mr Seo. Jisung accepted the compromise and Chan told him he was a good boy because he didn’t fight. 

Chan would fill in his paperwork with Jisung and Mr Seo’s help, package it up and stamp it all, take it to the offices to get more stamps on it, and put it in some weird cubby hole at the end of a long dark corridor to make sure it got to the right person. Then they would wait for approval, and so it would go on for weeks because the government was slow and the Lees were slower.

It had taken a lot of negotiating with Mr and Mrs Lee as they flip-flopped back and forth about whether Felix would cope with being away from home, whether they would be sure that Chan would keep him being raised in a right way, whether he would be good enough to be an idol because, they never failed to add, Felix was just a beta. They always wanted to make the point that their son would struggle in a world that was so intensely oriented around alphas and omegas because he was just a beta. 

Jisung never liked how specific that was - not simply a beta, but just a beta. The Lees always talked up how they didn’t see dynamic and they believed in fairness for all but it was fake. Jisung was sure of it. They never failed to highlight how Felix was just a beta - always with that slightly condescending tone - and how they had raised him to not play into dynamics as if that was somehow a good thing. They would brush off compliments about how they had raised him too, always downplaying his achievements. 

He was a good student. He got solid grades. Jisung had seen Felix’s transcripts from his school. He wasn’t deeply academic - he was no Seungmin - but he was good. He would have gotten into a good university if he’d been that way inclined. He was a great martial artist, on the competition circuit, an excellent swimmer who regularly went to meets, and he could dance like he was born to it. 

He wasn’t just anything. 

Jisung didn’t like their tone when they said all of that crap, but he had to swallow it down, be polite to them because they held the keys to Felix's freedom. He spent most of those long weeks encouraging Felix to have faith and stay the course, helping him to understand every set back and how they were going to beat it. When his paperwork got sent for extra review, that was fine, Jisung had reassured him for hours over the phone, telling him that Chan wasn’t going to give up on him. They were going to get him out of Australia - it was just taking time. 

They used to end every call with a promise, telling that he’d be safe with them because he begged them to tell him that. It was always the same, Chan and Han sitting side by side on a bunk or on the couch in the office or hell, in a car somewhere, on the way to some appointment, Felix alone in his bedroom or at the swimming pool toilets, and he would say please, please, tell me that this is going to work. Please tell me I’ll get there. Tell me I’ll be safe. 

They’d always say when you’re here, we’ll keep you safe. 

It was always the most important thing - Felix didn’t care about debuting or whatever in those conversations - the only thing he wanted was for someone to keep him safe. 

In hindsight, Han really should have recognised that Felix was a child asking strangers to make him safe. That… was strange at the time but now, it feels so unsettling to understand that line in a whole new context, with a lot more information than they had before. And he did use that word - safe - and Han couldn’t then and still can’t now place exactly what Felix meant but he knows it was not a good thing. 

But he and Chan had done it. They had brought Felix across the sea to Korea and they had done it because they loved him no matter what. They had paid a lot of money for Felix’s plane ticket, a one way trip to Korea. Chan had booked him the Australian meal for the flight, paid for him to be allowed to bring an overweight bag, and had even told him that it would be cold so he should pack a coat (he didn’t really understand this one, and that was why he made the mistake of turning up in a hoodie and freezing himself blue in the first five minutes of being in Korea). 

Jisung hadn’t really dared to believe it was real. 

But there he was. 

It had been such a relief to see Felix in person, on Korean soil, as if he had always belonged there. He was real, alive, in Chan’s studio, and Han could barely believe it. Han had closed the door behind him, stepping into the room quietly, holding his breath because it felt un real. 

He was so happy he could have cried. Their baby, the one they had tried so hard to get, had finally arrived. 

The reason why Felix was absolutely passed the fuck out could have been obvious. It was a long flight - through the night, going to a country and a culture he knew nothing about and had no experience in so everything was new and strange, and Chan had only been able to afford economy tickets so Felix was crammed into cattle class for hours. Felix had sent them a picture from his window seat, Australian land disappearing under the wing to reveal a dark expanse of nothing underneath him. He’d written afterwards, in English - see you in Seoul. Let’s make tomorrow better than today. It wasn’t a stupid quote. It wasn’t a dumb platitude to soften up Chan and Han. He meant with all of his heart and Jisung knew why. 

The day had started early for Felix: breakfast, a last check in with Chan, and, because life couldn’t be that easy, there had also been a blistering row with his parents. Mr and Mrs Lee had gone off the deep end, hurling accusations of betrayal, of being hurt by Felix’s choice to leave them, even threats of bringing in other people who would help steer Felix back onto the right path. Han had heard both Mr and Mrs Lee use that language before, and it always felt… wrong to him. It was weightier than it should have been, not an off the cuff remark but something that was real and taken very seriously. 

Felix had fled to his aunt’s house hours ahead of schedule, because she was the one who was supposed to take to the airport, and Chan had been on the phone to him, soothing him back down, telling him to wipe his tears because the plan was still on, he was still coming to Korea, Chan had made sure of it. 

Jisung hadn’t been able to stomach sitting there, in the studio, while Chan comforted Felix because it sounded too much like their relationship was being severed before it even began and he couldn’t take that. No, instead Han had watched his location tracker app for Felix, plugging his phone into the wall in the stairwell to the roof so he could sit in the cold concrete box, watching the neon lights flickering on a black sky, tinted with sickly orange, desperately monitoring for the smallest sign of movement from Felix. 

He was going to watch until he saw Felix move to the airport, until he saw him safely on his way and nothing was going to dissuade him from that. 

And he had prayed. 

Jisung’s rosary was something he didn’t often wear. It was something that he was always conflicted with, but he had taken it out that day, wrapped it around his fingers. He didn’t say the rosary, the words drying up in his mouth before he could say “ I believe in God, the Father almighty creator of heaven and earth…” 

He was Catholic on paper but Jisung had battled to find a label he could cope with. 

He had always had trouble with religion and praying and the rosary was a prime example. His grandparents said that fulls shouldn’t say the rosary because that was for alphas and omegas and betas only. Full omegas should content themselves with listening to others pray it for them, appealing to their fathers and husbands to speak to God on their behalf because God did not want to be troubled with the foolish words of a full. God needed to devote time and energy to those who were destined for great things, and that… that didn’t include Jisung. His grandmother told him that full omega wives have no need to pray. 

God will give you a husband. 

That is His greatest mercy to you.

 Asking for more is greed and greed is a sin. 

Those were the voices that Han heard in his head when he tried to pray the rosary, even years later. It didn’t matter how many times Father Tullio said that fulls should pray because God loved all of His children, whether or not they were full, Han couldn’t always shake that feeling of wrongness. He was neither housewife nor pregnant and that left him bereft in the eyes of God. 

Everything else he could find an argument to refute such bullshit. But not when it came back to the man upstairs. It’s taken a long time to figure out his relationship with God because it’s difficult and complicated and layered with so much of his past. Like everything else in Han’s fucking life, religion was and still is no different. 

But that day, he had leant on his faith, and chosen to give his devotion to Mary, Mother of God, and the kind of mother that all good people deserved. He had placed his hands together and he had prayed, like he should, saying Mary, most loving of mothers, asking her to intercede for Felix, to get him to Korea safely and quickly. She was a mother, just like Minho’s Mother Goddess, and he knew she wouldn’t let a child suffer. He asked her to bring Felix under her shadow, to protect him, to love him as fiercely as she had loved her own son because Felix’s own fucking mother didn’t. 

To this day, Han wonders just how she interceded. He doesn’t question if Mary did - he knows that she had stepped in for Felix as a fact because the proof is in Felix being in Korea. The proof that Mary was successful is the fact that for three years, Jisung has woken up to Felix in his life, just down the hall from his own nest or, more likely, in the nest and next to him. 

Mr and Mrs Lee never pulled their child back. That day was the last opportunity for the Lees to stop Felix on Australian soil, to keep their son far from Chan’s influence and protection. It was the last possible moment for them to retake control over their son. But they never did. Han never knew why and he still doesn’t even now. Maybe their phones all died. Maybe they got into a car wreck they never talked about ever again. Maybe they got scared by someone bigger, better, stronger than they were. 

Han doesn’t know, even now, years after the fact. Felix never mentioned asking them what happened and Han doesn’t pry when it comes to Felix’s parents. 

But that day, he had prayed for hours, cold and stiff in the darkness, waiting for the rising sun until Chan had bought him a cup of coffee, and sat with him shoulder to shoulder in the freezing concrete room at the top of the building. When he came into the room, Jisung’s Prime had been tired and sad, his face so full of pain that Han didn’t need to speak about it. He had just curled into his Channie’s side, sighed a big deep breath, and prayed a little more. Chan never stopped him from praying and maybe… maybe it was just enough.

When Felix had called, explaining the situation as he sobbed, Chan had comforted Felix in the airport bathroom, promising him that in Korea, things would be different, that there wouldn’t be any more fighting, that his parents wouldn’t be able to dictate everything anymore.

Chan would be leaving for the airport around midmorning so there had been hours yet to go. They’d come to the office in the middle of the night because neither of them could sleep and they may as well get some work done (Chan), and mindlessly destroy his shoes by scuffing them over the concrete as he watched his phone (Jisung). 

It hadn’t been the sweet, gentle send off that they all had wanted, at all. 

And Jisung had known that when Felix arrived, they would have to help him to figure himself out, maybe even heal because Jisung could draw a line between the Lees and their condescending attitude and the way Felix looked for someone to see him for him, like a road on a map. But he didn’t care. He had promised that Felix would be loved. 

And Han already did love him. 

Seeing him in person, on the sofa, on that day back in January of 2017, Jisung was sure that he loved Felix. His entire body just was shedding tension and fear like he’d never seen it before. He knew at that moment, it wasn’t fake, it wasn’t a pretend thing he was just trying to convince himself of because he needed to be better for his Prime. No. It was real. 

He loved him.

Seeing him wrapped in the blanket, the one that Chan had bought for him, just for Jisung to have in the studio, a blanket of his very own that nobody else was allowed to touch, it felt right. It felt good to see him covered in the sweet cover, the moon and stars rising and falling with the boy’s deep, even breaths. Jisung had seen the way his hair, messy and coppery brown, was getting too long, the golden cross earring curling on his cheek, and his freckles, so pretty and delicate. Jisung liked freckles. He thought they were sweet. 

He had stood there, in the entrance to the studio and he knew everything was okay now. He didn’t need to fight, he didn’t need to do anything about his feelings because they were all good feelings, safe feelings that didn’t need someone else to help him regulate through them. It was strange. Han had already agreed to not fight with this boy, taking a vow on his pack tag with Changbin as a witness (who, frankly, didn’t believe it), and now that the boy had finally arrived… He didn’t need the vow. It was weird to be so empty of hate, to see something that he knew he would normally be rioting over but it didn’t feel the same. He didn’t want to fight. He didn’t need to fight. Not with this boy and definitely not over something so stupid. 

Chan sat back on his chair, tilting it to make it comfortable. Why? Why is it okay for him to be here like this? Why is it okay for him to be touching something that’s yours. 

Han had looked at him. Why wouldn’t it be? 

Because it’s yours. Chan pointed to the blanket. He had a point. Han didn’t like people using his shit and touching his bedding was even worse. Han slept with that blanket. It touched his body. It was sacred. Nobody was allowed to touch it and everybody, from trainees to managers to JY-fucking-P himself, knew that. It was a big no-no. But this boy was just… wrapped in it, like he belonged, and there wasn’t the raging pain in Han’s teeth, the demand to push him out of the safe space Han had built to preserve his own self. 

Instead, he felt calm. Warm. At peace. He’s…. It’s real. The thing we said… He makes me calm. 

Chan had tilted his head back, looking at him all Prime-like, the kind of expression Jisung was getting used to seeing, still, years after the fact. Just him sleeping is enough to make you feel calm? He doesn’t have to speak or anything? 

Jisung had rolled his eyes. I don’t fucking know. Han didn’t know shit about what goes on inside his head, despite the therapy and the Omega Officers and all the other fuckery that he had to do every week (still doesn’t most of the time), but he couldn’t deny it. He felt at peace in a way that he couldn’t explain but he knew deep in his bones. But I feel it. 

It felt safe. He felt safe for the first time in years. His body…. It no longer had to fight back at a moment’s notice, brewing anxiety like he needed it to live, treating everything as a threat. 

Just him being there… 

It was enough. 

Jisung had prayed for this and… and maybe… maybe something had come true. 

Do you think he’s doing it deliberately? 

Unless he’s the fucking Sandman, I’m guessing no. Han was rude at the best of times but Chan didn’t bat an eyelid. It really took a lot to get under Chan’s skin in those days. It worked over the videos and shit. I guess it works in person, too. 

So he’s a beta who keeps you calm. It’s strange but if it works, we won’t question it.

He’s full. He said and Chan shrugged. I mean it. He has to be full. 

He says no. He says he’s a beta.

He’s fucking lying.

You will not tell him that. Chan’s voice shifted, becoming heavier and thicker in a way that Han knew all too well. It wasn’t Command but it was damn close and Chan was being serious if he was going that far. He didn’t like it. If he is full, we’ll figure it out soon enough. If he isn’t, you’ll just piss him off.

But he’s full. Han was so sure of it, so desperately, achingly sure that to doubt that Felix was full was to doubt whether Han was full. He knew he was so Felix must be full too. 

The logic was simple and undeniable. 

Jisung had known Felix’s gender dynamic from day one of seeing him. It was like being able to tell if someone had brown hair or blue eyes - it was that easy for him. He saw Felix being sweet and gentle, making cookies at home and icing them so prettily it looked like works of art on his YouTube video, so proud of what he had made. His dynamic was written into the way he deferred to his father when he walked into the room, the way that Felix had made something so nice for his pack because he wanted to treat them with his hard work. The earnestness in his eyes, the way he sought affection just like Han did from his pack, the way he smiled, it was all there. Han had always been able to read gender dynamics just as well as Chan, just as good as any alpha and when it comes to fulls, Han knew he could see it as easy as breathing. Fulls know each other even just by meeting eyes.

Han knew he wasn’t wrong. 

Everybody else said he was. 

Everybody else said that Han didn’t understand what he was talking about - that he should leave the business of gender dynamics up to people who understood the subject (Han knew they meant alphas because a knot suddenly meant they were all powerful and all knowing) and a lot of them said that Han should shut up about things he didn’t know about. They would mock him, tell him he was stupid because he didn’t finish school, because he wore chains to keep him under control, because he couldn’t get through a single training session without a meltdown. 

That one fucking hurt because he could. Jisung had been to plenty of classes while he was a trainee and he even liked some lessons and he liked some teachers. He just couldn’t hold it together for three hours if the teacher spent the entire time needling at him, calling him out on his body, on his lack of education, on the way that he was so shy that sometimes his words just fucked off in the middle of a conversation and wouldn’t come back for hours. 

Not everybody was like that. Some people were kinder in the way they dismissed Han’s feelings. 

Father Tullio had been like that with Han when he had his weekly meeting for his spiritual development. Thursdays evenings didn’t feel that spiritual but Chan made that rule and Chan said he had to go so Han didn’t have a lot of choice. Thursdays evenings were spent at the little Church in the middle of the poor side of Seoul and that was that. 

Jisung had sat there, high above the nave, his legs over the edge of the gallery because what was religion if it didn’t also involve a little bit of danger. It had been only a few days since Felix and Chan and Jisung started talking. Maybe a week, if he thought about it. Jisung needed this boy, needed him in a way he couldn’t articulate and only Chan seemed to understand the feverish urgency to have him and love him and keep him the way Jisung felt it. Father Tullio had sat next to him, holding Jisung’s hands because that was the only way he would be ministered to and he’d listened to Jisung ask the question that had haunted him ever since he first saw Felix’s little face on the screen of his phone. 

Can God make a mistake? 

He didn’t know what the answer would be to such a big, all encompassing question that really, was doubting all of Catholic dogma. But the reality - that Felix thought he was a beta and Jisung knew he was a full omega - was so loud and so inescapable and he didn’t know what to do with that information. Jisung was so confused, so daunted by the way he felt, he didn’t know what else to do but ask for God’s help. 

Father Tullio had put his hands on Jisung’s and said, God does not make errors. Sometimes, we can think things, we can even know them but God knows better. We must trust in that above all else. Not what we think we know but the only thing we can be sure of. He has a plan, always.

But God didn’t make a mistake. 

God made Felix. 

And Han knew that He made Felix as a full. 

He felt it so strongly, so deeply in his bones that he was so convinced of it. He would have been more open to someone teaching him the sky was green, not blue, before he would give up what he knew about Felix. Jisung didn’t get why he was so against considering he was wrong but it wasn’t going to happen. 

Father Tullio hadn’t pushed him when Han had resisted, when he had refused to accept the religious lesson wrapped in soft words. The good father had learned to not fight Han - it ended badly for everybody - and instead, he did the same thing that Chan did when Han got an idea in his head. 

If you believe that, then you feel strongly about it. Time will tell who is right; God loves all of his children, no matter what. And, as always, there was an undercurrent of I hope you know what you are doing.

Han… kind of did back in those days. Well, even now it’s still ‘mostly’ knowing what he’s doing that he’s got down pat. There are days when he’s so fucking confused that he just throws in the towel and goes back to bed, presses the proverbial reset button and hopes that tomorrow is better. 

Back then, he did that with fists and fighting. 

Father Tullio had sat with him for the rest of the hour, sipping his tea and encouraging Han to drink his own with just a look every now and again. It wasn’t… friendly per se, but it was gentle. It was civilised. It was the closest that Han had ever come to feeling like a real person for a long time. He hadn’t expected to find it in that place - The Marian Sanctuary of the Holy Blood. It was a little, out of the way church, attached to a nunnery where the residents worked with orphan children, the poor, and the addicted. 

His Omega Officer had told him that it was a place for lost souls. 

It was a place where Han felt close to God and far away from the need to fight and that was enough for him. They didn’t pray that day, after Jisung’s questions hadn’t been answered properly. Father Tullio hadn’t pushed him and he’d told Chan when they met up in the atrium that Jisung is feeling a lot today. He has some big questions and he is struggling to accept that God works in mysterious ways. 

In hindsight, it was a massive underestimation and Father Tullio had no idea but Jisung had just stayed quiet, pressing into Chan’s side as he was strapped up, a jess on and the cuffs too just because Jisung was in a weird mood and Chan never took chances with that. 

God works in mysterious ways was a weird way to defuse Jisung’s questions and also, it didn’t work. It never would - God was mysterious but He always made sense somehow. Jisung could always find the logic in His works but not with this. 

Not with the lies about Felix. 

Of course, Father Tullio wasn’t the only one. The managers told him he was wrong when Han first started making noises about bringing over this strange new boy, asking people if they had seen his audition tape, begging the managers in charge to help them to bring him over. Han didn’t beg for much - usually, it was people begging him to behave or to let go of me! Jisung occasionally listened. But him begging for them to let him have this boy… it was strange and unusual enough to catch the attention of a lot of people. 

But they didn't understand. 

When Jisung had visited the manager office, walking into the room to silence because he never came there willingly, to the bullpen of pre-debut managers, the staff had looked at him and scoffed at his request. Ise and Moon-Sang and Soo-Kyung, they all turned around and said that it wasn’t possible for a boy to be full and not know about it, for someone to get so old and not have their body reveal the truth. They laughed when Han had asked for them to believe him because he wanted Felix in his room - in the nest - and they thought he was sweet and in love and stupid. Betas don’t belong in the nest, Moon-Sang had said to him, and he’d told Han that he knew that he didn’t finish school but surely he knew that much. Soo-Kyung had laughed with his coffee in his hand, told Han that he’s not going to be your baby - he’s a beta and he’ll always be outside of the pack. 

Felix was a baby and he would be in the pack. 

Chan had promised.

Ise had lent down to him, put her finger under his chin, told him to run along now, the alphas are talking, because she knew how that would set him off. Jisung had never felt the urge to take someone’s face off more than in that moment. He could have done it. He could have reached up, fangs out, grabbed the bun at the back of her head and just… slide his fangs into her face, tear and pull and bite down because she’d fucking deserve it. At best, she’d need a lot of surgery. At worse… 

Well, Chan never let him get that far. 

She was provoking him, on purpose, because that’s what Ise did to him - she liked to watch him try to hold it together against her and always - always - lose to his emotions, always feeling so angry and on edge and hurt every time she walked away from him because she would dig into him, claw at his weaknesses and somehow, it would always be Jisung’s fault. 

That day, he didn’t get to bite her. Chan had seen the warning signs, the scent of venom in the air, the blue of his eyes, at the way Jisung was being spoken to. For most people, it was unintentional. For a few managers, it was deliberate and Han didn’t like being spoken to like a fucking child. It was a long standing issue between Jisung and people like Ise, despite her title of ‘manager’. 

This was why he had only two managers that he tolerated and neither of them spoke to him like that. 

Chan had intervened, stepping between Ise and Han for her safety. He’d forced Han down to his knees, physically restraining him while ordering Ise to back up. He’d put Han back in his chains, in a spit gag, told him to let it go with the voice that made Han buckle under and accept a ruling he hated. But there was a difference, too, when it came to every other fucking arsehole in the building and Chan. Jisung clung to that difference like a drowning man clings to a raft because it was the only thing that kept him going, some days. 

Chan never told him he was wrong. 

After all the conversations with managers, Jisung’s omega officer, with the Lees, with Father Tullio, and the government officials, and every other fucking person on the goddamn planet, the one person who had never told him he was mistaken was Chan. Chan knew what Jisung thought. And he never told him no, you’re wrong. Han trusted his Prime, trusted him deeply and wholly and that was important - if Chan didn’t disagree with Han, it must mean he agreed. Or at least, he hadn’t made his mind up about it. He only ever disagreed with how Han brought it up to others - not the core of the argument itself. 

And it had worked. After so long, after so much fighting and paperwork and begging the right people to listen to them, they had done it. 

Felix was there. 

Han had to touch him. He had to. He needed confirmation that this was real. He knelt in front of the sofa, all neat and tidy like Chan made him be when he knelt because it was about showing respect to his alpha at all times and Han could tell Chan to shove the respect thing but… he might have liked it. 

Kind of. 

Some things were okay. 

Felix was sleeping deeply, one hand curled up near his mouth, and Han felt a part of his heart break at that. He knew that feeling. But this was their boy, looking small and tired and so precious that Han, king of fuck you and your mother, too, couldn’t help but coo at him. He wasn’t worried about Chan. He wanted to get close, to see what he knew was true. He lifted his hand, reaching for Felix, but Chan was faster, grabbing his wrist. 

You will not wake him, either.

I’m not going to wake our baby. Han had whispered, being so close to Felix. I want to see if they’re real.

If what are real ? Chan had been confused. 

His fangs.

He… He doesn’t have any. 

He does. I’ve seen them. Han was sure of this. He shook Chan’s hand away. I’ll be gentle.

Chan hadn’t objected anymore - he just wheeled his chair closer, coming to watch Han touch the boy he had dreamed about for months, the one he had pointed to on a slightly blurry screen and said that one. I need him, and Chan had just nodded. Me, too, Jisungie. And then they had gotten him, and bought him all the way across the ocean to Korea and he was real. 

And Jisung was opening his mouth, parting sweet little lips gently, to peel them back and look at his fangs. 

He was a fucking weirdo. Jisung can admit that now. It’s weird to touch someone else’s teeth, to put fingers in their mouth and touch things that only a dentist should. It’s even weirder to do it while they’re asleep. 

He… lacked boundaries, his therapist said. His therapist also said that Jisung was troubled and carried his trauma around with him as a shield and Jisung hated her a lot more after that. 

Changbin called him bizarre and told him to keep his hands out of his mouth without consent (which Jisung understood to mean that Changbin didn’t have an issue with the idea of someone touching his fangs per se, just someone doing it without his permission). Jisung thought his fangs were really interesting to look at and to touch, all short and stubby but with a dagger sharp point on them that curved back, designed to hold on with their serrations that most people did not have. Changbin let Han touch and see them occasionally, when he was in the right mood, and he never objected to Han’s fingers then. He just didn’t like it when he was asleep, apparently. 

Whatever. 

Chan never said a word about it when Jisung put his hands in his mouth - he just made sure that Jisung had washed his hands and that he did it in a relatively private place. Jisung liked Chan’s teeth - his fangs are long, sharp, such a pretty colour, and Jisung thought they were handsome. He’d never thought that about someone’s teeth before but it fitted. He would sit on Chan’s lap and just… touch. Just hold onto them. He would sometimes go to sleep like that, just tucked up on Chan’s lap, feeling the sharp points over and over, as Chan would soothe him by stroking his back and telling him alpha’s here, alpha’s got you. 

His Omega Officer said that was a comfort thing - other people had teddy bears, or blankies, or non-sexual omega- pacifiers to soothe the anxiety away. 

Jisung… would touch other people’s fangs. 

It was another thing that his court mandated therapist (short, black, American, from New Orleans and married to some court person somewhere that Jisung never had met) asked him about, one of the things that went into the folders and folders of his information, and Jisung never really heard anything else about it. In hindsight, he did notice that all of their attempts to get him to use a soft toy or a blankie or a pacifier to self-soothe stopped around that time. What fucking use any of that would do for him, he didn’t know. Also, that was such a weird thing that the courts liked to push on full omegas - according to them, he was a fucking child and he needed something in his mouth at all times (because they thought his biting stemmed from an oral fixation) like he was a baby, not a teenager and angry at the world as a fully presented person under so many shackles and restrictions. For the record, his aggression came from having to deal with idiots who had somehow gained a tiny bit of power over him and he didn’t like that. 

He didn’t need a teddy bear, he needed help. 

The court therapist had instructed the omega officer and Chan and everybody else he was mandated to meet to stop the fussing about getting him to use the teddy bears they kept throwing at him or the blankets or whatever else they wanted him to try. Clearly, Miss Cherry recognised that teeth worked for him. 

The rest of the pack turned a blind eye to it when it wasn’t their mouths that Han was invading. When it was, they mostly submitted without questioning what he was doing, would let him touch and reassure himself for as long as he needed. It was Jisung’s thing. Just… sometimes, they might wake up with Jisung’s fingers wrapped around their fangs, his face too close to theirs, or they would be cleaning their teeth in the bathroom, and he’d just… sit there. Watching. 

Maybe it was because of all the threats that Jisung had had, threatening to file his own fangs down, cap them off, after ripping out his venom ducts. Maybe it was because Jisung had never seen them so often, his grandparents telling him it was uncivilised to see them, or maybe it was just a reassurance thing - alphas with long, sharp fangs can protect, and defend, and keep him safe. 

Maybe he just had a thing for teeth. 

Hard to tell, really. 

But he was so desperate to know about this boy that he had to do it, had to touch what he knew he shouldn’t. 

Fangs were an easy way to tell dynamics. Only fulls and alphas get them and there was no fucking way on earth that Felix was an alpha. No, if he was a beta or a standard omega, he wouldn’t have them, his DNA stripped out of the need to protect and defend with tooth and claw like alphas and fulls. 

Han’s own fangs were long, lethal, and razor sharp. He had too many fangs, filling his mouth up in a way that very few people could copy, every single one of them knife sharp and hungry to protect, to fight, to make someone bleed. He took pride in them, in how they were so long that they could sink into someone’s arm and come out the other side when he was really fucking mad. 

But not Felix. 

He was not like Jisung in how dangerous he was. 

As Han pulled back Felix’s lips, his fang came into view and they were exactly what Jisung had predicted, all those months ago, when it was hard to tell on a screen, where pixels blurred and merged to hide what he was. But not anymore. He placed a hand on Felix's cheek, turned his face so gently, and Felix didn't wake up. He just sighed, dreaming on, and Han could see both fangs for the first time.

Han could touch them. 

And they were there. 

The fangs that everybody else had told him was a figment of his imagination, the ones they’d laughed off and said it was distortion in the video, a result of the company’s shitty internet and a not-great-monitor. But they weren't. Jisung knew it back when he first saw them and he was confirming it now, in person. 

Felix’s fangs were small, baby fangs because he was a baby but they had potential, white, and fierce, just how a little full should be. They had little points, just enough for a little full, and everything in Jisung breathed a sigh of relief because he knew that confirmed it. Felix was full and he was young and maybe - just maybe - he was younger than Jisung by more than what the paperwork said (at least, the paperwork that he had now.) Something in Han shouldn’t have found it so easy to slide someone who was, in theory at least, only a day younger than him into such a role. Jeongin was the maknae of the group but something about this Felix naturally felt like he was a baby, and Han didn’t get it but he couldn’t deny it. 

The little fangs were exactly what he would have expected from a young full, perhaps a little too old for his big ones to not yet have come in, but Han always remembers that he was too young when his own came in, always out of sync with the timelines that doctors and dentists pointed to in their books about when fangs should drop. It made sense to him that Felix was the inverse of Jisung, that his fangs would be little and sweet like him, and he maybe would never get his big ones but that would be okay because Jisung would love him anyway. 

And Jisung never wanted Felix to go through what he did to get his fangs. 

Jisung had never recovered from the way his teeth came in, his body helpless and unaware of what to do as his mouth fractured and bled, his jaws screaming in pain as genes that were as old as cavemen shoved their way through a million years of evolution to get to him, in his eleven year old body. They refused to be denied. 

He sweated and drooled and howled in pain as his fangs came in over weeks and months, splitting his jaw bones apart as they forced their way down, too big for his face, demanding their own space. His self control could do nothing but shatter as the rest of his teeth tried to move aside and failed because that’s not mouths work. He remembered his parents taking him to dentist after dentist because they didn’t know that this could still happen to full omegas. 

Han struggled. The pain made him irritable and confused, bitter towards his grandparents who thought he was overreacting when he could barely stomach tea and soft rice pudding. The pain raged and he raged, too, and he couldn’t figure out how to make the pain stop. Being told to bear it like Christ bore the pain of the Cross was neither helpful nor actually something he was interested in. 

He sobbed and begged for someone to help him and his father had eventually overridden his grandparents. He called with a desperate plea to the University of Malaya, reaching out to old university friends who had become lecturers there, asking for his child to be put on the study list so he could get the best treatment as an experiment at the prestigious Dental School there. 

Jisung was not a patient. That was always something that his father had tried to hide from him, pretending as if Jisung hadn’t seen the paperwork. But he knew. He always knew. Han Jisung was an experiment and it never felt good to remember that. He got in because the guy in charge took one look at his x-rays and said, we can use him as a case study. 

Doctor P’leng was a fucking twat and Jisung was helpless. 

He wasn’t told what would happen. He wasn’t even told that it would be a months long process of braces and weekly visits, having a bunch of student dentists all having to put their fingers in his mouth, touching him, asking about his development, his weight, his height, his medication. They were always so fucking personal, diving into his medical records, asking his father if he had started to menstruate yet, as if his uterus was the reason his teeth were trying to break his face in two. He hated hearing them read their summaries to the dental teacher while he lay there, drooling, bleeding, in pain and moaning for someone to come and fucking help him. They always cited him as an intersex omega with severe behavioural challenges as if he was some retard because that label always - always - was never far away. He didn’t have behavioural challenges. He didn’t like arrogant alphas. That’s personal preference, not a medical condition. 

But it didn’t matter. He was the subject of all their essays, all their presentations, pictures of his mouth showing each period of intervention, how the train track wires and cross braces and the tension systems pulled his teeth out of the way of his fangs, the holes in his gumline where they pulled out his wisdom teeth to save his upper jaw from cracking in two when he was so fucking young that he still had the child x-ray brackets in all of the pictures. 

Jisung still has nightmares about that place. 

In hindsight, he knows it was for the best. He was at risk of breaking his own face, the pain making him not just irritable but down right raging, devouring his ability to speak so he couldn’t be understood, and he was always hungry, because he couldn’t eat. He couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t think, he was just descending from human to animal slowly, over weeks and weeks as his own face fractured, millimetre by millimetre as his teeth forced their way through bone and flesh. If the dentists hadn’t intervened, he would have had serious problems now, years later. 

But he wanted to be left alone. 

It didn’t happen. 

He got dragged to the University Dental School twice a week, every week, for months. That was the beginning of the end for him. Even then, it took four people to give him twilight sedation, strap him to a chair and then fit a cage to his head because that was the only way they could work safely. There were risk assessments, documented records of his struggles, videos taken with his father in the background, looking on as his child cried while men in white coats looked into his mouth. There were even shots put in the papers of him strapped to the chair like an insect pinned to the board. 

It hurts him, it hurts Jisung deep inside to think that their baby would go through something like that with the Lees. Not knowing what was happening to him, not understanding why they were hurting him, only able to feel pain, to hurt, and to suffer as people he trusted looked on. 

Jisung won’t let that happen to him. 

He can’t. 

It makes him want to throw up, want to fight and scream and cry because nobody should have to do that and Felix least of all. 

But he did. Jisung did. That was his life for so long. Like Felix, Jisung went down in textbooks for his unusual anatomy, and had so many people looking at him as just measurements and statistics and dental pictures, not a real person. Han hated it all but the fangs themselves. The change left him with weapons that bleed venom and get him into trouble too much. Maybe Felix would go the other way, getting his grown up canines late, and maybe they would still be little and pointed and not really razor sharp because that’s what babies have, and he was always going to be younger than Han, more than he could ever know.

Han’s fingers had brushed the edge of the one white fang he could reach easily, pulling Felix’s lip into a snarl that he didn't have any control over. It looked wrong on his sweet face. His fangs were there, so clear and obvious to everybody, and now the proof of why Jisung loved him was there. 

He’s not full, babe, Chan had said, and his tone was not convincing. He recognised the significance of what Han had found, the teeth they could both see screaming at them that Han was right. Chan believed, too, Han knew it. Felix’s fangs were out of place as a beta, alien and wrong because betas had no need for fangs. But they were exactly right for a full, young and sweet and not yet ready to lose them.

Han was correct. The suspicions he’d had for months had been justified. Chan's scent had been soft and gentle and loving, and it meant he knew the truth, too, he agreed with Jisung. The words didn't matter. Scent was more important and that was all Han needed as proof he was right.

Everybody else thought he was stupid and blind and being led astray by instincts that were out of sync, driven out of alignment by rage and fear, a dumb little full who needed to be quiet, to let alphas tell him all that he needed to know. Han knew better than they did. And years later… He would be proved so right.

Back in the here and now, Judge Yi is looking at him seriously. “So you knew. From the beginning, you knew.” 

“I didn’t suspect it. I didn’t think maybe I was right. I knew. I knew he was different. I knew he was full.” Jisung has been sitting with this for a long time. Years. “I let him into the nest because I knew.” 

“And you don’t mind sharing with him.” 

“I’ve always shared. This won’t change that part of our relationship.” The Hold on the back of his neck is loosening. “I love him. I’ve always loved him. Right from the beginning.”

“And you don’t feel angry towards him.” 

“He’s always been my other half. Jagi - I love. He’s my partner, my better self, the one who knows how to lead and how to keep everything strong and safe and he knows me. But Felix? He’s the other half of me. We’re the same but not. He - he loves so much. His heart is this big - “ Jisung holds his hands out - “and he just trusts. I saw him and I knew we would work together. He’s… he misunderstands a lot. He thought I was Hana because he got confused with Chan’s sister and my long hair. But there was no malice in him. He wasn’t trying to hurt me.” 

“He just… didn’t understand.” Judge Yi is writing this down. “Why do you call him a baby?”

“Because he’s the baby.” Jisung shrugs and the lawyers look away, smiles forming on their face. “Don’t fucking laugh at me. He was always young. Now, it makes sense. He wasn’t presented. He was like a child. Somehow, I knew that.” 

“Because you’re full. ”

“Because I’m grown. ” Jisung shifts and Chan doesn’t let him get that far. He’s on edge, still, concerned that Jisung will snap. “I knew that he wasn’t grown. He was… too young, too innocent. He didn’t know shit when he came here.” 

“We… we all said that.” Seungmin of all people agrees with Jisung. “When… people meet us. They often think he’s our maknae. They… they think he’s younger than he is.” 

“So you knew he was full and you knew he was younger than you in some way you couldn’t describe but that other people could pick up on.” Judge Gye rubs the bridge of his nose. “Why didn’t you tell anybody?”

“I did. And that got me called a moron, a retard, and stupid. Oh, and I got told to shut up and go away if they were rude and let the alphas handle it if they weren’t. So I did shut up. But it didn’t stop me knowing.” Jisung squirms again, and this time, he gets Minho, holding his hands down. “I’ve been saying it for three years. It’s just now someone else has finally agreed with me and now, because they’re an alpha, suddenly it matters.” 

“And you would help raise him?”

“Me and jagi, yeah.” 

“Who is… are you jagi?” Judge Min points to Minho who nods. “Why -”

“Jisungie’s choice. I accepted it when I came into the pack.” Minho shrugs. “I think it is charming.” Jisung doesn’t know why but he’s always liked nicknames over real names. It’s a thing with him. 

“Do you think that you would be able to cope with another full omega in your house? You are First Omega, after all, are you not?”

“I am.” Minho touches his necklace, where his pack tag lies under his shirt. “And Yongbokkie -”

“Who - who is Yongbokkie?” Yi holds up her finger. “That’s… that’s Felix, isn’t it? You used that name before?” 

“Ah, it is Felix, Your Honours.” Myung-Ki steps forward, bowing a little. “He is formally known on his paperwork as Lee Felix, as it appears in English, but he does also have a Korean name that he uses informally. Minho-ssi likes to use Yongbok so… so that is why he called him that. ” 

“And who gave him this name?”

“His grandfather. On his mother’s side.” Chan holds up another one of the folders. “His parents forbade him to use it in the house. When he came here, as part of his immersion learning… we helped him to become more… settled with his Korean name.” 

“Yongbok…” Judge Min notes it down on her paperwork. “So you use his Korean name, Minho-ssi?”

“I taught him Korean. So it was fitting to use it. He… did not like it at first.” 

“Why?” She’s digging here - something about this name is interesting to her. “Why didn’t he like it?”

“I do not know. Perhaps it reminded him all too well of his past. Perhaps he was not comfortable with how it sounded. But… he became more comfortable with it. He became more amenable to it as time went on and he became more proficient in Korean.” 

“And now?” 

“He answers to both, equally.” Minho looks a little proud of himself. “I like to call him Yongbokkie. He has come a long way. I think it is a nice name for him.” 

“And you don’t have an issue with this little full joining you?” 

“No.” Minho looks up at the judges, his eyes blazing bright blue. He’s making a point. “I love him. He’s precious. Sweet. Vulnerable. If you gave him to us, I would raise him, teach him how to be full, give him the secrets of our dynamic that alphas don’t know, don’t understand. I’d be his unnie. ” 

“And do you think he would accept it?”

“Of course.” Minho nods, firmly. “He has lived in the pack home for years, lived by our rules, learnt our language. I do not see why this would be any different. If anything, it will be easier because we will understand him better and be able to help guide him with more knowledge about who he really is.” 

“He already gets away with murder. ” Seungmin says and the rest of the pack nods. When Judge Yi looks at him, he elaborates. “Minho-hyung… he treats Felix different from us. He’s kinder. Sweeter.” 

“He knows that Felix can’t take anything fierce.” Jeongin stands next to Seungmin, leaning on him ever so slightly. “He cuddles him, and feeds him, tells him he’s good for hyung whenever he thinks that Felix needs to hear it.” 

“Cuddles him?”

“Yongbokkie is not… you can’t resist him.” Minho’s cheeks are flushing pink, just a little bit. “He is… very… into hugging people. He hugs them, and kisses cheeks, and he likes to cuddle when you are still for a moment.” 

“Stand still for five seconds. He’ll find you and stick to you like glue for a while.” Jeongin laughs because it’s true. It’s…. A running joke at this point, with the pack. Felix is quite notorious for just being incapable of sitting still for five minutes and the only way to get him to do so is if he is cuddling someone. If he’s left unattended, either he’ll get fucking lost or he’ll just find someone to cling onto, wrapping around them and sticking close, letting them hold him or vice versa. 

In hindsight, again, it was another massive red flag because it’s a very common behaviour amongst young full omegas. 

“And you’d change to unnie?” Judge Min is still on this track, going somewhere. 

“Of course.” Minho nods. “If that’s what we decide, that’s what I’ll be.” 

“I see.” She nods. “And would you take care of the other one, too?” 

“Yes. Of course.” Minho’s fingers interlace with Jisung’s own. “I would take care of both of them.”

“Oh?” She looks taken aback at that. “That’s…”

“Jisungie is special. He needs… help.” Understatement of the fucking year, there. Jisung would scoff but Minho’s stroking his thumb over the palm of Jisung’s hand and it’s helping him to calm down so he won’t do it. “But so will Yongbokkie. I’ll help with both of them. It’s going to be a big change for all of us - bringing home a new pack member is always a period of adjustment.” 

“What about your apartment?” Won-Herpes-Face has finally had a thought - the brain cells must have been working overtime - and he points to the schematic of the apartment that he has clutched in his fist. “It’s too small! You can’t have a full omega sharing a room with an alpha!” 

“We can move.” Chan shrugs beside Jisung, the heat of his body radiating out. “Our apartment is owned by the company so we don’t have to give notice.” 

“So you could, in theory, move very quickly?” Looking up from her notes, Judge Min adjusts the bun in her hair. 

“It’s Friday evening. If we found a place, we could be in and out by 9am Monday morning. JYPE’s done it before. They’ve got contacts.” 

“So finding a bigger place… is not a concern of yours?”

“Nope.” Chan makes the sound pop and the judges look at each other. Jisung thinks they weren’t expecting that answer. “I’ve got enough money put aside to pay for jeonse or wolse if that’s what we end up with.” 

“And you would do it?” Judge Gye tilts his head. “You’d upend up your life, move house, just for this little full? ” 

“Of course.” The whole pack answers, looking at each other, baffled at the question.

“It’s just an apartment.” Jisung says, his cuffs chinking as he squirms in place. What fucking part of we’d do anything for Felix do these judges not get? “We moved four times in the seven months between the TV show and actually debuting.” 

“ Four times?” Myung-Ki looks amazed. “How -”

“One gets very good at packing an apartment with a few days notice.” Minho says, and his tone is sharp. “I have done it for as little as twelve hours.” 

“Twelve hours?” 

“We received the call at seven o’clock at night. Movers arrived at seven o’clock the next morning.” Minho shrugs. “It is a skill and one that I am sure I have not forgotten in the last two years.” 

“What about you, though?” Min is making notes, still, her pen moving as fast as Jisung has seen her write all night. “Will you be happy to share your Prime?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Minho looks baffled. “You act as if I have not already been sharing my Prime for two and a half years with seven other people.” 

“I - you are a full omega. It is quite different from sharing with alphas than sharing with fulls, Minho-ssi.” Judge Min seems caught off guard by Minho’s question. 

“Yongbokkie has always been present since I arrived. I have never known this pack without him.” 

“But he could usurp you.” Judge Gye taps the folder in front of him, self importantly. “He could come first ahead of you and that might upset the pack structure.” 

“I don’t think so.” Minho says, and the confidence is something that Jisung genuinely envies. 

“You’re very… sure about that.” Gye looks disapproving. “It is a problem that could happen. All of these ranks and things, they’re not fixed in most packs and it is important to not lose sight of that.” 

“I don’t think our ranking will be too… different, with Yongbokkie joining.”

“I don’t think you understand me -” Gye is getting fed up, frustrated about not getting to Minho with this very specific point. 

“I do. I do understand you, Judge Gye. The difference is that I disagree with you.” Minho has a way of being disrespectful while clouding it in a fog of semi-respect and it’s a skill that Jisung has never had any success with. It works for jagi, though, and Chan thinks it’s fucking hilarious. 

“And what possibly could give you that confidence?” Gye’s eyes are dark, the red in them glinting just a little.

“Because I am very assured of my position in this pack.” 

“You cannot be. It is disrespectful to be so blasé about something so very important, young full - ” 

“I am the first wife.” 

“...What?”

Minho holds up his wrist to the judges, showing off his wedding bracelet. He doesn’t wear a wedding ring - it’s not something his tribe does - but the bracelet is effectively the same thing. “My marriage makes me Chan-hyung’s first wife. I assure you, Yongbokkie will not change that.” 

There is silence in the courtroom. 

“...You’re married?” Won-Shit for Brains looks shocked. 

“That’s what this bracelet means, yes.” 

“Wait - Minho-ssi- “ Judge Yi is rifling through her paperwork, looking for something. She pulls out the picture that Chan had presented, of Minho and Chan, the one that Minho has in an album at home that says our wedding day underneath in Chan’s best handwriting. “This is a wedding photo?”

“What did you think it was?”

“An engagement photo. A commitment to marry at some point in the future. ”

“I see.” Minho raises an eyebrow. “You would be wrong.” 

“But… you can’t be married.” There’s a real lack of intellectual thought going on over the other side of the room with Won-Thicko and the judges look… not amused but… there’s something going on under the surface with all three of them when they see just how much the marriage has thrown cold water on the whatever plan the Lees have going. “You’re too young!” 

“I am of legal age to be married. My marriage is legal. I would not live with a man like this if I wasn’t wedded to him officially.” Minho raises an eyebrow. “I married Chan-hyung before moving here, to Seoul, and joined his pack.” 

“Since when?” 

“Since July 28th 2017.” Minho folds his hands together, not giving one inch to the other side. 

“A sham marriage is not a marriage!” Oh, that’s not a clever move from Won-Douche. That’s deeply deeply insulting to both Chan and Minho. “You’re lying!” 

“One would be a fool to lie in court, would they not?” Minho’s tone is like ice. “I do not lie about my marriage. I uphold my vows to Chan-hyung and the pack every day. ” 

“Your vows?” The judges look at each other, baffled, and Judge Yi leans forward again. “To be clear, for the record, I am asking you to clarify this photograph. You’re not just engaged, you are married? ” 

“The marriage certificate is here.” Beside Jisung, Chan holds out a piece of paper. “Signed, sealed, and witnessed, just like it should be.” Chan looks at Minho with red and gold eyes and it’s so cute Jisung wants to eat it because Chan loves his wife - always has done - and Minho loves Chan, no matter how reluctantly he shows it in public sometimes. He might have cute aggression at this point but Jisung’s point still stands. It’s cute to see his Prime and Minho be husband and wife together. Minho is such a traditionalist and Chan just… goes with the flow, happy as long as Minho is. Ko-Woon passes the paper up to the judges who take it, gently, honouring the value in it. “You’ll find the signature from the izbanha and the obahna, as required by law.”

“You didn’t just commit to marry him, in an informal ceremony.” Judge Gye stares down at them, his eyes going from Minho to Chan and back again. “This is genuine and legally binding.” 

“I have no plan to get divorced but if I did, it would cost me a lot of money.” Chan shrugs. “The paperwork is all there, like I said.” 

“It’s a tribal marriage certificate.” Won-Braindead insists, as he frantically searches through paperwork, everything flying everywhere. “You can’t use a tribal certificate like that.” What the fuck he’s on about, Jisung doesn’t know. He keeps saying tribal like that means something. “It’s tribal so it’s not real.” 

“I assure you, my marriage is very real.”

“Only members of tribes can marry on tribal land and get - and get a tribal certification of marriage!”

“I recognise that reading may be beyond you and for that, I pity you. Surely, you can see my wedding photo and surmise that I am, in fact, a member of a tribe?” Minho rolls his eyes. 

“You’re lying!” 

“Think hard about accusing a tribal member of lying about their membership.” Minho’s gaze is white hot. “Think very hard, little fool.” It’s a grave insult but also a crime. 

“My wife is a tribal member.” Chan is also pissed as fuck. “I’ve been to his home, eaten under his father’s roof, negotiated for his hand. Do not call me a liar when you’re too thick to know the law or what a tribal member looks like. Trust me, he’s a true member of the Gayasan National Park Tribe.” 

“He’s -”

“I really don’t know what’s so hard about this. He’s a member of a tribe so our marriage is valid. I know this is slightly more complicated than a parking ticket but this should be basic stuff for you. A tribal certificate is a valid marriage certificate according to the government.” 

“But -”

“There’s a website you can go to, to check what documents count as valid. I can show you. It’s quite handy in case you don’t know the law.” Judge Yi covers her mouth with her hand, and Mr Seo looks at the floor again. Chan is straight faced, glaring straight at Won-Ball-Ache. 

“I - that’s - unnecessary -”

“You’re the one who said that a tribal certificate doesn’t count as real. ” Chan isn’t letting him go. “Just thought you might need some help, you know, figuring out basics like marriage certificates even though you’re a fucking lawyer.” 

“Mr Bang,” Myung-Ki says and he’s not… reprimanding Chan per se but he is calling him back, telling him to let go of his prey. It’s not a good look to attack between alphas. Jisung’s aware that he’s getting away with it, mostly because of his reputation and because he’s clearly the lowest ranked person in the room. Chan is nowhere near him like that and needs to behave better. 

Chan looks at Myung-Ki and then turns away. He’s stretched thin and tired, too, and Won-Dick-Mouth is pushing all of his buttons, calling Chan’s marriage a sham. He takes his vows just as seriously as Minho. 

“This is… This is beyond what we expected, Mr Bang.” The judges are passing the marriage certificate back and forth as Min speaks, her tone much warmer this time. “You are a married man.” 

“A married man, looking to take on a full who needs help, and support.” Mr Seo says, and his facial expression says he knew but also that he didn’t expect this to mean so much. “Mr Bang has an apartment, a pack, and a wife. That is a very secure start for a young full, especially one with the serious medical issues that will no doubt result from his presentation.” 

“Indeed.” 

“A large pack would be supportive. There will always be someone with young Felix so he’ll never be alone. Their work is something they can vary. Mr Bang has a lot of control over what work the pack takes on and it would be possible for them to tailor their schedules and work-life balance to be able to meet all of Felix’s needs.” 

“We could take pack leave.” Minho looks over at Chan again. “It’s an option we’re more than happy to explore.” 

“How long is pack leave for your company?” Gye licks the tip of his pen to get it to work better and Jisung pulls a face. Disgusting. 

“It depends.” Changbin has another folder open, flicking through the pages until he finds what he wants. “Standard pack leave is six weeks, to allow for bonding and introducing everybody.” 

“Or the alternative?”

“If we go down the route of Felix being now reclassified as non-presented, then we’ll qualify for extended pack leave which the company will grant us when they get the paperwork. ”

“And how long is that?”

“Six months as a baseline.” Changbin flicks to a new page. “There is the option to apply for more if he’s… if he’s classed as special needs, like Jisungie.” That’s not surprising. Jisung knows that Chan’s pack leave with him could have gone to six months, if he had applied for an extension. 

“And you’d take that? The full amount allowed for you? All of you would be willing to put your careers on hold, not do promotional work or… magazine photoshoots or… adverts in that time?”

“Of course.” Seungmin tilts his head. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“We have enough in our back catalogue anyway.” Changbin puts the folder down. “I’m sure we could put together an album just with the songs we didn’t release, let that go out while we rest and affirm our bonds.” 

“You have a back catalogue?” Gye looks at the other judges. “Don’t… don’t your managers just give you the song, tell you how to sing it? How long could that take?”

“We’re self produced. ” Jisung isn’t having that fucking slander on his name. “We make our own music. We write it, record it, sing it, rap it, produce it, and release it ourselves. ” 

“You -”

“We’re on fucking KOMCA. We have writing credits on everything we produce. Don’t fucking disrespect us.” 

“It’s not disrespectful -” Judge Min tries to soothe him. 

“It is. It is disrespectful and you don't get to do that to us over our livelihoods. We said we write, we make our own music, and we work hard for our goals.” He’s really emotional, his cuff chain rattling as he points hard at his own chest. “We don’t stay up until five in the fucking morning, working on the same song for hours because it’s easy. We don’t spend hours recording and re-recording lines until we’re hoarse because we think it’s a fucking easy job. We do it because we respect our fans and our fucking music. ” 

“I understand.” 

“We don’t go out and buy a fucking track and pay some writer to slap some lyrics together in an hour and call it good. That’s insulting. ” 

“It is.” Judge Min nods. “We shouldn’t have assumed.” 

“We told you before.” Jisung isn’t having it. “Self produced. We all write. We all produce. We work hard.” 

“I didn’t understand -” Gye is doing the thing that Chan absolutely forbids when he’s reprimanding his pack - offering excuses like they’re valid reasons for doing the bad thing - and Jisung isn’t in the mood for it. 

“No. You wrote us off. You thought we were some fucking fake group, who don’t own our shit. You saw the idol tag and just went I know what that means even though all fucking night you’ve been telling us we have to be precise, we have to know everything ” Jisung can’t let this go. He’s sick and fucking tired of people claiming they ‘didn’t understand’ and using that as a way to get cheap shots in. “It’s about respect and not treating our creative work like goddamn dogshit just because you work in the law.” 

“I didn’t -” Gye hasn’t got the message. 

“It’s rude, it’s disrespectful, and it’s fucking foul coming from a judge.” Jisung is well aware that these were the exact same claims thrown at him a few hours ago but he doesn’t give a shit. “If you doubt us, check the notes and do your research but don’t put fucking lies on our name. ” 

“I… I shouldn’t have doubted you.” Judge Gye isn’t being condescending now

“No. You shouldn’t have.” 

“I - I apologise, little full. ” Gye, for the first time all night, backs down. Maybe he gets that he said the fucking rudest thing all night (and that’s stiff competition with Won-Fuck-Bucket). “I did not realise you had so much creative control. I should have been… been kinder. More careful in my words.”

Jisung wants to argue some more, wants to rip into Gye until he really understands but he can’t. 

Other people are watching. 

“Pull it back, little full. ” Mr Seo whispers to him, guiding him to sit back again on the table, and Jisung’s heart is pounding in his throat because he’s so fucking angry. He can’t speak anymore. 

“It was a stipulation in all of our contracts.” Chan looks pissed, as well. Jisung knows why - they work too fucking hard to be written off as some plastic pop stars, as if they can’t write a damn note or lyrics of their own. They do. They work for days and days without sleep when it’s time for a comeback. They didn’t get to where they are now by being fake. “We are a self-producing group. We work with outside producers, people we trust when it comes to our music but nothing comes out under the Stray Kids label that we haven’t worked on extensively. ” 

“I see.” Judge Yi looks at the other judges. “But you do have a lot of work you have been holding back? That could tide you through this period?” 

“We have a minimum of two years worth of releases, at least, I think.” Chan is looking at Changbin, his fingers out as if he’s counting on them. Chan and Changbin are the ones who keep track of their content in terms of raw numbers. Jisung is just the one who keeps dropping more and more content into the bucket, just every few weeks adding six or seven new songs or concepts of songs into Chan’s email, watching the spreadsheets grow ever longer. 

“You’re sure?” Myung-Ki looks slightly… off kilter. “That’s… that’s a lot of time. And work. I thought artists were…. Slower at producing.” 

“No.” Chan looks up at Myung-Ki, confused. “We work with inspiration. We don’t work to order.”

“So you could, in theory, keep everything going for a long time?” Judge Min rubs her forehead. “Your finances, your income wouldn’t suffer?”

“We’re not dependent entirely on our music if that’s what you’re concerned about.” Changbin holds up a thick folder labelled financial records. “Chan-hyung has investments, savings, bonds… More than enough for our living expenses for years, never mind a few months.” 

“But even if you stopped effectively working…. ” Min is being specific on this. 

Chan pulls out his phone, checking the spreadsheet document that’s on there. “If we assume a release schedule of once every four months, plus a Christmas track or two…” He stops for a moment, counting off things on the spreadsheet that Jisung can’t see. “If we kept to that schedule, I would say, conservatively, we could definitely pull from the back catalogue for at least two years of group music. Maybe a little less solo work. There’s also photoshoots that didn’t end up being used, old content that never got released, blooper reels, and the merch side of things…”
Minho nods. “We have lots of options there. Between our own merch, concert stuff, the backlog of things that we could do a few sales on… We don't even have to put anything new for a while and we'd be set. Not to mention our SKZOO line…” 

"Who?"

"The... cute little creatures. Each of us has one that is like... our mascot." Seungmin is trying to phrase it delicately for a group of people who clearly have no idea how to handle this kind of language. "There's music videos, soft toys, blankets, pyajamas, slippers... all kinds of stuff that our fans buy. We do lots of themed items. Our cut is quite... generous."

“Yeah, merch is a bit… bit of a lucrative aspect of this.” Changbin is checking his own phone, probably looking at the emails from their team that deals with that. “It never rests even when we do. It’s just a never ending fountain of new marketable goods and services… And, there’s the extra bonus of not needing our input much - just signing a few documents, approving some new designs - because it mostly handles itself.”

“And there’s always social media,” Jeongin adds, holding up his phone. “We could get separate Instagram accounts, Twitter, all of that. That’ll keep fans going for a good couple of weeks in between.”

“Just… pictures of you? That’s enough to keep fans satisfied?” Gye is lost, again. 

“...Sure, let’s go with that.” Seungmin shares a look with Jeongin. 

“We’re asking this because it could affect this verdict. Being away from the spotlight wouldn’t affect you?” Judge Yi looks at the other judges. “You could go on this leave and maintain your current level of… for want of a better word, fame? ” 

“I mean, it would affect us. Every week we don’t put something out there, it is a risk. We wouldn’t be doing promotional events, concerts, shows… Our brand recognition might take a bit of a hit and we’ll need to make sure we plan it really well. But it’s just a way to slow roll for a while, keep our names in the media while we look after Felix.” Changbin rubs his eyebrow and Jisung is amused to see it’s a carbon copy of his father doing exactly the same thing behind him. “Our team is pretty good. We trust them. We’d get them to make a plan, give us as much leeway as possible.”

“But you’re confident you could do it?”

“Absolutely.” Changbin nods.

“We could make it work.” Minho looks at Chan, who nods in agreement with Minho’s words. “It’s not impossible at all.” 

“So you would be able to raise him well, for this first part.” Yi taps her chin, thinking. “You would all be at home, giving him a firm foundation. And of course, you, Mr Bang and your wife, you would lead the pack during this time.” 

“Of course.” Chan and Minho speak together, as one, like they always do when they’re on the same page and on the same side. It’s like going up against a wall when that happens. 

Min is nodding as she looks between Gye and Yi, and Gye looks less… pissy than he did before. The needle has definitely moved here. Something about Chan being married, about him and Minho being the strong foundation of the pack, it’s doing something for the judges that nothing else has managed to do. It means something to them. Maybe it does. Maybe, it looks better that Minho and Chan are married, putting down stronger roots than the typical idol pack, maybe it looks like they have a deep foundation that isn’t going to rupture if the pack needs time to figure itself out after Felix comes home. Maybe what they’re trying to do is to avoid another Woojin situation on their hands. 

Minho looks a little too satisfied, having put the cat amongst the pigeons. He likes doing that. It’s his personality at this point - being as annoying as possible to as many alphas as possible and still coming out on top. Jisung genuinely envies the time and dedication it takes to get each attack just right. He usually ends up biting and really, that hasn’t gone too well for him for the last decade. 

Maybe he should take a leaf out of Minho’s book. 

But on the subject of marriage, Minho is right. He and Chan don’t… boast about it, per se. They rarely mention it at all. It comes out sometimes - like when they do their annual paperwork at the company, reselecting benefits like insurance payout beneficiaries. Minho gets to claim fifty percent of Chan’s payout because he’s married to Chan and Jisung is something else entirely, and the rest of the pack gets the remaining half to split between them. But that’s it. Most of the time, the marriage lives in the small things - matching bracelets, kisses in the darkness, the way Minho calls Chan in Sabaatji - things that just sit under the surface of the relationship. Fans aren’t aware, as far as Jisung knows, because the marriage certificate is not public knowledge, the company wanting to downplay it because it might upset fans to know Chan and Minho are officially married. 

Personally, Jisung thinks it’s bullshit and he knows that the fans probably would love to see some real pack stability because it’s rare in most idol groups and there’s always worries about whether the pack will make it beyond their first renewal. Jisung’s not blind. He’s read the Bubbl messages. He knows what the fans want to see. But nobody really asks for his opinion outside of music, so he just keeps that thought on the inside. 

JIsung watches the judges passing the marriage certificate back and forth, sees the lawyers looking hard at the judges. The judges have been drilling down for over an hour and a half into the logistics of getting Felix into the pack. Jisung is confident, on some level, they are at least open to the idea of letting Chan win. The other judge was too. But they couldn’t get over that First Prime issue that Mr Lee represented. 

But it’s been Hyunjin stepping forward for Felix and jagi’s marriage certificate that have prompted the most… positive reaction. Out of the two of them, it’s definitely the marriage certificate that’s been the most promising. Something about this, jagi and Chan having their relationship codified into legal chains means more to the judges than almost anything else. 

“Mr Bang, why did you not tell us you were married?” Judge Gye looks up at him, the red in his eyes almost entirely gone. “Why didn’t you share that you and your First Omega are not just bonded but married? ” 

“Because nobody asked.” Chan rubs his eyes. “Because every time I try to explain to someone that Felix being in my pack won’t change anything, they don’t trust me so why would I share that I am married and I live with my wife and our pack? That’s private information that could alter how our fans see us.” 

“But you understand this is… this is a big change.” 

“I do. We’ll take it on, one step at a time, just like we handle everything.” Chan’s scent is heavy and full of love for Minho who looks back at his Prime with blue eyes, like the ocean, sparkling and so pretty. It’s not often Jisung sees Minho in full blue for Chan and he loves it more every time he sees it. “I love my wife.” 

Minho looks smug. “I love you, too.” 

“And to be clear, you didn’t marry him because… fame, attention… whatever else it could be?” Judge Gye points between Minho and Chan, as if he can’t quite wrap his mind around this. 

“I married him when we were trainees, when Minho came to Seoul. Trust me, there was no money then. There wasn’t even a guarantee we would debut - we hadn’t even started to shoot for our TV show at that point.” He shrugs. “If there was money, it wasn’t mine at that point. I wasn’t… we weren’t famous.” 

“You weren’t… you didn’t have anything to your name?”

"We were on the debut track but that’s not worth shit until you actually debut. And even then, it can take years to make it. A lot of idols never do. The groups disband in a few years, nobody makes any money, they just end up with… with debt. There was never any guarantee. I couldn’t offer him anything for sure except my heart.” 

“So it was love?”

“Love and tradition.” Minho and Chan share a look, as they speak together, one voice, and Jisung feels his heart so full of love for them both. 

The judges nod, looking at each other again, making notes, and they leaf through more folders, passing papers between them. It takes them several minutes - long enough for Won-Piss-Face to drop a stack of papers on the floor and watch them scatter as he looks… somewhat dejected. He’s a fucking dick and he deserves every bad thing that happens to him. But the judges are ready to speak again, and Jisung’s attention is drawn away from the idiot sadly eating sunflower seeds out of his pocket, spitting the shells back into his hand and shoving them into his other pocket instead of picking up his papers. 

And he calls Jisung an animal? At least he has fucking table manners, for fuck’s sake. 

Gye isn’t paying attention to that, though. “So what to do, Mr Bang?” He sighs, and he looks… perhaps the most honest and open that he’s been all night. “What shall we do with this little full who means so much to you?” 

“I want him. I want him in my pack.” Chan’s eyes are deep and red and gold, swirling and moving, showing the strength of his Primacy. Gye nods in approval when he sees it. “I love him. He’s been ours for three years.” 

“So why isn’t he in your pack?” 

“I kept… I kept being told that he couldn’t be in the pack. And I tried. God, did I try to get him into the pack. I fought with managers and even JYP himself, because I wanted him that much but they kept telling me no, not now, wait for your contract renewal. I love him. I love him with everything I have, everything that I am. All of us adore him, from the moment we first met him.”

“But you are his Prime. You should have fought… more.” It’s a… serious accusation. Jisung feels it with all the truth behind it, like a bullet to the heart. 

But it’s true. 

Why didn’t Chan fight before like this?

“I know that now. I… I realise that there were a lot of chances, a lot of options I had that maybe I should have taken. I’ll regret that for the rest of my life because I didn’t take them and it got to this point.” 

“If we give this little full to you, Mr Bang, you will need to stand for him, to hold fast against so many pressures. He will rely on you totally. Everything he needs, you must give him - from the clothes on his back, the food on his table, the roof over his head. He will have nothing to his name.” 

“And I am willing to give everything.” Chan doesn’t qualify that. He leaves it there, and Jisung knows that he would give it all for Felix. “I will protect him, love him, keep him safe and keep him well as best I can.” 

“And if… if he does not come home well?” Gye holds up the folder that says medical records on it. “He is a sick, sick boy.” 

“Then I will care for him all the more. I take my vows seriously. To my wife, to Jisung, to the pack, and I will for him, too.” Chan wipes his eyes. “Whatever he needs, I’ll give. If he can’t be an idol, if he comes back to us and he’ll never work again, I don’t care. I’ll love him just the same. The pack… they’ll take him, too.” 

“We will.” Jeongin, far from being quiet, stands next to Chan, his face earnest. “We love him. He’s always been ours, we’ve always let him in. Him being full… That won’t change anything for us in how much we love him.” 

“Do you believe he’ll accept his new dynamic, Mr Bang?” Judge Min taps her pen on the table. “It is quite the transition from beta to full. It will be difficult.” 

“Felix hasn’t ever done things the easy way. I don’t for one fucking second think this will be any different.” 

“What do you mean?” She tilts her head. 

“He left his family at sixteen to move to Korea. He came here because of me.” 

“Because of you?”

“I promised him I’d look after him. I promised him he’d be in my group. I was building this pack and I said, join me with nothing to give him but promises of making it. I told him it was going to be hard work, that it might never pay off, that he might never get what he came here for. I told him all the bad, the difficult, the awful parts of what he’d face here as someone who was Korean in name but not in how he lived his life, who didn’t speak the language, who didn’t even know how to use fucking chopsticks.” 

“And what did he do?” The courtroom feels like it’s holding it’s breath. 

“He came. He flew thousands of kilometres to a country he didn’t speak the language of, that he didn’t know how to be himself in and he did it because of me.” He wipes his eyes again. “I paid for him, got it all organised, convinced everybody I could to get his paperwork done, because I knew I needed him in the pack. I needed him as a person.” 

“He trusted you.” 

“He asked me to keep him safe. That’s my only wish with all of this. To keep him safe and to keep him loved.”

“And you think he will learn to be full.” 

“I think he learned to train, to dance, to speak a brand new language, and to debut, on the strength of willpower alone. I have every faith in him. Every single part of me believes in him and his ability to put his mind to something and move the fucking earth.” Chan thumps the desk, and the noise is loud in the silent courtroom. “It’ll be hard, it’ll take work, it’ll be difficult and strange and there’ll be times when I don’t fucking know what to do because that’s what presenting is. He’ll bleed and he’ll suffer because that’s what happens during presentation.”

“Indeed.” Gye nods. 

To be honest, everybody in the room nods at that, too, knowing just how true it is. Presenting is hard no matter what kind of dynamic you have and it’s never been easy for everybody. It is hard on the body, on the mind, on the soul, and even if it is the most straightforward, the most logical and easy presentation, it’s still awful. 

Chan isn’t finished. “But I swear, I will teach him. I will guide him. I will let him choose his own path and whatever that is, I’ll help him every step of the way.”

Min speaks again. “This is going to be a great labour. For you and your pack. You’re asking to take him, under the law, as the unpresented person the law says he is, and teach him to be the full he is by nature. From the ground up, you’re trying to take on the burden of building him as a new full omega, piece by piece, history upon history. Could you do that?”

“I can. And if I can’t, I will learn what I’m missing. I’m not saying I’ll be perfect - I know it’ll be hard and dangerous and his body is so fragile right now that maybe he won’t even get there, to the end of the road of presenting, but I want to walk with him down that road. I want to be there for him, I want to help him, to love him and let him know he’s loved and cherished and to help him through the pain and the hurt and the emotional fallout that is coming for him. I know it’s coming.” 

“He’s a very sick boy.” She says, her voice solemn. 

“He is. And if he’s going to die, he should do it here, in Korea, with us.” The judges’ eyes widen when Chan says that. They clearly didn’t expect him to tackle that head on. They don’t know Chan, at all, they don't know that he never leaves a difficult conversation and he's had dozens of them over the years, with all of his pack members.

“Why do you say that?”

“I know he’s sick. I know he’s at risk. I know this fight… It's delaying what he needs. Every hour that goes by is another hour that risks serious complications. I know even if we do the surgeries and get him through them, there’s still a chance he dies. ” Chan’s breath is shaky and his eyes are wet now, no matter how he wipes them away. “But… I can’t let him die on a plane at thirty thousand feet. I can’t let him die without someone there, holding his hand, telling him it’s okay, that he’s loved and if he needs to leave us, then it’s okay and we still will always love him.” 

“And how would you have it happen?”

“If he has to pass, if we can’t pull him back, then I accept that. I want him to be at peace. The doctors, they made it really fucking clear, this is the end of the line for him if the treatments fail. I know that. I know I can’t fight death.” 

“Oh... Mr Bang…” Judge Yi puts her hand over her mouth. 

“But I want him to die here, with people who love him, with people who want the best for him. I can’t fight death for him but I can make sure he is loved when he goes and I can make sure he’s not in pain, fighting for his last breath.” Chan throws a handful of the papers, the case studies of the surgeries, and they land on the floor, pages fluttering through the air until they land on the carpet, the ugly pictures on full display. Judge Yi doesn’t flinch when she sees them. 

The only one who does is Won-Twat and he looks like he’s about to throw up. 

Good. 

He fucking deserves it. 

“You do not wish hardship for Felix.” Min folds her hands together as if she’s holding herself together. 

“I don’t want that for anybody.” Chan points at the papers. “If he dies, he deserves to do it with fucking dignity. He deserves to die like a human being, safe, and warm, and not in pain. He doesn’t deserve dirty bandages and screaming for pain medication and starving, restrained on a bed because he’s got nobody to protect him.” 

“But you’d protect him.”

“If I could take this pain, if it could be my brain that’s trying to kill me instead, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’d take his place a thousand fucking times over. But I can’t.” Chan’s face is wet with tears. “So I have to be here for him and I will fight for him in the court room and with the doctors and whatever else I need to do because I love him and I will not leave him.” 

“You’ve thought about this.” Judge Gye sits back in his chair. 

“I’ve had nothing but time to sit in a room and watch him breathe for days. This is the first time I’ve left his side and it’s only because I’m fighting for him that I’m willing to leave him. I haven’t slept in a bed since Sunday and I won’t go home until I know he’s safe, that he is okay and if that’s never, then I guess I should call his hospital room my home because that’s where I’ll stay.”

The courtroom is deathly silent as Chan launches his final appeal. Myung-Ki isn't speaking and neither are the rest of the lawyers. This is between Chan and the judges, now. 

“Your pack is going to have to change.” 

“And we’ll change. We learn, we adapt, we figure shit out and we pull together when the going is hard. I picked them. Each and every member, I picked because I wanted them, because I found what I needed in them.”

“Why didn’t you fight for him before with all of this information? Why didn’t you include your pack?”

“Because I thought I could do it better, that I was keeping them safe. But I’m not and I didn’t and I got it wrong. I admit that. But they came. For Felix, they came here, in the middle of the night, in a snowstorm, to fight for him.”

“They love him.” 

“We love him. We’ve always loved him.” This is Chan, laying his heart out, one last ditch effort to save Felix. He’s going down if they lose this case. Jisung has no doubt of that. Chan has loved Felix for a long time now. 

They all have. 

“I think… I think we have our answers.” Judge Yi looks at the other judges. “Thank you, Mr Bang, for your honesty.” 

“I want him to be safe. I want him to be loved. And if we’re not the right place for that, I will accept your ruling.” 

“Would you?” Gye looks sceptical. 

“I want what’s best for Felix. That’s it. That’s where my line is.” Chan can’t hold back now, his hands trembling.

“Mr Bang -”

“We’ve been talking about him - this whole time. But let me tell you what he is like. Let me just let you know the Felix we do because I don’t think you understand.” 

“Mr Bang, please,” Judge Yi holds up her hand but Chan barrels on. 

“I’m begging you please, please do not give him to them. Do not let them hurt someone who is so precious, so sweet, and so loving. ”

“Loving?” 

“He’s… he’s what we love. He wakes up every fucking morning and he loves and he trusts and he never ever stops. That kind of innocence is… it’s not something you can put back. If they break it, they will break him. ” Chan takes a deep breath, his hands shaking. “He wants to do charity work. He donates as much money as he can to Save the Children because he thinks that being a child should be about innocence, not hard work and pain.” 

“He… he sounds sweet.” 

“He makes us cookies and brownies because he says it makes you happy even though it takes him fucking hours. He made my grandmother a cake on her birthday because he says grandmothers need pretty things and it took him four fucking hours to decorate it with fondant and flowers that he made himself because she wanted a flower cake and we’d missed the deadline to order it from a store. It was a shoot day the next morning - he didn’t go to sleep for nearly two days in a row but he did it because he loves her. He doesn’t expect shit in return.” Chan wipes his eyes again. “That’s the kind of person he is. He gives and gives and gives because he loves and he doesn’t care if it’s money or time or just attention - he will always give it for you.” 

Chan swallows and the judges look at him, their entire focus just on him. 

"Our staff - he buys them meat and fruit and drinks when we’re on a shoot and when they tell him not to, he says but I want to be kind and they love him. They fight over who gets to do his make up because he lets them play dress up with him, doing whatever they want to his hair, to his make up. They kiss him and cuddle him and tell him you’re our favourite even though they’re not supposed to have favourites.”

“They care about him.”

“They care about him so much that they’ve been texting me non-stop since this happened.” Chan points to his phone. “I called - I called our manager, Soobin, in the middle of the night when we knew this case was launched. I said we need someone to sit with Felix. And he came. In the middle of a snowstorm, in the middle of all of this shit, he left his wife and child to come and sit by Felix’s bedside so he’ll never be fucking alone. ” 

“I -” Yi doesn’t know what to do with this torrent of emotional grief but Chan can’t stop now. He’s been bottling this up for days. 

“They love him. We love him. People love him because he just loves them so much and he cares and he has always cared. He looks at people like he can always see the good in them and he wants for that to come true for them.”

“He’s… special.” Judge Gye taps his pen on the table, gently, so clearly thinking. “He’s so very true to his nature even before it was known.” 

“He’s full. He’s always been full. ” Jisung speaks, his voice raspy from the venom, and his chains rattle. “You can’t take it out of him. You can’t undo what God gave him by letting them butcher him like a fucking science experiment.” 

“Don’t let them turn him beta by pulling him apart and letting him rot, parts of him decaying inside his body, diseased and broken. Don’t let them hurt him so much he’ll never be Felix again because that’s not saving him. That’s killing him by another name and you will break his soul.” Chan points at the other side of the court room, to the man who is fighting to kill their baby for the Lees. “They want to make him into a different son, one they didn’t get and one they can’t have.”

“But you will take care of him?”

“We’ll help him, however he needs, whatever he needs. However he comes to us, however his body is, however broken and wrecked he is, that’s what we will do..” The scent of honesty, so heavy and deep and raw is beautiful and so fucking sad because it took so much to get here, so much pain and suffering on their part but also on Felix’s and Jisung knows this is the final stand. “We’ll love him.”

After this, there will be nothing they can say. 

Nothing they can do. 

It’s not in their hands anymore. 

“We understand.” Judge Gye says, and his expression is… solemn in a way Jisung hasn’t seen before. 

“We want him to be safe. ” Chan’s final plea, one that echoes the agonising whisper Felix gave on the phone, every time they would speak to him in Australia, promising him that they would bring him to Korea, Jisung and Chan would get him there, he just needed to trust them is too much. 

It breaks Chan. 

It breaks him like nothing else and Jisung’s heart is not hurting, it’s screaming, raging, fangs out and hysterical, because this is the end and he doesn’t know how to handle it. His heart is throwing itself against the bars of his ribs like he used to against the bars of his cell, hands outstretched for someone - anyone - to listen to him. He’s so desperate to make someone understand, to let them just fucking have their baby, let them keep him safe because Jisung doesn’t break promises. 

The tears fall, the dam broken, for him and for Chan, and he can’t cope. He can’t take it anymore. Minho goes to Chan, holds him like he did in the side room because he’s so full of emotions, so scared and it’s all in his scent, unfiltered and unrestrained, everything so raw and hurting. Jisung has never seen Chan like this, buckling under the weight of it all, every inch of him so so ready to give in but he has to fight on. He is so tired, so brittle because he’s having to hold up the pack, go to war for Felix, keep everything going. It’s only when Chan buries his face in Minho’s shoulder again, his shoulders shaking, that the judges look at each other again. 

A hand rubs against Jisung’s back, and he knows it’s Changbin. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t say anything. He just waits, strong, solid, dependable Changbin and it hurts to know that he has this and Felix doesn’t. 

Jisung wants to go to the hospital. He wants to be there with Felix. 

He misses him. 

The judges are silent. The only sound in the courtroom is tears from Jisung and Chan and it feels so… so hopeless. “We need to confer again.” Judge Gye says after the long long looks are done. “We will need more… more time to understand the information you’ve given us.” Jisung sees them through his tears and he can’t tell what they’re thinking now. 

“And you don’t have a timeline on that, Your Honour?” Mr Seo looks up at the judges, wiping his own eyes. It’s a rare show of vulnerability from someone who has been rock solid the entire time Jisung’s been here - he’s not sobbing, not like Chan and Jisung but he’s… he loves Felix, too. 

If Mr Seo is breaking, they’re all going down. 

“I know you’ve been here a long time. It’s been… a long case and it will only get longer and more difficult going forward. We are aware of that.” Judge Yi nods to the pack, the way they’re all circling around Chan and Minho, Changbin holding onto Jisung. “Our verdict is something that both sides need to progress with their plans for young Felix. But we need to consider carefully, make sure we are… we truly understand this case deeply. This…. It will be case law. We need to make sure it’s right.” 

“We understand.” Mr Seo nods, straightening his shoulders. “Should we… should we wait here?”

“No. Go back to your side room. Call your families. Rest. Try to drink and eat.” Judge Min’s pen is finally down, for good, resting on the bench before her. She looks… tired, and worn out, her bun finally beginning to come apart. 

This case is taking its toll on everybody. It is no longer a case, it’s a fight, a no holds barred slam down battle that has wasted so much time, so much energy and for fucking what? 

Jisung doesn’t know anymore. 

He doesn’t know anything. 

“All rise, please,” the court officer says, and Jisung doesn’t stand up. 

He’s too worn out. 

The pack are all distracted, too, gathering around Chan, putting hands on him to encourage him, to give him physical strength. Jisung watches as the judges look over at them, the way that Jeongin is leaning on Hyunjin who is holding him, stroking his hair even as he is holding onto Chan, the way that Seungmin is rubbing Minho’s back, little scratches the way he always does. Changbin alone stands besides Jisung, his hand warm and heavy, and it feels nothing like Felix’s hug, his warmth pressing into Jisung’s body, his fingers tracing loops and whorls around the curves of Jisung’s body because Felix wants to always touch, always be moving. 

He feels lonely. 

They need their baby. They need him to come back to them. They need him to be theirs. 

Jisung looks up at Gye, at the way he looks at them all, his hands folded over his stomach, grandfatherly again, but his gaze is serious and dark. Everything in his eyes is a swirling deep dark red, the gold in his eyes old and worn, too, a heavy ring of authority that has stood the test of time. He’s seen a lot. He’s a Prime, too, just as much as Chan and Mr Seo, and Jisung sees the weight of that Primacy in every inch of his body. 

Gye might hate him. Or at least, he might think Jisung is a fucking idiot, a full with aggression issues and not a lot else to his name… But also, this is the worst fucking decision to make. Jisung can appreciate that. He doesn’t like Gye either, but he can see that whichever way the axe falls, it will hurt. 

There is no easy answer here. 

Jisung holds his hands together as he sits on the table, his cuffs clinking as the chain moves. He can’t breathe. He can’t think. He just exists, in his well of pain, of fear and panic, and his own body betrays him at every turn. He watches the judges look over at everything, Gye ushering the other two in front of him, taking his position as Prime of the court seriously, his hands gentle as he places them on Yi’s shoulder to help her around the chair, then on Min’s arm as she opens the door. 

Jisung doesn’t know what the answer will be. 

He doesn’t know if there will be an answer at all. 

But this night has to end. 

It has to. 

He can’t take it if it doesn’t. 

When Jisung’s tears dry, he realises that Changbin has left him. Why, he’s not sure, but it’s probably something to do with Chan. 

He sits alone and apart from the pack, on the table, surrounded by the detritus of the case - glasses from the shattered water jug, pens, notebooks, files, and behind him, he can hear the pack reaching out to Chan. He doesn’t want to break that moment of bonding because Chan’s scent is still so raw, so naked, he can’t be okay at the moment. 

So Jisung sits. His chain is slack between his cuffs. His hair is in his eyes. 

JIsung knows he’s struggling. His control is still lingering at the four it was earlier, perhaps even less, as he sees Won-Dick-Cheese scuttle out through the rear doors, folders shoved under both arms, a greasy little rat making for the exit. It takes everything in Jisung not to run after him, start throwing fists and biting him, because at least one person would be feeling the pain that’s owed to them. 

He doesn’t know what will give him back the control he needs but it’s not being here. This place is only eroding at his soul, chipping away at him slowly, piece by piece. He breathes deep and it’s not really helping but it’s also not really hurting so… it could be worse. He doesn’t know how to process any other way.

“Hello, little full. ” Mr Seo speaks, quietly, as he leans on the table next to Jisung. His scent is just like his son’s, warm and heavy, slipping under Jisung’s defences like it’s entitled to be there. 

“Hey, Mr Seo.” His voice breaks, just a little bit but neither of them comment on it. Jisung is polite to Changbin’s father. He’s… he’s aware of how much Mr Seo has done for them. Usually, he’s not one for being polite, using his honorifics, but… he knows where he stands with Mr Seo. 

“How are you?” 

“Don’t… don’t ask me that question.” Jisung shakes his head. “Please.” 

“Okay.” And Mr Seo doesn’t. That’s the level of trust there. Jisung has sharp teeth, Jisung bites, Mr Seo understands how to not push him out of his comfort zone. It’s an agreement. “Do you want some water?”

“I broke the jug.” The mess is still there, broken glass all over the floor, but the water has long since dried. He should really clean it up. 

It’s his mess. He’s supposed to clean up his shit. Chan always made it a rule in the house - you break it, you clear it up and that was because of Jisung’s habit of just… being a tornado with fangs through life and people’s possessions. Changbin can vouch for him on that front, at least. 

“We got some more. While you were sleeping.” He holds out a bottle of water. It’s room temperature now, but Jisung will accept it. The headache that’s brewing in his teeth is uncomfortable and the water will only help. Mr Seo opens it carefully for Jisung. He drinks deeply and Mr Seo doesn’t rush him. 

Only when he’s drunk half the bottle, his thirst slightly abated for a while does Jisung speak again. “I… was it bad?”

“I don’t know.” Mr Seo leans a little further on the table, turning to speak to Jisung. “In a conventional court…” 

“We’d be in prison for contempt at this point.” 

“Jail. Prison is for the convicted.” Precise man, just like his son. Always has to be right. “But yes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but yes. Standing on tables and throwing things… never usually goes well for a defendant.” Mr Seo laughs, a little tired and slightly delirious. “But here… the judges are watching for something else.” 

“Like what?”

“I have no idea. But… but something about that last session, the questions they were asking… they were much more focused than the previous judge. They didn’t want us lawyers which is… well, it’s the downside of The Elder Court.” He rubs his temples, the greying hair there just enough to show refined gentleman without seeming to be too old. Jisung knows it’s a fine art. “They were looking for something in particular and I don’t know if they got it but… but I think they did.” 

“Do you think we convinced Min?” Jisung holds onto his water bottle, wipes the wet streaks from his cheeks. God, he’s so tired. “Do you think we gave her enough to come to our side?”

“...Perhaps.” Mr Seo looks at him, his eyes narrowing. 

“What about Gye? Do you really think he’s still fighting to give Felix to the Lees?” 

“Possibly.” 

“We held Yi, though?”

“How did you know about that?” Mr Seo says, and his face is stern. “That was a private conversation.” 

“You really need to start checking under tables if you want a private conversation.” Jisung isn’t afraid of sharing his secrets. It was a lucky chance that he got that much. 

“...It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with your delinquency.” Mr Seo sounds so much like his son (exasperated but also amused) that Jisung can’t help but laugh, just a little bit, broken and angry still. “Under the table? Really?”

“I miss my den.” 

“I see.” He doesn’t push further than that and Jisung appreciates it. “As for your question… I know Min seems more… settled. She got the answers to the questions she wanted. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, I don’t know. I genuinely don’t. But I trust my instincts that she came out here looking for something, and she got it.” 

“Oh.” Jisung clutches the water bottle that Mr Seo gave him, and he doesn’t… he doesn’t know where else to go from here. Everything in him is so tight, so caught up that he doesn’t know if he can even get up from the table. “Where are we going now?”

“Back to the side room.” 

“And then we wait?” 

“We do.” Mr Seo nods. 

Jisung doesn’t know why he’s so desperate to hear someone else say the same thing the judges did but he needs… he’s seeking reassurance from an authority figure, and he’s fully aware that right now, Chan isn’t capable of giving that. He’s still being held by Minho, supported by the pack, and Jisung… 

He needs an alpha for him. 

“Why don’t we walk back together?” Mr Seo holds out a hand for Jisung’s. “Mr Bang… I think he needs to rest for a while longer here.” 

“You don’t mind?” Mr Seo knows that Jisung is not allowed to be unattended - his cuffs are part of his licence agreement and so is him not being alone when he wears them - so it isn’t that weird that he’s offering. But also, this is Changbin’s dad. He doesn’t know if he’s okay with being Jisung’s babysitter for a while. 

“I don’t.” He offers his hand again. 

“I need to clear up… the glass.” Jisung thinks this is important. Maybe it will be, maybe it won’t but he wants to stick to his rules and there’s a fucking first for him. Rules are safety, though, keeping him on the path to staying with Chan and he’s never really got out of that mindset. 

“There’s a cleaner’s cart in the hall.” Ko-Woon says, behind Mr Seo. “We… I was going to get Tae-Hyun to do it but…” 

“I think perhaps this little full wants to clean up the mess he made. Am I correct, Jisung-ah?” Mr Seo reaches for Jisung’s shoulder.

“I -” Ko-Woon looks confused. Jisung doesn’t blame him. It’s been a fucking weird day and seeing Jisung cleaning won’t fix that. 

“Why don’t you get Tae-Hyun to bring it in, Ko-Woon? Please?” Mr Seo doesn’t stop looking at Jisung. 

Tae-Hyun probably does deserve the fucking janitor cart, dumped over his head, but Jisung won’t do that. He’ll play nicely. 

The other lawyers gather the papers on the table, the ones that are creased from Jisung sitting on them, but nobody says anything about it. They pack them neatly into the folders, stacking them on the edge of the desk, and when they’re done, they pick them up, dividing them fairly because they’re all reasonable, fair people. Jisung isn’t. He would have left most of them for Changbin to carry. 

As they go back, the lawyers swerve out of the way of Tae-Hyun, returning with his prize, apologising briefly. The janitor cart is fully laden, covered in a wet floor sign, mops and brooms jutting out of it like the spines of a lion fish. It clatters and lurches down the centre aisle of the courtroom, and Jisung can barely see Tae-Hyun over the top of it. 

But he knows what he needs to clear up the mess he made. It’s… it’s not soothing - nothing is going to soothe him right now if it’s not Felix - but it’s normal. 

Jisung starts with the bag, opening it out, making sure there’s no holes in it before he gets to work. It doesn’t bother him that nobody’s offered to unchain him. He’s used to working around his cuffs - at one point, he used to spend the whole day in them, and he’s never really lost the knack of it. The trick he’s learned is not to let the chain be slack between them, because then it gets caught in everything. He makes sure it’s always tight and then it means it doesn’t piss him off all the time. Then comes the dustpan and brush, sweeping the shards up carefully, making sure to keep his fingers out of the way because glass splinters are a bitch. 

The glass is spread over a wide area, the impact of it radiating shards out in a semi-circle, and Jisung is careful to go over the area multiple times, emptying the dustpan every time because he can see the tiny little fragments, the ones that would dig into skin, get in deep and become infected. It would suck to be the person who lent on the floor, maybe to retrieve a file or something, dropped by the judges, and get one of those splinters in their hand. 

He’s done it before, having a shard of glass work its way deep into his palm, a result of clearing up in bad grace. It was a quick way to cure his new found habit of throwing breakable things. After the third hospital trip to have the wound flushed and cleaned of debris, he stuck to solid things, like books and vegetables. Changbin hadn’t appreciated being pelted with a fist full of carrot cubes and broccoli florets but Jisung still stands by his claim that it was nicer than the cheap china bowl they were in. 

Only when he’s sure that he got it all, and the wood fragments from when the heavy base of the jug chipped out a little sliver of the bench itself does he carefully clean the dust pan out with a wipe from the pack on the cart, making sure it won’t be dangerous for the janitor when they come back. He’s being diligent in his task. Chan taught him to not do it half arsed and he’s never really stopped. 

He double and triple bags it, taking his time to be safe. He’s aware that the pack has filtered out of the room, Chan being taken care of by Minho and Changbin, the rest of the pack gathered close to them, supporting their Prime, and Jisung doesn’t resent them for it. Chan needs to draw on the strength of the whole pack. 

He has to be strong. 

Only Mr Seo remains, leaning against the table, watching him carefully. He doesn’t tap his watch or anything. He’s just watching, like he always does when it’s him along with Jisung. It’s the same kind of vibes that Father Tullio has. 

Jisung finishes everything as he should. He even finds a permanent marker in the cupholder of the cart, writes !!broken glass!! on the front of it to make sure the janitor doesn’t turn up, grabbing a hold of the bag of razor sharp danger. He leaves the bag on the top of the cart and drags it to the side of the well, over by Won-Shit-Stain’s table. He deserves it. Maybe he could clear up the sunflower shells he spat over the floor, the pig. Jisung can feel them under his boots, crunching into the floor and it’s still fucking disgusting. 

Only when the cart is safely out of the way, and Jisung has checked his work again - because anxiety makes him doubt - does he feel like he can leave. 

Mr Seo holds out his hand for Jisung. It’s tradition to escort a full when they are unaccompanied by a member of their pack and, in theory, it doesn’t have to be hand holding. In practicality, Mr Seo does it whenever he has to escort Jisung - and it’s been a few times, over the course of their court appearances - and Jisung has become used to it. 

He accepts Mr Seo’s hand. 

The walk back to the room is slow. Neither of them feel like rushing. It’s only hurrying back to wait more, to pace or worry or try to sleep, fitfully, on the floor. It’s not like the judges are going to pop out of their deliberation chambers in the next five seconds. Jisung stumbles through the corridors, Mr Seo guiding him. Cleaning has reset him but it won’t last for long. It only restored him back to the four he was at the beginning, unstable and scared, still on the verge of being silent and drowning in his own mind. It’s weird how that happens. 

Chan always said that Jisung needs to drop after this kind of thing and it’s been too long and he can’t drop and he’s paying the price for it now. Jisung took a long time to be comfortable with Chan always being right. 

“Are you going to pray again?” Jisung asks, and he doesn’t know what makes him want to ask but the words just fall out of his mouth as Mr Seo guides him through another set of double doors. He’s got no fucking clue where he’s going but that doesn’t matter. His question is more important to him. 

“Yes.” Mr Seo is good. He doesn’t even bat an eyelid at Jisung’s question. “Would you like to join us?” 

“I - you don’t mind?”

“We are all God’s children, little full. ” He doesn’t ask why Jisung would ask such a question but he holds tighter onto Jisung’s hand, leading him through the corridors. “I am sorry you did not join us last time.” 

“I - I needed… to be in the den.” 

“But you would like to pray with us this time?” Mr Seo presses the lift door button for him. “You’re welcome to join. Do you have a rosary?” 

“I… I don’t…” Jisung shies away from that question. 

“Then we will pray with just our hands and our voices.” When Mr Seo is like this, Jisung can see Changbin in him, the confidence, the way that he just sails past the potential trouble of Jisung’s complicated history with the rosary, redirecting the flow of the conversation around the issue like it doesn’t need to be even acknowledged. 

“Can we… Can we pray to Mary?” 

“Is she your patron?” 

“Yes.” Jisung chose her, against the wishes of his grandparents. They wanted him to be named for some loser who died because his son converted a chieftain during missionary work. Jisung wanted Mary, Mother of God to walk with him as he struggled to find his place in the world. He dreamed about her often even as his grandparents said that only alphas should have that gift. 

Jisung won precious few fights in those days, but that was one where he dug his heels and his fangs in and he refused to yield. He wanted Mary and nobody else. It took weeks for them to break but he would not accept any other saint and the date of his Confirmation came closer and closer and they had already pushed it off four times because they said he wasn’t ready. 

People would talk more than they already did if they kept pushing and pushing and pushing it back because then he would be too old and they wouldn’t be able to go to church and pretend he was just having some anxiety at that point. It would be noticeable and that was worse than anything for his grandparents. People would gossip about their unruly grandchild, the full with behavioural problems and a smart mouth that didn’t like alphas, even though he was almost of marriageable age, when alphas would come looking for his hand. 

Jisung got his way. 

He walked down the aisle of the Most Holy Church of the Immaculate Heart of Jesus Christ when he was eleven years old, with a black eye and venom in his mouth, burning his split lip. His backside burned under his skirt and he knew it was a fight that he would feel for days afterwards, the punishment for being defiant beaten into him like they had promised. He didn’t care. It was worth it to be Confirmed with Mary as his patron, knowing he was now in her service rather than some dog of a saint who didn’t do shit for him. 

“Then of course, we can pray to Mary.” Mr Seo guides Jisung into the lift, presses the button for the right floor. “I think that it would be very fitting to offer our prayers to the Mother of God now. It feels right to seek her protection and her courage to face trying times.”

There’s silence for a moment, while the lift takes them two floors up, and Jisung looks at Mr Seo, his face so serious and quiet in the harsh light. He doesn’t say anything and Mr Seo looks back at him, his gaze gentle. He looks… fatherly. 

God, Jisung misses his father. 

“Is there a reason you want to pray to her in particular, little full ?” The lift dings as Mr Seo asks his question. 

“I… I want to pray for her to help Felix.” Jisung isn’t quite sure why this is so important but he wants to be clear on why he needs Mary’s intervention here. “He… he needs her.” 

“Then we will do that.” Mr Seo opens the last set of double doors, leading to the corridor of side rooms. All the other doors are shut - Won-Dog-Dick and the hospital lawyers are all hidden away in their rooms - and only the door to Chan’s side room is left ajar, spilling light over the floor.

Jisung is so tired. 

He’s so scared of what is going to happen next. 

But Mr Seo’s hand in his is warm and safe and strong and his voice is so earnest when he says we’ll ask for Our Mother, Mary to help us and Jisung knows it’s the right thing to do. The cross at Mr Seo’s throat, glinting on his necklace, falls out of his shirt collar, hanging next to his blue silk tie. Jisung knows it’s a sign that he needs to put his trust in someone and if it can’t be the judges, and it can’t be the lawyers and it can’t even be Chan because everything is falling and crumbling and unstable under his feet, then it needs to be someone else. 

Mary once moved heaven and earth for Felix, guiding him out of Australia and keeping him in her protective shadow until he was with Chan and Jisung. 

She kept him safe. 

And now, Jisung will pray to her to do it again, beg for her to take Felix under her mantle, bring him to her side like a good mother would do to her child, because she’s a better fucking mother from Heaven than Felix’s own mother is down here on earth. He’ll ask her to intercede with God himself if she needs to because Mary loves all of her children, just like God does. 

And Felix needs her now, more than ever. 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Four hours. Four fucking hours. 

That’s how long it takes to get a verdict. 

Jisung struggles every minute of every hour, his body and his self control stretched to the fucking limits. He’s never done it like this - never had to hold himself - and all of the training, the lessons Chan has taught him are being pushed to the brink 

He prays twice with Mr Seo. 

The first time is with everybody, lawyers, and the pack, excluding Minho and Chan, all of them in a circle. Changbin holds onto one of his hands and Mr Seo holds onto the other one and neither of them say a damn thing about the chains. They pray to Mary and to Jesus, and to God himself, asking them for strength in the face of adversity, to bring the pack comfort and strength in these dark times, to keep the devils at bay and the temptations of evil from the judges so they may make their decision with justice and mercy and Jisung doesn’t know if it’s enough. 

Seungmin stands across from him, his eyes dark and careful as he watches Jisung, paying attention to him in a way that Jisung isn’t used to from Minnie. But then again, nothing is normal about today or this week or anything ever again and he doesn’t know if this is something that Minnie will keep doing or if it’s just for now or if he’s not even aware of it. 

Jeongin is restless. He can’t stay still, can’t settle, not even when Chan calls him to his side to let Jeongin sit at his knee, keep him close to comfort him with his Prime’s scent. He’s constantly staring at the phone that Changbin has in his pocket, the one that keeps going off every few minutes until Changbin turns it off. 

After that, Jeongin look somehow more at ease but also more exhausted, more worried than ever. 

Jisung is left to his own devices for a while, lost in the shuffle as the lawyers plan and discuss what happened, and the pack tries to reconnect. He can’t cope with being out in the open air, so he ends up under the table, the heavy conference one in the middle of the room. Chan brings him his headphones, and Changbin hooks them up to his phone because Chan’s is dying again, and the heartbeat comes back because that’s all he can tolerate. He takes Hyunjin’s coat under the table with him, wraps himself in it so he’s small and warm, and nobody says shit about it to him. They leave him there, headphones on, and Minho slides a water bottle over to him, without making eye contact because something about Jisung is so on edge he’s making everybody else like that, too. 

The second time they pray, half way through the waiting period, it’s just him and Mr Seo and Changbin, close together, and praying for Felix in particular, asking Mary to intercede for him, and Jisung doesn’t understand why it makes his fangs want to relax for the first time all week. 

He doesn’t doubt that it’s a message - he’s sure it is, his fangs aware of danger long before he is - but he can’t make sense of it. 

Maybe he’s just too tired. 

He tries to eat but nothing feels good in his empty belly and he doesn’t force it after his stomach lurches in a very unhappy way as he nibbles on some crackers that the lawyers have bought. He knows if he pushes it, tries to eat, that’s a fine way to end up throwing up into the toilets and he feels like death anyway. 

He doesn’t want to be sick in this place. 

It feels like a museum, cold and impersonal, and he is lost inside of it. 

The toilets, when Seungmin guides him down the corridor to the only full omega ones on the floor, are just as bad as he remembers: ice cold, the water from the sink freezing his hands, the air on his skin burning. He looks in the mirror and sees curls in his hair, put there via running his hands through it, the madness in his eyes, flickering the blue there like he hasn’t had for years at this point. 

He’s backsliding. It's in his scent now, in his eyes, in his whole body, and there's no escaping it. When he comes back, the others can tell he’s going downhill fast. Jagi collars him and makes him sleep. There’s no choice here, no option to say thank you but no thank you. That’s… that’s not how it works. 

Jisung knows how it has to go with his jagi. Lie down, close his eyes, go to sleep. Or Minho will make him lie down, close his eyes, and go to sleep. That’s what happens, no matter what. He chooses to not fight, to let Minho put him back on the blanket with the fleece for a pillow, Minho sitting beside him to stroke his back, luring him back to sleep again. 

He wishes he had fought back, though. 

Something is wrong with him, making him hot and cold again, his dreams vivid and full of fear, like a stream of never ending images, burning into his mind and he can’t cope with it, the intensity so much worse than he can bear. Jisung knows he tosses and turns, calling out in his sleep because he wakes himself up doing it. The lawyers look at him, concerned for him, the way he fights his chains before he realises what they are, panting like he ran uphill inside but he doesn’t really come too, doesn’t start to function as a real life human being, just existing in that horrible state between sleep and waking, where nothing feels right and everything is too much. 

Sleep has him in a chokehold, and he shakes and trembles his way through these dreams, his chains clinking and rattling, the noise invading his dreams. It’s been years since he slept like this and he doesn’t know why it’s coming back now, but he can’t stop it. 

When he used to sleep like this, Chan would take him to the studio, let him mess around with music and sounds, locked in with his headphones on, his ankle chained under the desk, because they didn’t have a lock on the door and Jisung was notorious for bolting at a moment’s notice. 

Chan would sleep on the chair in the corner, covered in his coat as a blanket, and Jisung wouldn’t sleep again for days because he would be too scared to, trying to force his body to crash because at least then it wouldn’t be real and he didn’t have to see these dreams, and Jisung hated them then and he hates them now. 

It feels always like falling, like running, like drowning, and he can’t cope with it, can’t figure out what his brain needs because it keeps slamming the images in front of his eyes, into his mind, like it thinks these things are important but he can’t see them fast enough, can’t understand what it wants from him and the part of his brain that is all animal and no human tries to take over, tries to seize control and he’s not allowed to give into that. 

He has to be good. 

But it’s so hard when he dreams like this. 

He dreams again of guns and knives, of the statue of Mother Mary in his church, the way that her mantle is stained with the blood of Christ, her gaze looking not upwards to God in Heaven but down to Jisung on the floor, kneeling and helpless before her because that is the blood of her son and she will not rest until her child is returned to her. Jisung feels the checkerboard floor of the church fall away underneath him, and he falls down into the sky, looking down over the world as Felix bleeds and screams. He sees the pack run run running away, the forests swallowing them up, the mountains soaring into the sky to become impenetrable barriers, impossible to go back and impossible to go forward as he hurtles towards them, helplessly pulled along by something so much bigger than he is.

He wakes again when his body hits the rock but then it doesn’t and he doesn’t really stir, either, plunging back into sleep, down into the cold depths of the ocean and he hates the ocean because he can’t swim, it wasn’t allowed and he’s never just got around to learning, but now he should, and he can’t breath as something pulls him deep into the black. 

He sees the pack in snatches, unsure if it’s real or if it’s his dreams throwing them in there, Changbin’s face, serious and strong, Minho’s worried and exhausted, Jeongin with dark circles and red bitten lips. He sees Hyunjin, white faced and full of fear, Seungmin, bowing his head low so nobody can see his face, the glimpse of his eyes that Jisung can see bright and red in the dull light. 

Chan stands over him, his eyes bright golden, so full of the weight of Primacy, and red, like blood and like fire, blazing bright in a pale face, and Jisung shakes when he sees it because he’s breaking. 

He’s falling apart. 

Sometimes, Jisung can fool himself, think he’s got everything in hand, he knows how to be himself now, and he’s grown, so he can cope with everything and then his brain grabs him by the back of his neck and forces him down to his knees and down to the ground and down into submission because he is not grown and he cannot cope with what lives inside his own head. 

He’s out of control and he knows it. 

When he stirs, properly, sleep leaving him like he’s pulling himself out of quicksand, slow and heavy and exhausted, Jisung doesn’t know what’s happened. He aches like he’s not done for a long time, and he can’t move. For a second, he wonders if he’s back in the cells, in the full restraints that used to be his constant companion during his heats, but then he sees the ceiling, and it’s too high, too grand for a cell. 

He remembers, slowly. 

He’s lying on his front, his hands clasped together, and he’s covered in a coat that he doesn’t remember putting on. It’s Minho’s green one, the inside covered in the scent of an old forest and the temple incense. He can’t move, though. Minho is there, wrapped around him, and not a centimetre of space between them. He’s covering him like Jisung hasn’t needed in a long time. When he was bad in the beginning, when his anxiety rode to the fore, Chan used to do deep pressure therapy with him, lying his full weight on top of him, forcing Jisung to recognising his body, the limits of his flesh and bones, and Minho is doing it too, with him, now. 

Minho has never done this before. It used to be only Chan that did this. Jisung isn't sure what that means. 

“Babe?” Chan is lying next to him, holding Jisung’s chains, as he covers him from the front, and he never used to need two people to do this. Jisung can’t understand what’s happening with him, with his body, and he’s unsure, on edge immediately. 

What the fuck happened?

He knows his scent changes instantly, and they respond to it, both Chan and Minho in perfect sync. In the space of a breath, Jisung has both of them crowding close, warm and strong all around him. 

Chan asks him softly, “Are… are you with us?”

“Why?”

“Because… because you haven’t been.” Chan is not saying something and he looks behind Jisung, to Minho, to seemingly acknowledge something that Minho has done. 

“I…” He doesn’t have words and Changbin appears behind Chan, holding a bottle of water. He nods to it. “P’ease.” His throat is so dry. 

Chan lets him sit up to drink. Minho stays close, his arm now around Jisung’s waist, near enough to feel every inch of Minho’s body against his. He drinks deep, the water cold, and the air colder against his skin. He wants his hoodie back now. Chan holds his hand against Jisung’s neck, checking his pulse and Jisung shakes in Minho’s hold. 

“What… what happened?”

“I… I don’t know.” 

“You dreamed of bad things?” Minho whispers in his ear, soft and quiet like he does in the middle of the night, when Jisung has nightmares. He’ll never judge, never get mad about being woken by flailing arms or the blankets being kicked off. He just holds Jisung, whispering into his ear, comforting him with touch and love. 

Jisung has never been so grateful for finding jagi on the street, dancing, than he is on those nights, when the world is too much and he needs someone to keep it at bay for him. 

“I think there’s a verdict coming.” Jisung says and what the fuck gives him the right to say so, he has no idea. He feels confident in saying it, the words feeling right in his mind and in his mouth, but there’s no reason why. 

“What makes you say that?” Minho whispers and he doesn’t for one second sound like he’s doubting Jisung. For him, that’s normal. It’s okay to say things like this. “Did you dream it?” 

Jisung loves him so much. 

But he can’t explain himself. It feels like he’s crested the mountain, the hard work and the brutal punishment of pushing his body to the brink now beginning to fade, and now, this is the slip-slide down the otherside, gaining momentum with every second that goes by and he doesn’t know if he’ll hit the bottom or take flight half way down. But he knows it begins with the verdict coming down. He doesn’t know what will happen, whether it’s good or bad, but the wind has stopped howling again, just for a moment and it’s like the world is holding it’s breath again. Something in Jisung knows that this is going to happen, something in him knows that this is coming, and he needs to be ready for it. 

The lawyers look at each other. “There’s been no verdict, little full. ” Mr Seo looks at him. “The judges haven’t sent anything.” 

“It’s coming.” Jisung is confident in this. What gives him that confident, who knows, but he isn’t willing to back down. 

“We’ve - it’s been four hours since they went to deliberate again, little full. It could be hours more.” 

“It won’t.” 

“I’m sorry.” Mr Seo says, and his face is kind because he thinks Jisung is distressed from the nightmare. He is but that’s beside the point. “I know it’s hard -”

A knock, at the door, freezes Mr Seo in place. The other lawyers look at each other again, but they aren’t humouring Jisung, playing along with a worried little full, now. 

“Jeongin, get that.” Chan says, his face serious. 

It’s a telling sign that Jeongin doesn’t even think to object or to go slowly to the door, reluctant to obey an order. No, he opens it immediately, letting whoever is inside into the room. 

It’s the court clerk. It’s the same one as before, and he doesn’t doubt she’s also on her knees exhausted, having worked so hard to keep the entire court case going, supplying the judges. They’ve been waiting for this case for so long and there’s literally no other cases going on in the entire building. He’s checked. It’s just them, only them, duking it out for Felix’s Primacy. 

Jisung holds his breath. 

“The Elder Court has reached a verdict,” she says and Jisung’s world ceases to turn. “They would like you to return to the courtroom, please.” 

Jisung will never forget the way that Chan turns to look at him, his eyes so deep, so intense, and he doesn’t say anything. He just stares at Jisung, considering him, as if he can see something new in him, and Jisung doesn’t know what that means. 

“Mr… Mr Bang?” Myung-Ki calls out to him. “Mr Bang?”

But it takes a long moment for Chan to look away from him, for him to break that fierce gaze and Jisung can’t do anything but offer up what he knows he has in his heart. Chan’s never done that to him before, never looked at him like that, but he doesn’t feel threatened by it. 

He’s never felt threatened by Chan. 

He just… wants so much for this to be over. 

The race down the corridor feels… it feels dangerously familiar. Minho is holding his hand, and his chains are still on. The pack crowds into one lift, gathering close, everybody reaching out to touch Chan, because they need to give him strength, and Jisung watches him close his eyes, tilting his face up as he breathes in deep. 

Just a little more. Just a little bit more. 

Chan doesn’t pray. He doesn’t speak to God like most of the pack does, and he doesn’t speak to the Goddess, like Minho. Chan draws from the pack instead, and Jisung presses his hands on Chan’s chest, next to Minho’s and just below Changbin’s on his shoulder. He needs Chan to know just how much he’s hoping for the right answer, just how hard he prayed, how much he begged Mary to give them their baby as if she was going to be the judge instead. 

The ding of the lift arriving on their floor breaks the immersion, the beauty of the moment shattered. Chan opens his eyes and the red in them is steady again, gold strong like it should be. But he still holds Minho’s hand, as they leave the lift, the rest of the pack encircling them, because Chan needs his wife. Minho is strong and his eyes are blue, and he is holding the line for Chan, holding what he can for his husband and it makes Jisung love them both even more. 

They file into the courtroom, carried along by a rushing river, and Jisung feels like he’s not so much running but fighting to stay above the water, every breath hard won and not enough at the same time. Everything in Jisung is cold and hot and tired and too awake and too alive at the same time he feels like he’s dying. 

Nothing makes sense anymore. 

His dreams, twisted and wrong, full of imagery of saints and death, feel like they’re haunting him, one step behind him all the time. They’re there, just past the corner of his eye, in the flickering of lights and the flash of snow past the window, high up in the court room so all Jisung can see is a pitch black sky and the snow, darting past as it still continues to snow. 

The pack crowds around the table, no longer content to be split apart. They mix with the lawyers who try to calm them, touching their shoulders, Jisung’s arms, telling them to relax, let this happen as it comes, and Jisung really doesn’t think he can relax now. 

But Mr Seo holds him by the back of his neck, not a Hold, but just a scuff, gentling him without hurting him and he knows he needs it. He trusts Mr Seo to know and understand the difference between them. Jisung saw own his reflection in the lift, eyes so blue they’re glowing, his cheeks red with fever like he’s coming down with something, and he knows he’s on edge because his fangs are sensitive and the venom bitter in his mouth. 

“The judges will be out soon,” Myung-Ki says, his face serious. “Please, please, remember that we can appeal again. We do have options.” 

The pack all look at him, at how he’s trying to calm them, his scent soft and soothing like it’s been the entire time. He’s trying to prepare them for the worst and on a logical level, Jisung knows why. They may still lose. 

It might be that this is the end of their appeal for now. 

But he can’t think like that. He cannot. He won’t. He has to have hope. Mary is working and he needs to trust. His hands shake in their chains and he doesn’t know how to respond to it. 

“Come here.” Chan says, and he pulls Jisung closer, to his side, and Jisung comes willingly. It feels right to be tucked into Chan’s body, and he loves the kiss pressed to the side of his head, the one that Chan gives him and it says i love you, babe, more than words could right now. 

They wait. It takes time for the court to swing itself back into action. The court guards, the ones that were there with Judge Park come back, standing around behind the Judge’s desk. Their guns on their belts are very much noticed by everybody in the room. 

Won-Fuck-Stick returns, sweat stains beginning to show under his arms as he tries desperately to shove his jacket on, his hair messy like he was sleeping. He has creases on his cheek and his shirt is crumpled. He looks like he was ridden hard and put away in a dustbin. The smell of old sweat that comes from him as he passes the pack is…. Unpleasant. 

Jisung wants to throw something at him but he notes that the only things left on the courtroom tables are now plastic water bottles, arranged in a nice formation. But still, no crystal glasses and jug for him. 

Too bad. 

“All rise, please, for the judges.” One of the guards says, his hand resting on his baton, as the other opens the door to the back of the court. 

Jisung holds his breath. 

The judges file in - Gye, then Min, then Yi following up at the back - and they clearly have taken the time to rest, too. Min’s hair is back in her perfect bun, and the ink stain on Yi’s collar has disappeared. Perhaps she’s in a new robe. Gye alone looks the same, but his face is less… pissy than it was before. They take their seats in silence, the courtroom watching them intently. Every change, every difference, Jisung knows they’re all trying to read something into it but there’s nothing to read there. What happens now has already been decided. The verdict has already been written and decided on. 

It hurts Jisung’s heart but he has to hope. 

Judge Gye has a small stack of papers in front of him, in a neat brown file, looking so very insignificant and small for what it is. He licks his finger as he opens the cardboard cover, holding it with both hands. He looks like he’s about to begin a sermon, with his black robes and white cravat and Jisung isn’t sure he wants to hear this one. 

The expressions on all three judges' faces are fierce and determined. They’re no longer hiding their feelings, trying to keep neutral, not leaning to one side or the other. They’ve let go of that, revealing more and more of how they feel and Jisung… again, it’s another sign, but he can’t read it because he’s losing control, unable to see past the worry and the fear that has him in a chokehold and that’s making him more on edge. 

Chan holds Jisung's hand, intertwining their fingers because this is it. 

This is the end. 

Jisung can’t breathe. 

The judges look at each other. Judge Yi opens a file in front of her, takes out something to pass to Judge Gye. 

“So. We have reached our verdict.” Judge Gye holds his hands together in front of him, over whatever he was given, and his tone isn’t glad or pleasant. “And we must say, it took time to reach it.” 

“We understand, Your Honour.” Chan bows his head, exhaustion in every line of his body. 

“I don’t think you do.” 

“You - Your Honour?” 

“I don’t think you understand. In fact, I think this is a place where you have been trying to understand and failing. From the beginning, you and your pack have been… defiant. We have spoken to Judge Park, too, discussed with her how you behaved in her courtroom.” 

“I -” Myung-Ki is lost and the other lawyers are looking at each other, their eyes wide. This is absolutely not what they were expecting. 

Jisung knew it could come to this. In his experience, judges have a bad habit of holding onto their anger and then using it to fuel their verdicts instead. It’s never ended well for him. He’s livid but he’s not surprised. 

 “You are rude.” Gye isn’t stopping. “You are rude and you are impatient and you have no respect for this process.” 

Chan’s knuckles go white as he grips onto both Minho and Jisung’s hands. 

“Your fulls are rude. They are disgraceful in how they behave in public. They are impudent and disobedient. They stand on tables in courtrooms, shouting at judges and attorneys, demanding to be heard when they should be quiet. They don’t obey when they’re told to be silent. They refuse to heed an alpha’s order, and they insist on speaking over alphas in a space like this. It is uncivilised.” 

Chan is brimming with unmitigated anger, hostility pouring out of him. Behind him, Jising sees Changbin’s fangs coming out, and Seungmin’s thick, fat fangs, and even Jeongin’s uneven ones, the left pair still not dropping as far as the ones on the right. 

But Gye isn’t finished. “They were uncouth in public. They were sarcastic, snide even, and they back talked to alphas as if they were equals.”

Jisung’s fangs are out, too, loud and proud, too big to fit in his mouth and sharp as knives, venom gushing now, because this is what he’s come to expect from the legal system after all this time fighting it. Being right is irrelevant. It’s all about what the judges think and feel and they always get it wrong. 

“And it is clear that you have permitted it. You have not educated it out of him in the case of the little full, and you have tolerated it from your wife. I understand the mountains are far from here but you have lived in Seoul for over two years. It is absolutely antithetical to the standards of conduct of this court.” The judge is pointing his finger, making his point with jabs at Minho and Hannie. “You have let them run free, unencumbered by rules and restrictions.” 

“I don’t -”

“Mr Bang, this is not your time to talk. This is our time.” Judge Gye takes a deep breath. “I will have my say and you will be silent.”

Minho’s eyes, on the other side of Chan, are burning blue, anger pouring out of him, his scent bitter and burning. He’s barely holding on, too. 

“And this is the consequence of such rudeness. Your fulls cannot even be demure when they are in front of us, standing with their Prime. Blue eyes and fangs like some kind of fighters, sizing up for battle, it’s uncivilised.” Gye points to the rest of the pack, pointing to each member in turn. “Your pack is no better. Running in the well of the court, shouting and demanding things of judges and attorneys, being rude and aggressive. It’s no wonder they are like this, seeing how you behave in court, too.” 

The judge is red faced, his expression fierce and Han simultaneously feels like a five year old being scolded and like he wants to fight the judge with everything he’s got because the judge is wrong and he’s fucking rude, not the pack. Jisung is over being treated like a child when nobody else seems to realise that they are the only side that understands how fucked up this whole thing is. 

Condescending fuck. 

Jisung should never have thought of him as grandfatherly. 

Chan’s fangs are long and naked, the ivory white of them beautiful to Jisung, even as they are bared in a futile gesture of anger and despair because Chan knows that this is it. 

This is the end of the line. 

Felix has already been signed over to his father. The other judge did what she could to protect Felix but Jisung isn’t stupid. She’s given him a death sentence, despite the fact that Felix is entirely innocent. He doesn’t even know he’s full, he doesn’t even know the pain his parents want to subject him, and he doesn’t even know how hard the pack has fought for him - fought and lost, despite everything they’ve tried. Even if the other judges let her ruling stand, the best they can hope for is Felix’s bare survival. He doesn’t think they’ll go that far, though - it’s clear that the judges have rejected them. 

Won- Nightmare over the other side of the courtroom is looking smug as fuck, all proud and happy, like his shit lawyering and shit paperwork and shit clients won this case, like he actually did something, and Jisung sees the fat of his neck, the way that it’s just begging for fangs to embed themselves in deep. 

“Your fulls, Mr Bang, have smart mouths and think they can talk over judges, that they can say things and stand here and be equal to alphas. They think that we have to listen to them, as if they have value in what they are telling us.” 

Minho snarls at that, savage like Jisung almost never sees out of him, his fangs so pretty in the light, strong and thick and barbed, and Jisung feels Chan’s hand shaking so hard in his. 

Jisung feels the tears welling up in his eyes, losing the battle with his self control because what is the fucking point anymore. They’re losing someone they love, forced to give him up to people who absolutely cannot love him and Jisung knows that because nobody sane could force their child to do this. Nobody at all. 

“And that is what young Felix needs.” Judge Gye lifts up what Judge Yi gave him a minute ago and Jisung feels his heart stutter in his chest, behind the bars of his ribs. 

It’s Felix. 

It’s a picture of Felix, from just after they debuted, his hair a soft brown, and his smile so sweet. He’s a little shy, reading a script, a candid shot taken by someone - a pack member, Jisung can’t remember who - and he seems so… so bright. So full of hope. 

He looks like theirs. 

And then he thinks about what Gye said, and his heart freezes all over again because he doesn’t understand. He can’t figure out the meaning of the words. 

“This is the boy we have been debating. We agree with you that it is important to keep him in mind during all of our discussions, in all our decisions about his future. He is the most important person in this room. He is also the only one who does not get to speak for himself. We, as the finders of fact and the ones who will give the ruling, must keep that in mind.” Jisung closes his eyes. After all of this, something - something - got through to them and it was that. “His life is precious. His spirit must be protected, his body honoured in everything we do. That - that alone - will be our guiding light for this verdict. We must not stray from that.”

"We concur, Your Honour." Myung-Ki murmurs, his hands tightly clasped behind him, his wedding ring held between his fingers. His scent is confused and lost for the first time in all the hours that he's been fighting for Felix. 

“He needs people who will fight for him. People who won’t look at authority and back down because they’re smaller or because they are full.” Judge Gye takes a deep breath. “He needs people who will love him for who he is and will fight to the bitter end to protect that, no matter what.” 

Chan is lost, looking back and forth between Mr Seo, the judges, and the pack, and so are the other lawyers. This is not what they expected at all. 

“What the actual fuck?” Jisung is pretty sure - like, ninety nine percent sure - that Mr Seo did not intend for that to come out but it did and it hit at the quiet moment of the courtroom. Judge Yi looks away, her face just beginning to break into a smile. 

Judge Gye turns the page of the verdict, moving on past Mr Seo’s interruption. “Your fulls rode to Felix’s defence like nothing I have ever seen before. The passion in their argument, their unwillingness to submit because they were righteously defending someone who could not possibly defend himself is a mark of their bravery and their conviction in doing what is right.” The judge folds his hands in front of him and looks down at them all. 

“I - Your Honour?” Chan’s fangs don’t know whether to stay or go, and that’s so funny to Jisung and it shouldn’t be, not at this time, but it is. 

“They persisted. Your little full there, the one called Han Jisung defied order after order to be silent and to stand down because they felt that the pursuit of justice was so much more important than silence and decorum.” The fact that Gye knows his name and has finally chosen to use it isn’t lost on Jisung at all. 

Just Min takes over, the folder being passed to her. “They were correct to do so.” 

“I - I -” Chan is daunted by the sudden shift from angry and reprimanding to calm and kind, his scent snapping back from the enraged bitter and burnt reek of gasoline and bloody copper to something confused, swirling with intensity, but also, loving. Jisung has known Chan for long enough to know the difference. The softness of his scent that only comes out when he’s seeing his pack with warmth and tenderness… it’s present now. 

Chan is exhausted and his control of his scent is utterly lost but it’s making him achingly honest in a way that Jisung has rarely seen from him. Usually, he’s carefully controlled, keeping his scent even and calm because that’s what the pack needs from him but now, he’s just reflecting what he feels, the emotional confusion making his scent deep and full of his feelings, unhindered and exposed. 

It’s beautiful and it hurts because it took Chan being pushed this far to get him here.

“Your wife, Lee Minho, stood his ground when we questioned his marriage, his dedication to his Yongbokkie, his ability to teach him anew. He refused to be cowed by our prejudice against him. He would not allow us to misunderstand these very important things about his ability to understand and to provide us with alternative perspectives. He was the first person to recognise that Lee Felix has always been full and you have treated him as such which formed the lynchpin of your argument.”

Jisung knows that wasn’t planned, it wasn’t pre-decided by the lawyers. Minho was the one who figured that out, just from a photograph. 

Min turns another page of the verdict. “Your fulls were brave. In the face of alphas telling them no, in the face of the weight of the court, they fought for what is right for someone they love and care deeply about. They would not be silent in the face of what could have been a grave injustice today that would have left a young full suffering and ruined for the rest of his life.” The judge’s voice is not angry and loud now. “They are admirable young people. As their Prime, you should be very very proud of them.” 

Chan is looking up at the judges, almost swaying on his feet. 

Jisung wants to believe. 

He wants to believe just for a moment. 

Gye is quiet when he speaks again. “The argument they presented was simple but it is the truth. In this courtroom, the truth is the highest virtue we can aspire to.” 

“Indeed, Your Honour.” Myung-Ki and all the lawyers bow their heads, like it’s a kind of prayer. 

“I have never before seen two young people who would fight so hard, so desperately for someone they love.” Gye nods to the rest of the pack. “Your pack is equally passionate. They clearly love him, too, and support your petition for Felix. You have done well with them.” 

“Mr Bang, this has been a long, hard journey for you.” Judge Min looks so motherly again when she looks at him, and Jisung sees the blue of her blouse under her robes. “You have never stopped fighting for him.”

“I couldn’t - I couldn’t let him be taken and hurt.” Chan shakes his head. “I wouldn’t ever do that to him.” 

“With this petition, it is clear where Felix must remain. He must go to people who will fight for him, who absolutely understand where he is now, and where his future lies. He must be looked after by people who do not shy away from how ill he is but who accept that the path for him must be to allow him to come into his full self, true and clear.”

“Your - Your Honour?” Won-Brain Dead looks shellshocked. “I don’t -”

“We reject the assertion of Mr and Mrs Lee that Felix was always a beta. He is not. He has a womb. He has fangs. He is unwell, his body not quite whole due to his condition, but it is clear that this is not a sudden change. He has always possessed these attributes, even though they were not known at the time. We cannot, in good faith, order that he be returned to a status he did not have and cannot lay claim to. ” 

“I don’t -”

“In short, Mr Park, Felix was never a beta. He was always a full. His nature was full and our laws are loud and clear on this - once a full, always a full, regardless of circumstance. There is no surgery, no procedure, no drug in the world that can erase his nature. Only butchery and false papers can pretend to hide it.” 

“That is accurate, Your Honour.” Mr Seo nods firmly, his expression so determined. “Felix is full. ” 

“His nature was always full. It is clear to us that he expresses it so clearly, so naturally that there is no debate here. Some part of him knew. And that is the part that his pack knew, too.” Judge Yi’s voice is clear and strong and Jisung could cry at her words. 

“He was not in a pack -”

“Mr Bang was his Prime by constructive alphaship. We looked at the totality of claims in this regards, and Mr Bang’s side was far clearer. While Mr Lee was Felix’s Prime for the first sixteen years of Felix’s life, we consider on the balance of the evidence, that Mr Lee ceded his Primacy to Mr Bang when he allowed Mr Bang to take Felix under his aegis and into his pack.” 

“He did not!” Jisung is quite sure that this is not the time to argue things, but maybe that’s because he’s a better lawyer than Won-Thick as Pigshit despite never going to law school. 

“Mr Bang did everything correctly. He found the full he wanted in his pack online. He was taken by his physical appearance, his talents, and his longest serving pack member agreed. Mr Bang then made this little full’s Prime an offer, one that was unequivocally accepted on the provision that Mr Bang do all the work.” 

Jisung knows just how difficult that work was.

But the judges aren’t finished yet. “Mr Bang brought young Felix across the sea to Korea after paying associated costs and preparing the paperwork.” Judge Yi holds up Felix’s contract, the nice one with the pretty decorations and the signature in one corner where Chan claimed himself as Prime Alpha Bang Chan. “Even after his trainee period was over, and he moved into the debut contract stage, there was no action from the Lees. It was the last possible opportunity for Mr and Mrs Lee to recall their son and Mr Lee did nothing. He remained quiet and passive. Mr and Mrs Lee chose to not interfere with this public transfer of power.”

“They didn’t know!” 

“We find this argument to be insufficient. Mr and Mrs Lee were briefed on what it would mean for the Bang pack to take Felix on once they debuted. We have copies of the emails and paper documents sent to them to explain the next steps and the dangers of not complying with signing documents etc, including the risk of Primacy being ceded. They chose not to attend the signing ceremony where they could claim the Primacy again. They refused the opportunity to express their wishes, or to even acknowledge receipt of the documents.” Judge Yi points at the various emails and contracts in her hands, each one noted with her elegant handwriting, emphasising each way the Lees failed to step up for their son. “It is clear that Mr Bang stepped up for Felix and Mr and Mrs Lee knew about what he did. They were informed, in writing. They made no effort to undo what had been done, asserting Primacy rights, or even to question it.”

“I just did what I thought was right.” Chan says, and he’s wiping tears away. 

“Mr Lee has two other children. He runs a very successful business, as does his wife. He was advised, numerous times, throughout his son’s traineeship of his right to retain counsel and discuss with them. He chose not to. He cannot simply demand a do-over because he regrets his actions up to this point.” 

Jisung watches Myung-Ki nodding, approving of Judge Yi’s words. 

“Mr Lee ceded his Primacy. As a defence for constructive alphaship, we must now examine Mr Bang’s claim. There are three prongs of the Primacy test, as per Moon-Jung v Jae-Choi, Case 153-AC-V11.” Judge Gye takes the verdict folder back again. “We have studied these prongs and determined where Mr Bang meets them to succeed in his claim against Mr Lee.”

“They’ve been detailed.” Mr Seo whispers to Myung-Ki and Jisung catches it. He thinks that’s a good thing. 

Judge Yi continues, “For prong one, we needed to investigate to what extent Felix became a pack member. We find that Mr Bang did, in fact, integrate young Felix into his pack at all levels. He sleeps with them and always has done. He has even engaged in decorating the home jointly with members of the pack, such as in his room.” She holds up a picture of Jeongin and Felix’s shared bedroom, in it’s brightly coloured glory. Jeongin has left his pillow - dark navy blue - on Felix’s bottom bunk, clashing with the bright orange. “We have determined from statements from people who work closely with the pack, video content, documents, and social media posts provided to us, along with other evidence, that Felix has built strong bonds with all members, including high ranking members. He engages in pack activities such as movie nights, social events, and is closely integrated within your friendship circles. He also attends to the pack’s needs diligently, cooking, baking, and cleaning to help maintain the harmony of the pack’s home.” She holds up the chore chart, neatly colour coded the way that Chan likes to do it. “It is clear there is much evidence here that supports this. Therefore, we find this prong satisfied.” 

Jisung is never ever going to criticise Chan’s anal retentive record keeping ever again. 

“Thank you, Your Honour.” Myung-Ki nods to Ko-Woon who is taking notes on all of this, though why, Jisung doesn’t know. 

“For prong two, we must examine to what extent other people accepted Mr Bang as Felix’s Prime or if, in fact, they would defer back to Mr Lee. We find that Mr Lee was irrelevant to outsiders when dealing with the pack. Mr Bang is also acknowledged as his Prime by others - managers, brand partners, medical personnel, and the like - and his signature or stamp was accepted for all manner of things, including brand deals, production work, and payments on Felix’s behalf. There is years of evidence of this, including in booking and paying for plane tickets to visit Mr and Mrs Lee. There was no misunderstanding here. Mr Bang held himself out to be Felix’s Prime and others responded to him as such. Mr and Mrs Lee did nothing to correct this assumption. Therefore, we consider the second prong fulfilled.”

“Again, we thank you, your Honour.” 

“Our third test, the most subjective one of all, is whether Mr Bang has been a good Prime.” Judge Gye turns another page. "This is the most difficult -" 

“It’s not possible to quantify that!”

“Mr Park, you are now in direct contempt of court. ” Judge Gye is not having any more of the bullshit from the lawyer on the other side of the room. He points his gavel at Park, the first time in all of the court case that he’s pointed it at someone other than Jisung. 

He won’t lie.

It feels good to see someone else get that condescending fucking gavel shoved at them and Won-Failure looks pissed to see it. He understands that much, at least. 

“But -”

Judge Gye slams the gavel down before pointing it at Won-Dead-Between-the-Ears again. “You have had your time. I have warned you time and time again. Since that didn’t work, I am imposing on you a fine of three million won. If you interrupt me again, I will double it and continue to double it again for each and every interruption.” 

“If the little full didn’t know he was a full - ” 

“Six million won.” Judge Gye doesn’t break eye contact, the gold in his eye vivid. “I’m more than happy to make it twelve million, Mr Park. I am sure your clients would be delighted to know that their lawyer is so eager to spend his own money on this case for his own contempt of court charges.” 

“...Yes, Your Honour.” Jisung is very happy that the twat no longer looks smug. He looks like a sad blobfish and it doesn’t suit him. Nothing would except a bag over his head, to be honest, but at least he’s quiet again. “I will keep my silence.” 

Only after he’s given the idiot over the other side another fierce look, the gold in his eyes making it so that Won-Shik absolutely is cowed into submission, does Judge Gye continue. “We accept that Mr Bang has been a good Prime for young Felix. Despite not having confirmation of his full nature, we note that Mr Bang embraced the full aspect of Felix.”

“Your Honour?” Chan is confused, his tears flowing still, and he wipes his face with his sleeve until Seungmin hands him a tissue, passing another to Jisung and another to Minho. 

“Mr Bang, you nurtured his full side. You allowed him into the nest. You allowed him to work closely with your fulls, both for his chores and for his daily living. You allowed him to develop essential bonds with both of them, which is crucial for a young full. He has a strong one with someone who will guide him through to the next stage of his life.” Judge Gye nods to Minho. “Having someone who will be his guide, who is so deeply connected to history and to tradition can only help him to learn to be full during this difficult and tumultuous time.”

“And we note that he nurtured a beautiful connection to your full omega who many told you was incurable and would need institutionalisation.” Judge Min has her hands on a thick file and Jisung would bet money that’s his Record of Punishment. She’s also not wrong. Jisung knows he was on the fast track to spending some time on a secure unit at one point before Felix arrived. “This one little full was able to reach past defences that Omega Officers, therapists, doctors, and even the courts could not get through. We know that there was a turn around in your full omega’s record of violence and of his distress. It’s a turnaround that has remained consistent for years at this point. That… that is remarkable.”

“I like Felix.” Jisung says and it has always explained why he stopped biting and started being a good boy. Nobody cared to understand him when he said it. 

“We would be remiss if we took all of that away from him.” Judge Min nods to Jisung. “Mr Bang, Minho-ssi, Jisung-ssi… He is your little one. We can see that through everything you provided.” 

“You meet all standards. You and your pack, you have loved him, cared for him, nurtured his spirit and his full side even if you could not understand what he was on a conscious level.” Judge Gye looks down at his papers for a moment, taking a deep breath. “We grant your petition for the alphaship of Lee Felix to you, Mr Bang Chan.”

Chan falls to his knees. 

They got him. 

He’s theirs. 

“Thank you.” Someone in the pack - Jisung doesn’t know who - says thank you but they’re all surging forward to hug Minho and Jisung and Chan, holding them close, a true pack hug for the first time in hours. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” 

“This court must stipulate that Felix is a very ill young full. We do not lose sight of this very important fact.” 

“I understand.” Chan says, and he’s crying, more tears, but his scent is soaring with love, exhaustion eclipsed by a deep joy, the kind that only comes from being truly, deeply, content. Jisung’s heart follows, his scent joining his Prime’s because it’s catching, someone he loves so happy now. 

“This Court has placed a number of rules on this alphaship.”

“Your Honour?” Myung-Ki comes closer, to support Chan, and Han who is kneeling next to him, hugging him close, because someone has to be the lawyer in the room, answer the Judge and Chan is not capable of it right now. 

“This is not a usual case. This little full… We deem that he needs more oversight from the Court to protect him, and to defend his rights until he finishes presenting. It is in his best interests for the Court to retain a vested interest in his Primacy and to ensure he is kept well.” 

“Anything. Anything for him.” Chan says, and he wipes away the tears but more - more are coming and Han is crying, too, but he’s so done with all of this that he doesn’t care. 

They won. 

Whatever the stipulations, whatever the rules, it doesn’t matter. Felix belongs to them. 

Gye is speaking, still. “We will record our stipulations in the verdict but they will encompass Felix’s need for court oversight, his need to be placed under the highest level of designation within the Bureau of Harmonious Pack Life, and the fact that he will require assistance from all manner of departments within the government. He will need support. You will need to train to be able to meet him. Your Third, Mr Hwang, must also join you on that path.” 

“We will.” Hyunjin presses a kiss to Jisung’s cheek, and then another to Jeongin’s hair, who just has his face buried in Minho’s neck because he’s crying, real, true tears now, his shoulders shaking. “We’ll - whatever it takes. Whatever classes we need, we’ll do it. I don’t care if it takes years, we’ll do it.”

“We’re aware that more research will need to be done into the classes to guide you towards the best education for Felix’s specific needs. We… We also know that many of the stipulations will depend on his health which we cannot accurately assess at this time. We constrain this verdict on that basis, and will amend it further once… once more information is known.” Gye is still holding Felix’s picture, and he looks at it, his face… if it was anybody else, Jisung would call it fondly, as if Felix was his own grandchild. “It will be nice to meet him one day.” 

“You’ll love him.” Chan laughs, broken and wet, and the rest of the pack does, too, because Felix charms everybody he meets, even if he’s never said a word to them. It’s just… it’s so Felix for him to do it even now, at the end of the most difficult time. 

The verdict folder is closed, and the judges look at each, and down at the pack, too. Their faces are fond, even as Won-Shit Stain looks miserable as sin. 

It’s only when the pack begins to separate, drawing back from the pile of pack that they devolved into, Chan surfacing, his scent still warm and loving, that the judges look at each other. 

“Mr Bang?” Judge Min says, and Jisung sees her take Felix’s picture, looking at it long and hard. “I have some words of advice for you.” 

“Yes, Your Honour?” 

“You must learn to rely on your pack.” She says, and the pack goes still around Jisung as they realise this isn’t over yet. 

”I do?” Chan says but it’s a question, not a statement. 

“You think you do but this case has exposed that you still want to keep them at arm's length, protect them by excluding them.” She’s speaking softly, kindly, but her words are heavy. “Your decision to keep your fulls out of this nearly cost you young Felix’s life.” 

“I know.” Chan does know. The way his hands tremble as he looks at the pack, at his lawyers, the people who rode with him to fight for Felix’s life. It’s all so telling of how much this has taken from him. 

“You need to trust yourself.” Jisung is reminded of how the lawyers said that it was Min who was looking for something, something specific that was holding them back from Chan’s side. Maybe this was it. “Your pack is brave and clever. They have skills and intelligence beyond their years. I know that you understand that because you picked them. Have faith in those choices, in your own decisions to find people who compliment your own strengths and who can help you where you lack.” 

“I understand.” 

“Your pack must be a living, breathing creature, nurtured by your love and your strength but also allowing them to give the same in return. You are the leader and they are your people, but you are also theirs, their Prime, their leader. They love you and they care for you in a way that money cannot buy and fame cannot win.” 

“I -” 

“Man is not an island,” Judge Gye says, and his face is gentle. “You cannot raise this new full alone. He will need all of your pack to work together, to bring him home and to care for him, whatever happens.”

Chan looks down, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I - I will. I’ll learn.” 

“You’re young, my boy.” Sometimes, Han forgets that Chan isn’t that old, for all that Seungmin crows about it. He’s only twenty two, leading a pack through a cutthroat industry, being a massive part of their creative powerhouse, covering for them and their rule breaking, protecting them from the storms of upper management and sasaengs in ways that they don’t really know until he decides to tell them. They should respect that and help him more, give him more leeway because although he’s the oldest of the pack, he’s a third of this judge’s age - maybe even a little bit less. To this judge, Chan probably is really really young. “I’ve seen Primes twice your age stumble at every hurdle.” 

“There’s going to be a lot of them.”

“There are. There’s going to be paperwork, there’s going to be medical challenges, there’s going to be legal issues that take us - we judges, you and your lawyers, and your pack, too - weeks to figure out because the law has not ever seen a situation like this before. There will be lots of issues that will take time and patience to resolve.” 

“I’ll still do what I can for him.” 

“I believe you.” Gye says and Jisung doesn’t doubt it for a second. “But you will fail. You will stumble. It is the nature of raising anybody, of any dynamic. Nobody is perfect and we do not live in a world where perfection can be achieved in anything we have power over. Only God, the Almighty, has that ability and He declines to share it with us.” The judge touches a necklace around his neck, and Jisung sees a glint of gold, a cross tucked behind his tie and Changbin shifts in place beside him. “But we can do our best and we can learn and strive and when we fail, we can resolve to learn and do better.” 

“I promise. I will do that.” Chan holds Han and Minho’s hands, tears streaming down his face. 

Judge Gye looks down at them, his face serious. “We are awarding you the greatest task a Prime can have - to raise a full. There are so few of them that every single one of them is a jewel in the crown of your entire pack.” Chan nods, accepting the words because it’s true. He’s never put it in quite those words before but Han knows they’re true because he and Minho are treated like that, different and loved in everything. “You were granted the gift of two fulls in your pack, and you have treated them well and let them thrive, despite their challenges.” 

“Thank you.” Chan doesn’t know how to react to that, and the pack pushes closer around him, just a few steps, but it feels right, it feels natural to huddle together and give reassurance and comfort in this moment.

“I know that you have done hard work before. I know that you have taken a full that many in this building said was too much for you, too difficult to turn around, and you defied them at every turn.” He gestures at Han who accepts what Gye says. 

It’s true. 

Every step of the way, someone doubted Chan’s Primacy of Jisung and they still thrived, still came out the other side better and stronger than before. They've passed most things even if Jisung is still in chains now. 

“You took another full from the mountains, from a world far from our own, and it is clear he, too, has thrived and succeeded in a modern world that is often cruel and unwelcoming to those of the old ways.” He nods his head to Minho, who juts his chin up, proud of who he is and where he comes from. “Those are not small tasks. You are capable of much more than you realise.” 

 Judge Gye takes the picture of Felix from Judge Yi, turns it around to look at them and Han finds it impossible to look up, see a Felix who is so alive, so vibrant in the picture, but also so young. 

The Felix in the picture has no idea what’s coming, what’s barrelling down the train track towards him at a thousand miles an hour. 

“This little full is not like you. He is not like your fulls, either.” He holds the picture gently, almost reverently. “He is unique. As the doctors say, he is one in more than a million. He is one of only a handful of people like him in the world. He will be delicate, fragile in a way that you have not seen before, and he will be so very precious for that.”

Judge Yi takes the picture of Felix from Judge Gye and Han truly does feel like the judges are treating the picture of Felix, with the reverence of his actual body. It’s… touching in a way to see how tenderly they treat his picture. It’s clear that it’s how they deliberated, too, cutting through the bullshit the Lees tried to throw at them to reach the actual core of Felix.

Holding the edge of the picture delicately, with just her finger tips, Judge Yi turns it back to them, making them look at all the hope in Felix’s eyes, frozen in time from years ago. “It will be your job to guide him, to teach him everything he needs to know. All of you must come together and work as a pack to protect him, to defend him, to make the difficult choices about his body, his medical care, his education, and his moral upbringing.” Jisung swallows at just how big of an undertaking this is going to be. He’s heard it before but all of a sudden, it’s so real. “He doesn’t know Korea like you do, Chan, or like your pack does, and he doesn’t know his own place in that world. You must carve out a place for him, every day working hard to teach him the role of a full in our culture, one that is so alien to him because all that he knew before, as a beta, is gone. It will be your job to ensure that whatever happens, he learns it well. ” 

“I promise.” Chan says, and everything in him goes into those two words.

Judge Min now reaches for the picture of Felix. She, too, is so gentle when she takes it, tender in how she touches his face, for just a moment, like a mother looking at a picture of her child. “He is a medical curiosity. He is famous. His body will be judged. Your choices will be judged. People will have opinions on this case, on how he dresses, on the religion you choose to raise him in, the work you let him do, the money you allow him to earn. You must still choose what is in his best interests, regardless of money or pressure from outside sources.”

“I promise.” 

“You must promise to him that he will be at the core of every decision you make. Not your parents, not your company, not the public itself can come between you and your best judgement for him.. You must not allow yourself to be swayed from what is best for him. You must constantly and actively choose a path away from for financial reward or for fame or for luxuries or for the love of another. He, and he alone, must be your guiding light.” 

“I promise. I’ll never change that.” Chan vows, and Han murmurs it, too, along with the rest of the pack. It’s not planned, it’s not something they agreed to do but it’s the truth. The pack will never pick money or love over Felix. 

“I believe it.” 

“I love him. We all love him.” Chan wipes his eyes, but the tears keep coming. “I can’t… I can’t let him go.” 

“We can see that. Your pack fought for him in a way this courtroom has never seen before.” 

“...I… I apologise.” Han says, his voice small and raspy, his throat wrecked by the shouting and the venom from earlier. “We… we were… we were protecting our Felix.” 

He doesn’t normally apologise when he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong - he still doesn’t think it was necessarily a bad idea to throw the jug, to stand on the table and scream at the judges when they refused to listen, but he also… he’s also aware that it wasn’t the most constructive way to handle it. 

He’s supposed to be better. 

“I see that.” Judge Gye makes a note on the paperwork in front of him. “It is… a remarkable show of protection from someone who used to stand on the table and scream that a judge had no power over him.” 

“I… I’ve changed.” 

“I see that.” He says, and Han’s ears are burning. He's... embarassed by his past self. “This time you were standing on the table and screaming that we needed to do better for your baby. Am I correct?”

“I…” He can’t answer that. It’s true. It’s so fucking true and Gye has read him like a fucking book, clearly. 

“What happened to the glass, little full?” Judge Min asks, pointing to the floor below the desk, the chip where the jug landed and gouged splinters of wood. There’s nothing there now, but they all remember the mess he made. 

His cheeks burn as he points to the plastic trash bag on the janitor’s cart, the one next to Won-Shik.

“You did that?” She asks and her voice is not… mocking, but curious. “But you were so angry.” 

“In this pack… I have to be responsible. I broke the jug and the glasses. So I have to clean up my mess, make it right again.” 

Judge Min looks over the top of her glasses. “Good.” 

“Good?” He’s so confused. 

“You’ve come a long way,” she says, and Jisung is lost. He’s never had this judge before but he knows they talk. They knew who he was before he walked in with Chan and the others. “That… is a change from how you used to be.” She puts her head on her hand, looking at him with more than just a little fondness. Jisung knows that she approves of what she’s hearing. “I see that this little full did change you and your mindset.” 

“I got tired of clearing up my own mess.” 

“Did you get tired of biting people, too?”

“...No.” Han shifts from foot to foot and the judges all chuckle together. He can’t lie to them - he’s not up for being given a contempt of court like Won-Bellend - but… he also bites people when… when they deserve it. 

He hasn’t done it often since Felix arrived but… he does reserve the right no matter how much Chan tries to discipline it out of him. He’s done it a few times. Admittedly, he rarely draws blood these days but Hyunjin’s had a few occasions of perfect impressions of Jisung’s teeth (nice and straight from his braces, at least) impressed into some body part or another and he deserved all of them. 

“Standing on a table in a courtroom is… a new way to get the attention of the court,” Judge Gye says, mildly, but Jisung swears he sees a little twinkle in his eye, just a tiny one, and he sees the grandfather in him all over again. “I have served on this bench for twenty years, and I served twenty years in criminal court before that. It takes a lot to surprise me, little full, and yet, today, you have done so.” 

Han’s cheeks are burning and he knows his ears are red but he’s not cowed. “I did it for the right reasons.” 

“And what were those reasons?”

“Because he can’t fight for himself.” Han wipes his own cheeks, the salty tears still on them making his fingers wet too, even as his hands tremble. “But I could.”

“By standing on the table and shouting at judges?” Judge Gye looks at him, his gaze all knowing. 

“By meeting you at your level.” Han wants to be clear on this. “You listened to me then.” 

“...That is true, little full. ” The judges nod, their expressions showing that Han has, intentionally or not, caught them off guard. “Perhaps we should not have been so quick to dismiss you.” 

“People think I don’t matter because I’m full. But I do. I do matter.” Chan told him that, right back at the beginning, and he’s always tried so hard to not let that go. He matters. He’s always mattered. 

“You were brave today.” Gye says, and he holds onto Felix’s picture. “You were very brave.” 

“So was jagi.” Han grips Minho’s hand, pulls him closer. “Jagi fought for him just as much as I did.” 

“He did, indeed. A little sarcastically, perhaps, but still.” Judge Min looks at Minho hard. “Do you feel as though you must apologise for that, too?” 

”It made you listen. I don’t apologise for doing the right thing.” Minho is breathtaking in his boldness, his unwillingness to bow to those above him, and Han could never be that bold without violence. He runs on fear and anger, not quiet confidence and a core of steel like Minho. “Felix needed me to fight for him.” 

“And this is how you encourage your fulls?” Judge Gye turns to Chan. “I do not recall that in your pack rules?”

“I try not to encourage violence. But I also tell them to do what’s right.” Chan laughs, a little wetly, and the judges all look side to side at each other, their expressions saying that they knew Chan would say that. “And if that means standing on a table and swearing at someone doing the wrong thing, go ahead. Same with being sarcastic and refusing to back down from an alpha.” 

“Should we be grateful that your full with the bite record did not try to add us to that said record?” Judge Yi smiles. 

“Yes.” But it’s not just Chan who answers - it’s Changbin and Hyunjin too, and Seungmin, and Jeongin, and Minho, too, and even Mr Seo, because they have all felt Han’s teeth inside of their bodies or at least seen it up close and personal. Either way, it wasn’t fun for them and Han… mostly regrets some of those incidents. The judges laugh and Han’s whole face turns hot pink, he can feel it under the tear tracks. 

“The biting is a long standing issue. The shouting… work in progress.” Chan ruffles Han’s hair, gets his hands batted away. Han groans, burying his head in Minho’s chest. He needs the hands that come up, stroking through his hair, so gently because Minho knows he needs it. “We’ll keep working on it, though.” 

“I will thank you to not do it again, little full. ” Judge Gye says, and Han looks up at him. He feels shy and strange, exhausted but his heart is no longer heavy and hurting. He can’t understand his own body and it confuses him. “Perhaps we understand each other a little better now.” Han nods. “And in that spirit, I will withdraw the charge of contempt of court.” He bangs the gavel on the table, and the noise is loud in the quiet of the courtroom. “I think you have better things to do than spend three weeks in the omega suites below this courthouse.” 

“Wouldn’t be the first time.” Han mutters and Minho tugs on his ear hard. He’s pushing his luck, he knows it, and it’s Minho’s job to keep him somewhat in line. 

“Your Honour - was - was this a unanimous decision?” Myung-Ki takes the note that Ko-Woon hands him. “So that we may understand the stipulations…” 

“It was.” Judge Yi looks to her fellow judges before she speaks. “We debated long and hard and our reasoning, you will find in the written form of the verdicts, because it was different for each of us. All of us came to the same decision but our journeys were different.” 

“Tradition is as tradition does.” Min adjusts her glasses. “But it… it is not tradition to hurt a little one. We all agreed on that front. From there, we had a shared understanding of our duties, and the law, and how we should apply both to this case.” 

Gye nods in agreement. “We are all different but we are all Primes and this was a case that hinged on the fundamental role of such a person. Being a Prime is rare and special. It is not one to be taken lightly.” 

“Indeed, Your Honour.” Mr Seo nods, his own eyes gold and red, so hot and deep that Jisung gets stuck for a moment. 

When he comes back to himself, it is not to a happy thought. 

“Mr Bang, Do you understand that one day you may have to give him up? That he may want to go and live somewhere else, with someone else?” Judge Yi asks a question that nobody has dared to ask before and Jisung feels the earth crumbling beneath his feet again. 

“I do.” Chan smiles and it’s bittersweet and gentle, the face of someone who has long come to terms with that. “And I will let him go if he wants to.” 

“What makes you say that?” Judge Gye looks at him. 

“If you love someone, let them go.” Chan says, simply, and he smiles, and it’s so full of feelings and thoughts and complicated emotions that Jisung thinks it’s so beautiful and sad even though Chan’s scent is so happy. “If it was meant to be, they’ll return to you.”

“Indeed. Indeed, Mr Bang.” The judges look at each other, nodding as if this has confirmed to them, yet again, that this was the right choice. 

Jisung knows it was. 

Their baby won’t be going home with the Lees. He’ll stay here, in Korea, where he belongs. 

The judges confer for a moment before they call over the court clerk, handing her something to bring to the pack. It’s a piece of paper and it’s not until she lays it on their table, spreading it out so they can see it, that Jisung finally realises what it is. 

It’s the Alphaship certificate. 

It’s small, so small, for all the pain it’s caused them to get it. All it is, all that it came down to, was a sheet of paper that simply has Felix’s name written in the gap in the middle, in a beautiful flowing hand, each curve of the letters in black ink, so stark on the paper. Jisung thinks it’s Judge Yi’s handwriting. She’s written Lee Felix in English because Felix doesn’t have an official Korean name, and Han’s heart clenches again at that because he knows that Minho will take away that name for a while, and this might be one of the last times he ever sees it written down for a very long time. 

Jisung watches as the clerk of the court smooths it out, making sure that it is situated just how she wants it. She’s careful to avoid touching the place where the judges have all signed it, their seals glossy and red, the ink still drying in the thickest strokes. 

“Mr Bang, please sign here,” she says, pointing at the other corner of the certificate. She neatly places a black ink pad next to the paper, a blotting sheet laid beside it, ready for afterwards. “Your pack stamp, if you could.”

The lawyers have Chan’s stamp, in the box from his desk, and it’s wrapped in a hoodie, one that takes time for them to unwrap, Minho carefully taking responsibility for it as Changbin holds the bundle, waiting for Minho to lift the lid on the traditional lacquer box. The stamp is large as Minho offers it to Chan, and Chan’s hand trembles just a little as he presses it down onto the pad, needing to breathe deep as he waits for it to pick up the ink. 

Only when he’s perfectly calm does he pick it up, place it on the page where the clerk points to - under the line that says Pack Prime and the date. Chan leans on the stamp, his hand pressing down on the seal and Han places his over Chan’s, too because this isn’t just Chan. It’s the pack stamp, it’s for all of them, and they’re bringing Felix home with this, they’re bringing him into the pack, and he needs to be part of it, too. 

And then Minho copies them, and Changbin follows up, and then Seungmin and Innie and Hyunjin are there, too, their hands hot and desperate as they press down, all of them helping Chan to commit the pack to Felix, to do what they’ve all wanted for years. 

“We’ve got you,” Changbin says, and Chan looks at all of them, his eyes so red and tired but so proud of them all, so deep and dark that Han knows he won’t ever reach the bottom. “We got you both.” 

Chan doesn’t say anything, but he swallows hard, his eyes so glossy but they’re still red, still gold, still Prime and Jisung loves him so so much. 

When the clerk blots the ink stamp, it looks so neat and pristine, crisp black lines saying Bang Pack in neat letters, the single plum blossom stark against the white of the page, nestled deep between the leaves at the bottom of the stamp. 

It looks so right. 

She slides it into a pack file - the first one that Felix will ever have, the leather cover pristine and white because he is not yet presented, not yet ready for the black folder that Jisung and Minho have, and it’s so strange to hold it now. It’s real. The pack holds onto the certificate, so precious and hard won, and the judges look at them, their gazes so serious, so heavy. 

“We give you this gift, of his life, into your hands.” Judge Gye passes down the photo of Felix, and JIsung feels the weight of the action pressing down on him so much that he can barely breathe. “You will be his Prime, his pack, and his first family here. You must protect him, nurture him, and help him to understand what it means to be Felix all over again.” 

Chan reaches up, takes the photo with shaking hands. He holds it tight, against his chest, just like he would hold Felix if he was here. The pack gathers close, pressing in tight against Chan, adding stability to their Prime as he sways in place, daunted and exhausted by everything it took to get to this point. 

“Thank you.” Chan says, and he speaks for them all. 

“Your pack loved him without ever knowing what he was. Your pack welcomed him and cherished him and nurtured him tenderly and warmly. Every word you’ve spoken in this courtroom, every exhibit you’ve put up shows that clearly. You are his pack, and you, Chan, are his Prime.” Judge Min says, and her words are gentle. “When all else fails, and the times are hard and the decisions are difficult and painful, remember that. Teach him that.” 

“We - we will.” 

“Go, now, to the hospital.”

“Your Honour - there is still the matter of formally vacating the lower court’s decision, and of removing the hospital’s injunction on Felix’s treatment - at this time, he cannot go into surgery because all but life saving care is forbidden.” Myung-Ki steps forward, his face concerned.

“We will take that up, presently, then. But for now, you may go, Mr Bang. This… this is all formality - paperwork and showmanship.” Judge Gye waves him away. “Go to the hospital. Be… be with him. Give him the strength that he will need.” 

“Thank you.” Chan stands in the middle of the well of the court, swaying, surrounded by the lawyers and his pack and everything that has happened but he looks up at the judges, wiping away more tears, his hands shaking. “You… You saved his life.” 

“No, Mr Bang. You did. You and your pack. That faith… you will need it. Hold fast to it.” Judge Yi says. “Go.” 

Chan is the first to leave. He’s got what he came for, he has what he needs and the hospital will take it from him, push the plans they have made for Felix into action. He will need surgery and scans and interventions and Jisung knows that’s what waits for them at the hospital and Chan is going to be there for all of it. 

The rest of the pack follows, pushing past Jisung because they want to go, too long held in one place and they’ve never been a pack that settles down, refuses to move when they could be up, learning, producing, making things new and taking on more challenges. This is another one, and it’s put electricity through their veins, make them look forward for the future, not the past, already accepting the seismic change that’s happened because that’s what they do. 

But Jisung alone feels… he feels like he’s standing still in the middle of the rush, the only one outside of it all. He follows the pack up the aisle, twenty step behind them, carrying the hoodie that the seal was wrapped in, slow, his feet still in the quicksand of his dreams. It no longer feels so terrifying, so all consuming, but the world is turning slower for him, it seems. 

At the top of the aisle, he turns to look back, and it feels like he’s turning to look down the nave of the church, the high vaulted ceiling above him, the warm yellow light as though from candles. Where the crucifix would be, there instead is the seal of justice, strong and uncompromising in the light, casting a shadow all around it. 

He should be with his pack. He should be trying to catch up to them. But he has unfinished business. But he can’t help but look back at the judges, just before the doors, as he stands there, one hand resting on the handle. 

It’s done. 

They gave them Felix. 

That’s all Han ever wanted. 

And for that, he must pay his respects. He can’t deny them their due and he knows it’s been a long time in coming. He’s fought and he’s cried, and he’s shouted, and he’s begged them to hear him over someone he loves so much. 

And they did. 

They heard him. 

And he must respect them for that. And so he bows, deep and low, the way he’s supposed to, the way he’s always been taught, the way he never does to other people because he doesn’t care for their attitude, their expectations, their demands to him. 

But he does this time. 

He honours them, the way they honoured Felix, and when he comes up, he sees them looking at him, with red and gold eyes, because they did it. They made the most difficult decision of all, penning the decision that would save a boy’s life. Jisung understands them a little better now because he knows that Mother Mary is with him. 

This is her grace that has done this. 

She bought them before the three Primes who were willing to overturn a thousand years of history for one little full. 

And they all - Mary, the judges, Jisung - they kept the promise that Chan had made to Felix years ago. 

They had kept him safe.