No Dogs Allowed

Sweet Ice & Soybean

(ty for reading, ur much appreciated, the star bows its head and says hello :D thank you for 600 reads, by the way, that is quite a lot of eyes on this clumsy story, so you have all my gratitude!)

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My brother killed my mom before she ever truly died. It was the same way he killed me before I'd ever even lived.

Modern self-defense classes for the young will often tell you that your chance of survival should and can never depend on muscle, because muscle always wins. Rather, your chances lie not in force, but in location. A strike is only as good as the place it lands.

For a kid that talks about his mother so much, I'll be frank with you, I didn't know her very well. My mother and father had done something a bit audacious for the Yun family, as in their long lineage, they'd never had the issue of twins. Much less an Alpha and an Omega. The smart thing would've been to split us and send us off to mentors across the country from each other as to avoid conflict. But my mother had been a ghost child herself—a reason why my father's parents had been so against their marriage—and likely knew from the get-go that I had a very slim chance of making the cut. So, she advocated for her to take me, and for my father to take my brother, just until we were old enough to be evaluated.

My mother never talked about her life before my me and my brother. I'd tried plenty to ask, but she'd always smile and shake her head, changing the subject to something safer. I'd tried to ask why she married my father. She only told me, "I've been many people, Echo. I try to be wiser than the last girl."

When my brother and I were old enough to begin testing, my mother knew I was out of time. I think she'd made the biggest mistake a Drachmann parent could make, and she knew it; every parent knew better than to have hope before the second birth.

That being said, biology had always been against me, and always would be. But my mother was nothing if not a fool for hope. And I was nothing if not a fool for trust.

My mother placed a bandage over my cheek, her thumb brushing over the scratches on my chin. She wiped a tear from my eye. "Elias is stronger than you, Echo," she said. "Elias will always be stronger than you. So stop looking for how to push him over. Start looking for how to make him trip."

My father raised a brow when I scrambled out from underneath my brother, knife in my hand, Elias hissing and wailing at the wound in his arm. My father said, "Good."

I'd breathed a sigh of relief, collapsing on the hardwood, Seoul a lurking, black beast in the windows.

My mother had grinned down at me, a bright thing that closed her eyes, leaning down to kiss my forehead. "See, Echo?" she said. "See?"

Elias sat in the corner with a reddened bandage he fastened himself, and watched.

When my mother died, and my father shipped me off to America, Elias found me hours before, a cold grin on his face.

"Weak finds weak," he told me. "Umma and you aren't so different."

"Neither are you and Appa," I'd spat. "Cruel finds cruel. You're nothing but his pawn. At least Umma loved me."