Robin Red (BxB) - Alpha x Omega Stepbrothers

Chapter 10 - Fiancé!?

The first time Red went into heat, their mother led them down into the basement.

He was barely fifteen, his brother fourteen. Robin had only grown more reserved as he got older, and most of the people staying with them shied away from him. He talked to no-one except Red, a distant look on his face whenever his nose wasn't buried in schoolbooks.

"Lucky," Renée commented, serious, stern. "We already have an alpha here for you to practice with. No need to bring in an outsider."

Red's memories of it were hazy afterwards, nothing but a fog of pain. He could never have imagined what going through a heat would be like.

"Maman - no," he had protested, aghast. "You can't mean - Robin is too young. You can't."

"Your father would have left us alone if I hadn't taken his alpha son - his legal heir - with me," Renée said, turning to her youngest son.

"It's you he wants, Robin. But it's your brother that would suffer if he found us. You would be given power and opportunities, while he would be chained up and sold - not that your father would call it that. So - don't let that happen."

"I won't," the tall, gangly boy replied, eyes downcast but voice icy firm. Red squeezed his hand discreetly.

Their mother was always less...warm, with Robin. Less affectionate.

He never invited it, either - they were both of them stubborn, brilliant, and reserved, the young omega thought. More alike than they knew, related or not. Red might look like Renée, but Robin, her adopted son, took after her personality more.

Not that either of them seemed to realise it.

"And will you help Red practice? Learn to fight, whether he's in heat or not? Give him a better chance if ever the worst does happen?"

"Yes," Robin said.

The first time she had shut them into that room together, his first heat sweeping over him, the other boy had seemed so young, his dark hair standing out starkly against his pale skin.

"It's going to be okay," Red had told him, forcing out the words between his clattering teeth, fighting the shivers, the fever already crashing in waves over his body, trying to reassure his little brother.

But it was not okay.

That day, Renée led them down dark, creaky wooden stairs, past painted concrete walls, to the locked door past the exercise equipment.

To the practice room. 

"It is not my job to protect you from life. You are no longer children," she told said. "It's my job to prepare you for it. And I intend to do just that."

"Maman - " Red shivered, wrapping his arms around himself.

"No. Listen. The things I have done to survive and shield you two would give you nightmares. 

"But now you are becoming adults - and neither my alpha nor my omega son will go out into the world lacking self-control and awareness if I have anything to say about it."

The door swung open, unlocked, and they entered a narrow room with a corridor down the middle, sturdy steel mesh closing off each side of the room, forming two cells. The floor was painted concrete.

"I learnt this, on my own, when suppressants were denied me. Both omegas and alphas can learn to control themselves and keep their wits about them despite the pheromones. That comes only with experience and practice."