Silver Lining

~~☽~

The silver wolf is a male, or so he finds out in the next couple of weeks from the small traces of pheromones the omega has left behind.

On his morning patrols, he had caught whiffs of them sometimes: by the creek, beneath the trees, within the flowers. There's a large flat stone, a tad further up North, where they liked to lay in the afternoon to lazily soak up the sun's rays; Chan hadn't run into them again but he had followed their trail and that stone they had obviously scented and claimed as their own. It wasn't until one particularly cold morning that Chan had found himself seeking out the stone for warmth too and rolled on top of it without really thinking about how his own scent was probably all over it now. He feared that they would never return to it again, that they would assume he was kicking them out or trying to cover up their presence; but when he had returned the next day, they had ironically smothered it with their scent glands even more and Chan could distinctively pick up on the boyish musk of pheromones that were all too akin to the six other male wolf hybrids living in his home.

The thought excited Chan, eager to learn more about this mysterious stranger, and the fact that the wolf just added his imprint on top of Chan's means that he's either demonstrating defiance to the alpha or he is teasing him (both makes the silver wolf a whole lot more intriguing; he likes a challenge, a feisty challenge no less).

The omega leaves tracks leading to and from the creek each day, smelling rather old by the time Chan finds them like the silver wolf was wandering around there just the night before, and when he finishes up his rounds of the territory, there is always a fresh mark on the tree just outside of the clearing where his home is like the omega rubbed his face on it in a 'I was right here and you still couldn't catch me'.

Chan enjoyed the teases and chase. The rest of his pack, on the other hand, most certainly did not .

Minho and Changbin worried that this omega belonged to a rival pack and was trying to start a turf war; Hyunjin worried that the omega was a scout for the ferals and soon their land will be completely overrun by bloodthirsty mutts; Jisung worried that the omega is so pretty that he is actually part of the Exo pack and the really strong alphas over there are going to give them hell when they find out that Chan is hitting on their omega; Seungmin worried that the omega is just a regular lone wolf, not a hybrid like the rest of them, and the others are getting worked up over nothing; Jeongin worried that the omega was secretly an outlaw or is alone from banishment and is laying low in their territory to mooch off of all their resources.

Chan worried that the reason he was already so whipped is because this omega is his soulmate; he wants the silver wolf so bad but at the back of his head, there's that thought that he's simply being used and his feelings will never be returned. Wolves mate for life; he doesn't think he'll ever want another.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately for the others, he can't be sure), after three weeks the tracks stopped appearing and the scent mark on the tree slowly faded into nothing but a distant memory.