Because The Night

Four

"They're...my babies, ours. Our pups", Mew was standing, honeyed skin paled to white, eyes unseeing.

"Babies? What?", Gulf scrambling to his feet, ungainly with long naked legs, protruding stomach hidden once more beneath the length of the jumper that skirted his upper thighs.

"Two, there are two heartbeats"

"I'm having twins?"

"You are. I mean...we are. Right?"

At last their eyes met again, with nothing left to hide - there in a cool pool of moonlight, as Gulf reached out a trembling, shy hand to trace a thumb across the alpha's cheek.

"Shai khrub"

And then, in perfect unison, both croaked out a heartfelt "I'm sorry na". Gulf for the secret he had kept. And Mew for unknowingly putting the younger man in the position of harbouring that secret in the first instance.

The elder man lifted both hands to the omega's cheeks too then, and just for a few fleeting seconds - there at the heart of the wildest storm in decades - the two pressed foreheads together, eyes closed in peace.

Peace, at last - because it was only then, with such skinship, that the neuralgia that had gnawed at the two for months on end abated. That the searing of their empty chests subsided to be filled up with a toe-curling warmth instead.

Muddied mind rivers surged clear, as Mew found the truth at the heart of it all. Their bodies had yearned not only for the loss of a potential bonding mate - the chemical, physical magnetism that had first drawn them together on the dancefloor, hell that had first driven either of them to even enter that cave of a bar in the first place (and was it why they had been brought back together to a cave here again? Tricks of a mischievous universe) - but also the separation from his blood, his pups, his family...

There was much to discuss - so, so much - yet it would all have to wait, because the birthing process wouldn't and couldn't. Gulf's cries were intensifying, a restlessness commanding his body as he began pacing about the small space, leaning against the inner walls as he groaned and rocked his hips, pressure building in his lower back as he struggled to find comfort in that hard, foreign place.

And suddenly Mew's alpha instincts were overriding his commendable professionalism. Because this was not just any birth, it was the birth of his own pups, it was an omega who was his omega - in all but name and bite - teetering along the raw, agonisingly treacherous cliff path of childbirth.

The elder man pulled out a torch before flinging his equipment bag away to the cave mouth, instead gathering up Gulf's cagoule and jeans, then stripping away his own coat, paramedic uniform and undervest, until he stood in only socks, boots and grey, thermal leggings. He retreated swiftly to the rear of the cave - the most protected and secluded, a cosiest corner, furthest point away from the storm that raged unrelenting - where he arranged the clothes and mat, positioning the torch beneath the fabric of his vest to create a warm glow: A nest.

The vast majority of omegas gave birth in hospitals this century, but the cave was no hospital, and Mew's senses were guiding him back to the ancestral ways. A nest of the alpha and omega's scents, a safe space, dim lights. And him - most of all, him. Midwife-come-alpha-come-father.

"Gulf", Mew massaged at the younger man's tensed shoulders, as he cried out in a series of long wails, head rolling against the jagged rock face until it left grazes in its wake, "You're doing so beautifully. You've stayed active and let gravity do it's work and these babies are very nearly ready to be born now" - he turned the omega into his own embrace, noses burrowing into one another's necks as they steadied themselves with the scent of the other - "It's time to come to your nest now".