Blackened Feathers

Familiarity

Omega wasn’t on duty again until the evening, so he decided to follow up on his selfish evening with Seren and have a self indulgent morning. He ordered breakfast to be delivered to his room and spent the morning listening to music and working on some new songs of his own on his guitar. Omega always had plenty of ideas swimming around in his head, but he barely ever made the time to actually follow through with them. He left his phone on silent and didn’t look at it once.

By lunch time he was feeling recharged, and he felt guilty that he hadn’t thought about Alpha at all. He headed to the cafeteria again to pick him up some lunch and made his way to the cells. Secondo and Quinn were in with Alpha and Omega smelled his blood the second he walked through the door. He rushed in to make sure Alpha was ok and Secondo looked up at him. He was bandaging Alpha’s hand. Omega looked over to the wall and saw cracks in the bricks, which were flecked with specks of blood.

“Fucking hell, Alpha, what happened now?”

His friend looked up and he had a dazed look on his face. He had a glazed-over look in his eyes. Omega could smell whatever sedative they’d used on him and his good mood faded. He must have been getting worse for them to have to drug him to stop him from hurting himself.

“We gave him a sedative to calm him down. It won’t last long, but it was the best we could do,” Secondo told him.

Quinn came over and took the food from him, putting it down next to Alpha’s bed.

Alpha smiled and beckoned Omega over.

“Hey my friend, how are you?” He patted the bed next to him and Omega sat down. Alpha leaned his head on his shoulder and sighed. He was totally out of it. “You smell like witches, Meg. Did you play with witches last night?”

Quinn smirked at him, and even Secondo half smiled.

“So your evening went well, then?” Quinn said, still smirking.

“Yes. Thank you,” Omega said in an irritated way.

Quinn shook his head and grinned as he and Secondo got ready to leave. He leant down to Omega on the way past and gripped his shoulder.

“Take my advice, Omega. That witch is the answer to your prayers. Don’t let her go,” he said quietly.

Omega frowned and wondered what Quinn had seen. The older ghoul operated on a different wavelength to every other ghoul at the Abbey and he saw much more than even the other quintessence ghouls did because of his seeing gift. It wasn’t worth asking him to clarify, though, as he was always cryptic with things like that.

They closed the cell door behind them, and Omega tried to get Alpha to eat something. He’d brought him a burger, his favourite, but he was too spaced out to even notice. He sat with him for an hour or so, but he fell asleep not long after Secondo and Quinn had gone and Omega decided left him in peace. Zephyr was on standby for when he woke up, as Omega was on duty soon, anyway.

He went back to the lair to eat. Zeta was with Terzo, but the rest of the ghouls had gathered in the kitchen to have lunch. Mist, Rho, and Special all looked over at him. Special jumped up and pulled him into a hug.

“Has he calmed down now?” he asked. “I went to see him earlier and he was going nuts. I had to turn back around and leave as he saw me, and it just made him worse.”

Omega could feel how upset Special was, the multi ghoul was sensitive anyway, but something like this would be devastating to him. He could see the underlying hurt and sorrow at the thought of losing one of their pack and he sent him some mojo, trying to soothe him. He knew it was like sticking a Band-Aid over an arterial wound, but he had to do something, anyway.