by Aiden Bates
“Since I’m off, I thought I could maybe bring you lunch. If you have time and you’re not too busy today, that is, sir.”
My father continued his long silence for a few moments longer before he must have decided in the affirmative, as he grunted and voiced his version of lunch plans.
“Issuing clearance to the gate. One o’clock. Sharp, Teddy.”
Sharp. Don’t be late, he meant, but also don’t be too early and expect to breezily make it through the gate a single minute before clearance starts.
“Yes, sir. Love you, Da—”
He’d already hung up.
One o’clock. Sharp, Teddy. Sharp. Don’t be such a civilian that you think one means anything but one sharp but also don’t be so military that you stand up when your civilian boss walks in. Don’t be such an omega that you settle for a nice, appropriate omega job in a nice, appropriate omega field while you wait for an alpha but don’t be so career-oriented that you resent being treated differently than the alphas. Don’t let the civilians you work around make you soft, don’t let the way you were raised make you hard, don’t let the alphas get you down, but also keep them in mind when your body decides to just do what your body does. Just whatever you’re doing, don’t be so…you, Teddy.
I sighed and rerouted myself, calculating where I could stop so I could be there at the gate at one o’clock. Sharp.
3
Roman
I thanked god for about the millionth time that mama had taught me to iron. Now, all those Sundays helping her with the laundry seemed worth it. ‘Just because you’re an alpha doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have to know how to take care of yourself. You may not have anyone else to do it for you.’ At the time, it had seemed ridiculous, but now, I was grateful for every scorched collar and burnt fingertip.
My uniform still fit, and now it was ironed, I thought it looked pretty decent. I kept looking in the long mirror in the bedroom of my apartment over and over though, just to make sure there wasn’t anything I was missing. It’d been over a year since I’d had to pass muster, and I hoped it was sort of like riding a bicycle. God, all that work for five minutes of a look over from a higher up, and if you were lucky, a short nod of approval. But I knew it was worth it. For O’Rourke, it was always muster. There were so many mornings in basic where all of us would be dragged up at the break of dawn to run because someone had forgotten to iron their pants or shine their shoes. If everything was perfect all the time, he’d told us over and over while we were barfing our guts up from miles of running, then muster wasn’t ever that big a deal. Isn’t that right? Yes, sir.
I checked my watch. One o’clock on the dot. Good. Still a half-hour to spare before I had to meet with Sarge. I gave myself a final look over, and then headed into my living room. Almost of its own accord, my left fist opened and closed over and over as I paced, my mind running a mile a minute as I imagined all the ways this meeting could go horribly, epically wrong. O’Rourke was a hard-ass. I needed to calm my nerves.
I stopped in front of a familiar photo. It was a good one, the whole unit together, arms looped around one another in our tactical gear. It was taken only weeks before the IED blast. We’d just gotten back from a mission, and we were still hyped up from the adrenaline of a successful operation. I looked at each of us in turn. It was hard to believe this had only been a little over a year ago. I looked at Garret, he seemed so much younger then, I did as well. Life, injury, had changed us. Back then, we’d still believed in our own invincibility. We’d followed one another into the Rangers and we’d done incredibly risky missions without batting a fucking eye. We were a family. I knew them better than I knew myself, and the sentiment was reciprocated.
Finally, my gaze settled on one bright face in the left corner of the frame. Jason. God, I fucking missed him. When he’d decided to enlist, Garret and I had followed. There wasn’t anyone better for advice than Jason. He had this laugh you could hear from across camp. He was there for us, all of us, all the time. Even in the end. Even when it mattered most. He’d been the one to find the IED, to warn us. When the bomb had detonated all I could remember was the shock of heat, overwhelming as it burned through my fatigues. I’d fallen back onto Garret, and in the middle of the chaos, I’d looked down and seen his injury. I’d looked into his shocked eyes and all I could think to tell him was that he was going to be okay before he passed out.
“What the hell am I doing, Jason?” I asked out loud to my empty apartment. I could almost hear his smart-assed reply. ‘Well, whatever the hell it is, Carpenter, you better get to doing it. What the fuck are you waiting for?’
He wasn’t wrong. Jason never was.
“Wish me luck, Jay. And tell your dad to lay the hell off, if he can help it.”
Here went nothing.
“He’ll be with you soon.”
O’Rourke’s assistant settled me into a chair right outside his office while I waited. I was getting tired of waiting rooms. The base was thriving, pulsing with energy like a beehive. O’Rourke’s office dripped with alpha hormones. You could just about taste the testosterone, and suddenly I felt about as wet behind the ears as I had when waiting at my bunk for the first introduction to the man. I wondered how he had changed since my time in basic. I’d made sure to be five minutes early, knowing my old Sarge well enough to know that late wasn’t an option. On time was late to Sarge. My anxiety had settled somewhat, now I was here in the thick of things. That battle instinct never went away. Nerves were fine, but when you were in the line of fire, when it was go time, they had to take a back seat.
I heard the door open, and I stood, snapping naturally into attention. I expected O’Rourke’s grim face, the gray hair and stern, driving eyes. Instead, I was met with full lips, dark hair, just long enough to curl, inquisitive, laughing brown eyes, and the smell of citrus and cinnamon.
Teddy.
He froze in the doorway, paper fast food bag still clutched in his hand. God, it was awkward. I mean, we’d seen each other a handful of times since I’d come back from Malmur, but each one had been…tense. The first had also been stressful, charged with a million emotions as I handed Teddy a small box with Jason’s dog tags inside. After that, other than the occasional mishap, he and I had both been doing a pretty good job of pretending the other didn’t exist. For my part I did so as a survival instinct. Any time I got around Teddy, I was instantly reminded of everything between us.
When I’d met Teddy O’Rourke, really met him, I was seventeen years old to his fifteen. I’d seen him around now and again, but he’d almost purposely avoided me, just like now. At Silas’s fifteenth birthday I’d been voted to make the beer run. Karen at the liquor store never bothered to card me. Just like everyone else back in the day she’d been easily charmed by me and my good looks. At that time, I had quite the reputation for being, well, full of myself, cocky. And it was well deserved. Doors, hell, windows opened for me back then, all with a smile. I’d come back to the house, cases of cheap beer in hand, as the hero of the party.
As the drinks flowed, everyone started to have a good time, and I found myself on a couch in the basement with Teddy. Finally, I was talking to him. I was instantly smitten with the omega. He was funny, and even then, I could tell he was smart as a whip. He wasn’t so easily charmed by me as the other omegas and girls, and that resistance, that speculation, that challenge had been like catnip to a tomcat. I’d wanted him, wanted him more than I’d ever wanted anything. And I could tell, even if he was too clever to admit his hand, that he’d wanted me, too.
He’d told me that his old man wouldn’t let him date, and I remembered being so disappointed. Until, that is, a few weeks later, a note in my locker gave me an address, a time, and a ‘Don’t be late, Roman Carpenter.’ That was all it had taken. I’d gone without really even thinking. It could have been anything. A set up, a cruel joke, someone else entirely. But still, I went with nothing more than the promise that it could be him. It had been, and we’d spent half the night making ou
t in the back of my car until I was so keyed up I thought I was going to catch on fire. For months I would visit him whenever we could, seeing each other in secret to avoid his father’s wrath. Even then I knew getting on Logan O’Rourke’s bad side wouldn't make for a good time.
“Roman? What are you doing here?” Teddy seemed just as surprised to see me as I was to see him. I snapped out of attention, but even still, it felt like every muscle in my body was on high alert. It was like that every time I saw Teddy. Before I had a chance to answer him though, he shook his head.
“Um, god, sorry. Hi.” He pushed his glasses back up, a sign he was nervous. “How’s civilian life?”
“It’s, ah, well. That’s kind of the reason… Teddy, see, the thing is…” Jesus, now was not the time to be stumbling over my words.
Movement behind Teddy caught my eye, and I spotted Master Sergeant O’Rourke’s face over his shoulder.
“Sir,” I said, saluting.
O’Rourke stepped out from around his son, his eyes flashing back and forth between Teddy and me, trying to puzzle out the situation in front of him. I would have thought it impossible, but Teddy, if anything, looked more uncomfortable now than he had moments before. Shit.
O’Rourke’s gaze finally snapped to me and stayed, lingering over every detail of what I was wearing and my appearance. He stepped closer, and I didn’t dare look away from him to see what Teddy’s reaction might be.
“Teddy, I’ll see you for dinner tonight,” O’Rourke said, voice low.
Teddy said nothing, and I felt the shift in the air as he brushed past me, my eyes still locked on Master Sarge. He kept looking at me for a few more seconds before he sighed and turned away from me, waving over his shoulder for me to follow.
I took a silent breath and tried to refocus on the task at hand instead of on Teddy. I went into the room and stood at attention in front of O’Rourke’s desk. He settled himself, and I kept waiting for him to tell me ‘at ease.’
Instead, he looked at me again, dark eyes boring a hole into my head.
“Sergeant Roman Carpenter,” O’Rourke barked.
“Sir,” I repeated.
“So, tell me, son, what makes you think you belong on my base, training my recruits?”
Here we go.
4
Teddy
At home that evening, I settled into the most elastic gym shorts I owned for the swelling, the thinnest t-shirt I had for the hot flashes, a hot water bottle for the cramping, and my laptop for work.
For company, I had Blankenship, the older gentleman I spent most of my free evenings with and sometimes fell asleep curled around. He was white, twelve inches long, uncut and unabridged. Nightly, he sweet-talked me through ‘Introducing continuous versus discrete progressives into stochastic simulations.’
He was a loose-leaf, one hundred plus page paper I’d hurriedly printed, hole-punched and bound while nobody was looking at work, and he currently sat on the couch next to me, highlighted all over. He was a little dry, sure, but he, like me, was interested in models and simulations, and not just the kind where you pushed a button and the computer spit out how things were supposed to go given the data you’d fed it. Blankenship and I had a special connection. We both wanted to bend and twist the tools we had until they were able to tell us not just how things should go, but how things could go.
War games were fun and all, useful, even. They told you exactly what would happen if exactly what you inputted occurred exactly the way you said it would. That was the nature of working with machines. They couldn’t help but show up at one o’clock sharp, for example, if one o’clock sharp was when you told them to show up. They were exact, plain, precise. And that’s why they were wrong.
From the first astronomical charts to the moon landing, mankind’s first great leaps were to teach machines to be precisely accurate, to give them the heuristics needed to land on a perfect answer each time. But, so long as we were using them to model the real world with its real-world conditions and human behaviors, the perfect answer wasn’t ever going to be the right answer. Blankenship and I wanted to introduce as much randomness into the equation as possible in order to simulate reality. From there, you could just branch out to using it for all kinds of things. I wanted to model so effectively that it helped make the best decisions for the folks on the ground and avoided having to put boots down anywhere unless it was absolutely essential
Work paid the bills well enough, but this, this was my real passion project. Of course, I played things close to the chest. I knew better than to be public about it because I’d seen what happened to omegas with amazing ideas. More often than not they’d suggest something only to be received with silence or utterly ignored. Worse, they might then hear that same idea being parroted back by an alpha to applause and acclaim and with absolutely no acknowledgement the omega ever had anything to do with it. When it came to being in a team, an omega’s efforts were often glossed right over while their alpha boss was congratulated for his team producing the work, and then the alpha would ultimately get promoted. It was a fuck up, but omegas were natural-born team players, presumed to cooperate instead of compete. That was just how it was.
All that was bad enough, but this project was a passion project in the most literal sense for me. I’d always been into systems and networks, even as a kid, and growing up as an army brat made it completely logical for me to look into military applications of my skills. But when Jason died in Malmur, the importance of using whatever tools we could to minimize having people out there stepping on IEDs became personal, and there was no way in hell I was going to watch an alpha shake hands on stage and win an award for something I was making for my brother. So, by day, I was a mild-mannered omega grinding along at work. By night, Blankenship and I got cozy and plotted how we were going to revolutionize strategy and how we could cut down on the number of brothers in Malmur in the first place.
Something in my lower belly rudely interrupted my train of thought with a twinge. My hot water bottle had cooled somewhat and was now just…a water bottle. I looked down at the left-hand corner of my computer screen to gauge how long I’d been absorbed and…damnit.
Twice a week, ever since Jason had died, Dad and I had a standing dinner date. I guessed it was his quiet attempt at rekindling kitchen-table conversations we used to have, so I never skipped them. Partly because Dad didn’t change plans, ever, partly because Jason would have killed me for skipping them, and partly because if I didn’t keep an eye on Dad after his heart attack, nobody was going to. I hadn’t missed a single dinner date in almost a year.
There were close calls though. Like, right now. Dinner was always at eight o’clock, sharp. It was now seven-thirty. Fuck.
I brushed my computer and Blankenship off of me and hurried to get dressed.
“Damnit, damnit, damnit.” I pulled my jeans on, grabbed a real shirt then ran to the bathroom. I looked in the mirror and frantically tried to make myself look presentable. The best I could do was run my hands through my hair and polish the lenses in my glasses. Dad wasn’t a fan of slovenliness in any sort of capacity, so you had to look a certain way even if you’d spent most of the day stewing in your own sweat on the couch. And you couldn’t be late. Once I was satisfied I would more or less pass muster, I ran out of the door—barely grabbing my keys and wallet in my rush, and then threw myself into my car.
Late was also a relative term with Dad. His house was across town, about a fifteen-minute drive from my apartment in King’s Place, so if I’d been meeting anyone else in Somerset for casual dinner, I wouldn’t have been considered late. By the time I’d pulled in way too quickly, had taken one last look at myself in my rearview mirror and had hurried up the steps to his porch, it was one-minute past eight, probably on the verge of becoming two-minutes past eight. Again, right on time for anyone else, late where Dad was concerned.
I punched a finger into the doorbell and reflexively stood at attention on the porch. About a microsecond later, Dad opened
the door, as if he’d started hovering around the door at about seven fifty-nine to make sure I was past the threshold as close to eight as possible.
“Late,” Dad and I said in unison—Dad’s tone grim while mine was apologetic. “Sorry, Dad.” I shrugged in contrition and slipped past him.
The evidence that Jason had once lived here was all around the house. The walls of Dad’s house functioned like some sort of three-dimensional, standing scrapbook in honor of my brother, and not in an effort to memorialize him after his death, either. The walls had always charted my brother’s mounting list of achievements throughout his life.
There was Jason posed with his pee-wee football team, some of his baby teeth still in. On another wall was Jason, now in middle school, crossing the finish line as he ran track in the off-season. Over there were a series of graduation pictures, from elementary, middle, and high school from right to left on the way to the kitchen. More emotionally significant objects found their way to the mantel, which was full to absolute capacity with trophies, certificates, some pictures, and then his medals that sat studded in a velvet display. Above them all though, hung the most honored centerpiece; a double case that housed both the memorial flag and the medal of honor they’d presented us with when Jason didn’t come home.
I knew other younger siblings were jealous of the attention older siblings sometimes got. Also, omega children getting passed over for alpha siblings was something everyone said they didn’t do, but most people did. I loved my brother. Still love my brother. Will always love my brother. I wasn’t ever mad. I simply accepted. But at least there was one picture of me, and it was on the mantle. It was a picture taken after graduation. My master’s in software engineering, the first one in the family as far as I know, and you can just sort of make it out behind the display case for Jason’s JROTC ribbons from high school.