Eustass Kidd for Pirate King

When Papas was born - his family pack had predicted he would be an omega.

Carrier parents loose their scent the longer they are pregnant; a slow dulling of smells until it was gone altogether. For beta carriers, it was unnerving, but their sense of smell was weak to start with so the change wasn’t a life altering.

For an alpha or omega carrier, it was an identity loss of sorts. As the body took nutrients and energy from them for the growing baby, the flood of new hormones reduced them to the blank slate of a new life. Pack mates would rub and rub often to transfer smell of family back onto them, giving them a tether back to the personhood they had set aside for nine months.

As labor set in, strange smells would start to secrete from the oil glands. Not their own, but a bitter sharp thing that warned strangers away in their time of vulnerability. A smell only family could love.

Papas’ pack believed that the scents of a pup could be found in that profile. Elders would crowd the carrier as the labor ticked on, studying the smell. The window to understand the scent for alpha carriers was small - but maybe that was because fertility for alpha carriers was so low and thus not studied often. True alpha scents would return the fastest - once the pup was moving along toward joining the world beyond, the alpha body seemed to return more to its past scent profile - and by labor’s end, most alphas were back to smelling like themselves again like nothing had changed.

Betas would display this ‘pup’ scent for the duration of labor, nearly until the pup was crowning, before it eased of and their own scent returned. But beta scents were weak, and this pup smell was weaker. By the time a pup was born, all traces where gone and it was nothing but the overpowering smell of aggressively neutral that marked all pups.

As the most fertile, and most majority of carrier parents to start with, omegas oozed that strange future pup scent from labor’s start all the way until the umbilical was cut. And even then, their scent didn't return yet - instead the infamous ‘nursing omega’ stage started. A period where an omega was almost indistinguishable from an alpha in behavior - rude, vocal, aggressive, violent. Some called it the ‘mama bear’ phase, an omega nearly recklessly murderous in defense of their pup. Their smell was recoilsome to all but pups - even bonded mates put off from the smell and bonded nests often left to just carrier and pup until the pup was weaned and the omega stopped nursing, and their own scent finally returning.

But the period before the organosulfuric scent settled in, was what many - including the elders of Papas’ pack - believed to the a pups unfiltered future scent at its strongest. Sometimes, the elders would even prolong a carrier omega’s labor to be able to further study and divine the smell. Papas’ carrier had been forced to struggle for nearly three days as the pack debated over them.

In the end, it was predicted he would be an omega.

Papas spent nearly 13 years under the careful tutelage of his family pack - molding him into what a perfect omega would be for his future alpha bondmate. They’d already picked one for him - an alpha four years his senior from a merchant pack they wished to have more exclusive trading contracts with. Everything about his life was designed to serve his alphas family, to the point when he was 14 and his pack was stressing on why hadn’t he presented yet, and he realized he didn’t have anything of his own. No interest, no passions, no hobbies. Even his name until that point was picked to compliment his betrothed alphas pack.

As a pup, even as a young teen, he still has some freedoms he would loose once presented and bonded. And even if his elders claimed to know his scent - it was 14 years since they’d smelled it - and he took a risk that they didn’t really remember it as well as they claimed they did. And he chose to run away before they had a chance to learn it again.

That’s when he learned that the streets were hard for a packless child - and even as a pup - there were many adults that smiled at his too wide, whose gaze and hands lingered too long. The neutrality of his smell seemed to call them, and the others where more than happy to look away when the street smelled of pup in distress.

So he ran further.

He left the inner city walls. He left the safety of the outer walls. He ran and ran and ran until he crossed the heaps of derelict and rusted trash that had collected so far and wide it would have doubled Kutzk’s city size if it was counted in its limits. The scrap yard formed by the currents and World Government illegal dumping off their shores had redrawn the shape of the island itself, stretching miles past the half collapse lighthouse left abandoned when it no longer served any use to passing ships. The Scrap Rats who lived there now had too many other things in their lives to worry about than a pup, and Papas found a serviceable place for a nest to call home.

And it was a good enough home for the next year.

Maybe would have been a good home for longer.

But when Papas was born - his family pack has predicted he would be an omega. And somewhere in his 15th year, biology said he’d played child long enough.

Papas didn’t understand at first - what was happening. He felt itchy and anxious, pacing outside his home after tearing everything out and replacing it again and again and again.

He’d never been so picky about his nest before, but everything was wrong now and he didn’t know why. He was also starving but nauseous. The smell of food made him want to get sick even as his stomach lurched and groaned painfully, demanding not to be left empty.

His skin felt pricky, the brush of his clothes left him scratching; he’d drawn blood on his wrist before he’d finally just taken his hoodie off, the cuffs of the sleeves feeling like manacles. it had helped, but it also clued him into how warm it was, and he was worried he’d become sick - feverish. If he was ill - if he became too ill to fend for himself - he had no pack still. It could be a death sentence out here. He was painfully alone now. No one to care for him, tend to him. No one in his nest.

The next day was worse. He wanted to cry. He might have already started to cry. His throat was dry and sore and he felt like he couldn’t catch his breath.

He was sure he was sobbing by the third - or was it fourth - day. And then someone came. He wasn’t alone anymore and there was another in his nest. They smelled so good - he’d never smelled someone so strongly before, letting them rub their temple against his head, a smear of scent so bright and crisp left on his skin. He butted his head back - the oil glands behind his ears itching like never before the past few days, and pressing them against this strangers head felt. so. good.

He felt safe and loved and happy in a way he didn’t think he could. No feeling he’d every even entertained - its concept out of his wildest imagination.

Until he didn’t.

This stranger was holding him down - refusing to let him move, face pressed suffocatingly into his nest. Papas was pretty sure he was crying out for help, but the stranger laughed. Their smell was stronger now, but it wasn’t soothing anymore. It was smothering. It choked him, make it harder to breath, to think. His body hurt in new ways, and the alpha - his heart knew it now, his stranger was an alpha - called him terrible names, and then hissed omega at him like a slur as they forced him down. Terror gripped his heart as he felt their breath heavy and hot against their neck, teeth grazing the gland there. They meant to bond with him.

And Papas was alone and unable to stop them. He’d run away from a pack that cared for him to prevent this, yet here he was all the same.

Hot blood pulsed and poured over his bond mark and Papas cried into his nest, clawing at the bedding, at himself, nails breaking as he begged for help.

But the sharp pain of a bite never came even as the scent of blood poured out over his nest. Was this it? Was he the omega bondmate to a stranger? Was he tied to an alpha he didn't even know the face of?

Blood across his back, thick in his hair. But the smell was fading, the overwhelming smell of nothing at all blanketed his mind and his panic didn’t feel so sharp anymore.

Strangers in his nest again, interlopers at his door. Instead of red blood dripping over him, a sun of red hair popped up under his arm, crawling up into his space at his side and pressed its small tiny head to his throat. Papas took a deep breath, mind going numbingly blank as his heart struggled to calm, and small arms wrapped around him, pulling him close.

He hadn’t been part of a pup nest since he ran away. The smell of child different now- a jagged nothing cutting though him and forcing the smells of the world away. He let himself focus on that. Clinging to it and the terror slipped away, the itch that had let it in to start with falling quiet.

Papas’ first heat was not over, but the waves lost their intensity. Minutes slipped to hours until he could think for the first time in days. Eyes like the sun itself stared up at him, a literal child in his arms.

Outside his nest, he could smell the displeasure of another sulking around, how mint and earth could smell threatening and bitter he wasn’t sure, but it also smelt welcoming and maternal. He would met Killer shortly after when Kidd pulled the blankets of Papas’ nest aver his shoulders and usher him into the sun. Killer painted in the visceral red of an alpha’s split lifeblood. Someone murdered, stabbed in the back, all in defense of Papas. Killer - three years his junior - but standing tall and defiant. Looking ready to take on the whole world.

Papas - who might now legally be an adult in the eyes of Kutzk authority having presented finally - took one look at the children that had saved him, hands outstretching to take his - to take him away from here. His nest of years - his own home - with the corpse rotting away in the dull sun of the alpha who’d violated it safety.. He took their hands, and became Pack. Kidd and Killer took him home to their own pup nest, Killer holding him as the heat continued, as he cried and sobbed and clutched at his new Packmate, trying to forget the terror that marked his rite of passage into adulthood, to find safety and comfort in the arms of the pup who'd open his nest to Papas' without a second thought.

As Kidd watched the horizon for threats those following days, Killer might have whispered they were equal in that nest - but Papas knew better. His hormones might go on to mark the start of Pack Heats moving forward; he might be the oldest right now; he might be the ‘adult’. But Killer was Pack leader. Kidd was his co-leader. Children both. He tried not to put them on a pedestal, the pair saw him as family after all, even if he saw them as saviors.

But these were the only ‘alphas’ Papas would ever wish for again. Killer happily comforting him in the nest when his biannual heats rolled around, when no one else was there to hold him and care for him yet; Kidd getting to play guardian, playing attack dog, defending the lighthouse nest they’d commandeered for themselves. And with Papas, they were better able to defend it from other Scrap Rats. Starting to build a real home in the ruins. The start of Pack Eustass.

The starting point of this story is after all is please for the love of all things good, give better sex education to children. This theme is strong with this story, and we are going to see that popping up more and more.