Chapter One - The Collapse

A.N. remember when i said it would take a while for this to come out? HAHA. i lied. ready to be my guinea pig audience again? if you've never read ABO before, i recommend doing a little bit of research first. it might not be your cup of tea, and it also involves a lot of lore. i may break some rules, but i do hope you'll forgive me. FYI this will be real AU -- no helmet, no star wars, mostly modern world with some world building involved. i hope you enjoy! (my fist chapters are always shorter than the remaining chapters, just fyi)

"We're not sure of all the details yet, but it seems a violent mob has broken out at the Designation Facility in San Francisco's Mission District. At least ten confirmed dead. We urge all our viewers to stay home and await their designation confirmations until further word from authorities."

— Recovered broadcast clip from KRON4 Bay Area, three weeks post Collapse

__________

Din tugged at the collar of his flight uniform, his eyes slowly tracing the rush of movement in the crowded terminal— mothers racing after their children, fathers toting suitcases, scattered solo travelers nervously looking from their phones up to the list of boarding gates. It was stiflingly hot under his suit, he could feel a bead of sweat trailing down the back of his neck, burying itself in his collar. The lack of air conditioning in combination with the massive skylights covering the ceiling were not doing him any favors.

This last trip had taken him out of San Francisco for two weeks, and he was eager to get home... if he could call his government sanctioned apartment in the Unmated Quarters home.

The Unmated Quarters used to be a neighborhood called Bayview back before The Collapse and subsequent uprising, at least that's what he'd heard, not that he could trust nor believe much of what they'd documented about that time. But according to the wildly censored Internet and even more wildly censored history textbooks, Bayview used to be a low-income neighborhood with one of the highest crime indexes in the City. Fitting then, that they had stuffed it full of "useless" unmated alphas who could do nothing to help bring the population up to an adequate level.

The crisp Bay air was a welcome relief as he finally exited the stuffy terminal and began walking toward the parking lot. He fished around in his pocket for his car keys, tugging them out before he made it to the covered structure.

There'd once been a time— not so long ago— when they would shoot unmated alphas rather than giving them subpar apartments on the edge of town. Unmated alphas were dangerous, unpredictable, disorderly and unmanageable. They would fuck anything, not just fertile, fruitful omegas.

Din had always found it amusing, in a sickening and infuriating kind of way, that they had been so willing to kill people during the Collapse when they'd shown such great concern over the state of the population.

That had been the widely accepted theory for the last forty years, that the designations had emerged because of a steady decline in pregnancies. The emaciated state of the two newest generations had caused humanity to evolve.

Or devolve, depending on who you asked.

Din firmly planted himself in the devolve party.

Because he'd seen it happen.

He'd only been five during the Collapse, but he remembered the chaos, the sharp, acidic fear, remembered the horrified look on his mother's face when her passport was stamped with a large red B. Beta. There had been some trouble with her pregnancy with him, before the Collapse, her uterus had been damaged, so when the designations emerged, her infertility left her not as a fruitful omega, but as a sterile beta. Back then they'd tried to separate the designations even more than they still do forty years later, and so when they stamped his father's passport with a green A, he snapped.

They'd both been killed in the crossfire of a riot.

And he had been taken, crying and kicking and screaming, to an orphanage, then later to a group home for young alphas after his designation made itself known.

Din ducked inside his car and finally undid the first few buttons of his suit, taking a deep breath as he pushed his key into the ignition and started the engine. He didn't feel like he could properly breath again until he'd exited the airport and emerged onto the wide, open expanse of the 101.

He'd joined the Resistance Army the day he turned eighteen, first as a soldier, then later as a pilot. But it became clear to him, early on, that this was a fight they were not going to win. The Resistance was too unorganized, too chaotic and hysterical without access to suppressants. He turned himself in when he was twenty-five, after seven years of fighting a war that would never completely end, at least not yet, forty years since the Collapse. Din was too good of a pilot for them to lock away or kill, too great of an asset with that green A stamped on his passport, so they slapped him on the wrist, placed him in an apartment in the Unmated Quarters, and gave him a job.

Perhaps it was of his own form of rebellion that he still had not had the Vision, at forty-five years old. Not that those things were controllable, but it did serve as some bit of flimsy vindication that Din did not have a mate, someone to fuck babies into for the satisfaction of the government. Of course, not every alpha had a fated mate, but those that didn't still usually mated with one of the unmated omegas, they still served their purpose. Din had never fucked an omega, would never fuck an omega.

He took the exit onto 3rd Street, driving the few blocks that separated the freeway from the Unmated apartment buildings— a set of five modern towers that faced each other, so that Din's view from his fifth-story window was just the front of the building facing him, not the Bay on the other side.

Unmated alphas didn't deserve a view, it would seem.

He dropped his suitcase in his bedroom as soon as he made it up to his apartment, then kicked off his shoes and padded to the bathroom across the hall, stripping down and cranking on the hot water in the shower.

It was a life of solitude, the life of an unmated alpha, a life of quiet. And Din didn't mind that, most of the time, when he did, he would call up one of the women that he regularly slept with— both betas— both subsequently unexpectant as to their relationship outside of sex. It wasn't that alphas and omegas couldn't marry betas, they could, now, after twenty years of it being illegal— one of the small victories of the Resistance— but it was still frowned upon, viewed as unnatural, a waste.

Alphas couldn't breed betas. And betas couldn't breed omegas.

And that's all this world cared about anymore, breeding.

It made Din want to rip his skin off.

He stepped into the shower, letting his head fall back under the stream of hot water. The warmth worked to dull the tense muscles in his shoulders, while his hand dulled the ache in his cock as he jacked it once, twice. He was too tired to call one of his girls. He hadn't gotten a decent night's sleep since taking off from SFO two weeks ago.

He tried to avoid the ring of soft tissue at the base of his cock— the physical proof of what he was— as he twisted his fist around his length, confining himself mostly to his head, never quite satisfying enough, even when he was buried in a beta. His body knew— subconsciously— that he couldn't breed them, and so at forty-five-years-old he'd never knotted anyone.

He thought that might be a record, some palpable proof of his restraint, of his defiance.

Din came with a grunt in his hand, letting his head fall forward, the water cascading down his face, dripping from his hair onto the shower floor. The relief wasn't enough to dull the seemingly constant ache in his pelvis, but it took the edge off.

He knew the ache would never fully subside unless he was with an omega.

And he would never give the government that satisfaction.

__________

"Jer" Daisy exhaled her fiancé's name, glancing up from her empty pill bottle to the reflection of her anxious expression in the mirror. "I'm out of suppressants."

Her heat was due to start in a week, and if she didn't start taking her pills proactively, it was going to be painful, more agonizing than it normally was, which she didn't even want to try to imagine.

"I think I have some extra in my work bag," Jeremy called out, from somewhere in their apartment, probably his office.

She shuffled out of the bathroom, to the living room, where she bent over and began digging through his work bag, until her fingers brushed against the smooth plastic of a pill bottle, and she felt like she could breathe again.

"Found it," she called out, but Jeremy didn't respond, only the honking of cars below their apartment filled the silence.

She popped the cap off the bottle and took one of the pills dry, cringing as it slid down her throat, then padded over to the little window seat in their living room, sitting down and putting her forehead against the cold glass— which immediately fogged from her body heat— and peered down at the bustling street below.

They lived on the edge of the Tenderloin, right before it faded into Nob Hill, which used to be the most dangerous neighborhood in San Francisco before the Collapse; it might have gotten worse since then if government propaganda wasn't to be believed.

The Tenderloin was home to all others. Couples who didn't fit the omega/alpha norm, sex workers who skirted by without much reparation from the already overwhelmed government, drug and unregulated suppressant dealers. It was the only apartment they could get when landlords realized that an omega was engaged to marry a beta.

She let out a breath against the glass, then lifted her head, picking her hand up to etch a flower into the fog with her index finger.

When she was a kid— in all respects except for the fact that she'd started presenting as an omega two days before her thirteenth birthday— she'd dreamt of her alpha— her fated alpha even though only forty percent of omegas have a fated mate— swooping her up from her chaotic childhood home, taking care of her through her heats, keeping her safe, loving her. That dream stayed alive until she was twenty-three, and all her omega friends were mated, fated or not, and she was still alone, waiting.

She met Jeremy a year ago, through work. She was a receptionist at one of the largest suppressant manufacturers in the state, and he was a pharmacist. A respectable job, especially for a beta.

He was nice, smart, not as docile as most betas she knew, and at twenty-five-years-old it was clear to her that no alpha was coming for her, fated or not.

Daisy heard Jeremy cough from his office, and she turned her head slowly toward the sound. Evenings were lonely, or maybe life was lonely. Jeremy worked late most nights, for his second job, helping the government weed out misinformation from the Internet. And maybe it was loneliness itself that brought her to Jeremy, that made her say yes when he proposed with a little diamond ring that was set on a gold band even though she only wore silver jewelry.

A warm body to sleep next to.

Never enough to cure the ache in her core, but some semblance of safety, of belonging, of love.

Maybe that made her immoral, vile and horrible for using him, for saying I love you with a flinch and a forced smile, but wasn't it better than them both being alone?

Wasn't it better than waiting forever, for that man from her dreams?

Daisy slowly stood up, padding through the living room and down the hall, to the room closest to the front door where bright, blue light was spilling out.

"Jer," she said softly, leaning against the doorframe, her eyes tracing the blond hair peeking up from his office chair. "How much longer you think?"

"Uh," he breathed out, his head disappearing behind the chair, "I don't know, babe, I'm slammed right now. Maybe a few hours."

Her stomach twisted, her heart sinking into her gut, that loneliness like a deep, drilling pain in her core.

"Okay, I— I think I'll go to bed."

"Yeah, sure, I'll be in a little after midnight if all goes well."

She let out a small breath, then pushed away from the door, shuffling toward their bedroom across the hall. She changed into her nightgown, brushed her hair in the mirror above her vanity with a straight face even though she could feel a lump growing thick and unrelenting in her throat.

Her heat, her upcoming heat, that was why she felt like crying, not because Jeremy had locked himself away for another night, not because the man from her dreams would never come rescue her.

She slid into bed, into the cold sheets, burying her face in her pillow and willing sleep to come so that she could hear him again.

Before her dreams faded each night, to darkness, to his voice, she usually dreamt of her mother, her father, their forced pairing back when omegas and alphas didn't have a choice, back when only fated pairs got to choose their mates... if the universe selecting your perfect match was akin to choosing. A forced marriage between her alpha father and her omega mother, solely to bear children, to bear her and her five older sisters who she hadn't seen since they all mated and moved out of the city.

Perhaps her childhood should have drowned out any lingering romanticism Daisy held inside of her heart, but it didn't, somehow it didn't, because the man who spoke in her dreams didn't yell like her father did, he spoke softly, that smooth rumbling baritone she knew like the lines on her palm.

But he didn't come, and so she was to marry Jeremy, condomed to hear that man only in her dreams now. The dreams she thought might cease as soon as she accepted Jeremy's proposal, but which only seemed to grow stronger, more unrelenting since.

Her omega friends never spoke about dreams, it was the alphas who had the Visions. She'd asked her best friend once, in school. Daisy was sixteen and the dreams had been going on for two years already.

"Do you ever have dreams?" she'd asked in a hushed whisper, leaning over their lunch table to whisper to her friend Erika.

"Yeah..." Erika had said slowly, her face twisted in confusion, "everyone dreams, Daisy."

"No," she shook her head, excitement bubbling in her chest, "like dreams of your alpha, talking to you, saying your name."

Erika leaned back in her seat, her brown eyes going a little wide. "No... I've never even heard of that. Why? Does it happen to you?"

"No," Daisy had spit out, picking up the bread roll from her plate and tearing off a piece, popping it into her mouth so she wouldn't have to answer any more questions.

Nearly ten years later and she'd still never heard of another omega having dreams of their alpha speaking to them... so maybe she was crazy, maybe it was all a figment of her imagination, but then why did it feel like he was calling out to her, beckoning her, comforting her when she was alone in her dreams and in life?

It was not like she'd ever seen his face, it wasn't a proper Vision, it was just his voice, his scent, the warmth of him, like he was visiting her from behind some kind of dark veil.

Daisy fell asleep close to midnight, still alone in the bedroom, comforted only by the drone of cars zooming below, the muffled conversations that drifted up from the street, until her dreams faded to black and his voice— that deep, rumbling baritone she'd known and craved for almost half of her life— called out to her.

"Daisy," he hummed her name, the deep, heady, musky scent of him tunneling into her nose. "Daisy."

She tried to grasp him in the dark, but came up empty, filled only by the sound of his voice.

"Daisy."

His presence, even without a form, was like a thick, wool curtain of warmth, tugging her down further, cradling her.

"Daisy."

She melted into it, her core at peace, not aching, not yearning, satiated, only in sleep.

"Daisy."

When she awoke, his voice still buzzed in her head, like it always did, but it was not that faceless man she slept next to, it was Jeremy, turned away from her, only the back of his blonde hair visible from underneath the duvet.

And she was alone.

In all the ways that mattered.