Contains implied intimate partner violence and discusses a suicide. Please read with caution.
Alex Anderson closed the exam door behind him and walked briskly around the corner to his office. He opened the office door calmly, and then he shut it quietly behind him. Then, he sent Fred the Educational Skeleton flying across the room with one upward swipe. He snarled, still unsatisfied, and kicked the trashcan into the wall sending wads of paper flying all over the floor. “GOD DAMN IT.” He closed his eyes and stabbed his fingers through his hair and pulled until it hurt. This one is gonna leave a mark.
He was never going to get used to seeing the struggle his clinic patients went through. With his eyes closed, he could see the hollow look in Gabriel Cooper’s eyes again. Big long-lashed, green eyes. Red rimmed from tears, dilated in fear as he looked at Alex and automatically remembered his Alphan attacker. His patient had obviously been fighting for control, trying to be brave. Alex hoped Dr. Charles, the clinic psychologist, would help Gabriel Cooper realize he had already succeeded at being brave.
Alex tried to imagine how another Alpha could look at the faces of his patients, at their small frames, and feel the urge to hurt and shove and tear and take. He couldn’t. All his life, even before he lost his sister Anastasia, he had been raised to believe in the power of Omegas, in their autonomy, in their limitless potential and their right to simply exist as they saw fit. His parents were old-fashioned, sure, but his mother was no meek, silent little Omegan help-mate. She may have retired from the workforce to raise her children, but there was no question that she had been the engine that always kept the family and his father’s professional life moving smoothly and advancing steadily. On the surface, she was all charm and good looks and witty repartée, but nobody crossed Victoria Park-Anderson or her family. At least, not twice.
Alex had been a high school junior when his older sister Anastasia had gotten engaged to Mr. Perfect, William R. Page III. Alex hadn’t known him very well. Proto-finance-bro Bill Page III hadn’t been especially interested in a lanky, studious, science geek like Alex. Ana and Bill had met at a debutante ball when Ana was a freshman. They had dated steadily through four years at William & Mary where she majored in political science and he majored in finance. He had proposed atop the Eiffel Tower over Christmas Break of their last year of college. Everything was picture-perfect.
Their mother, Victoria, always an outstanding judge of character, had never warmed to Bill. She had urged Anastasia to consider all her options, to take things slow. But Anastasia was insistent. The couple was married the following June, in a perfect ceremony at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, on a date carefully chosen for auspiciousness, and on their honeymoon in Antigua, Bill had claimed Anastasia. No claims before marriage had been a non-negotiable rule in the conservative Anderson household.
With the claim came the control. After the honeymoon, bit by bit, they saw less and less of Anastasia. When they did see her she was thinner and withdrawn, flinching and jumping at the littlest things. She claimed she was dieting so she could fit into sample sizes. She claimed she was just busy.
Six months after the wedding, Anastasia got pregnant and was thrilled. Then a miscarriage. She was wearing long sleeves at their annual Fourth of July party. Another pregnancy, another miscarriage. She grew even thinner, seeming to disappear before their eyes. Their mother had filled the fridge with food, had fretted, had begged her to come to the doctor, to the psychologist, even to a lawyer. Anastasia refused.
In late September, the phone call. Anastasia was gone. An apparently deliberate overdose on pain killers she’d been prescribed by a doctor that none of them had ever heard of. There was a note that contained nothing but an apology to her family, making no mention of her husband. The Andersons found all of their Christmas presents already wrapped and tagged in her closet. She was her mother’s daughter in that regard, polished and always prepared.
Anastasia's autopsy had uncovered suspicious bruising and a healing spiral fracture on her left radius. There was a fresh crack in one of her ribs. Bill Page said that she’d had a recent fall on the stairs outside their home. There was no one who could testify otherwise. Ana had never spoken to anyone about what happened in their home when they were alone. There was nothing that the law could do, even with the pull that Leo, their father, a federal judge, had. Everyone had loved Ana, but no one had been able to save her.
In the end, it was Victoria Anderson who went into action, pulling every one of the strings she had at her disposal until Bill Page’s lucrative hedge fund manager position vanished out from under him. Not a single one of the major firms would touch him, not in Baltimore, not in DC, not in New York. Socially, he was an outcast, too. Even his parents cut him off rather than be tainted by the black cloud of opprobrium that surrounded him. By that point, Bill couldn’t get an invitation to test drive a Camry during Toyota-thon. He pulled up stakes and moved away from the D.C. area. The last thing Alex had heard about him was that he was struggling along in obscurity as a financial planner in Columbus, Ohio.
The Anderson family had been devastated by the loss of Anastasia. The system, the privilege that they had all flourished under had been like water to a fish– sustaining, supporting, and invisible. Neither of his parents had thought much about Omegan Rights before Ana’s death. Neither of them had needed to, because in their family, everyone had always been able to do and have anything they reached for. They had followed the rules and they had been rewarded with a loving marriage and matehood and beautiful children who did well at everything they tried. They had money, they had control over their lives. Everything had unfolded exactly as it should in every social narrative.
But after Ana’s death, things changed. At night Alex's father drank too much. After his mother succeeded in dismantling Bill’s life, she had seemed uncharacteristically purposeless for months, uninterested in the social scene, uninterested in anything, really. As for Alex, he had buried himself in school and then college applications and career plans. He had already been planning to go to med school, which was one of the four acceptable career outcomes in their social circle, but now he had a specific goal to achieve while he was there. More than a goal. A calling.
No Omega should ever have to be trapped by an unasked-for or unsafe claim, that much was clear to Alex. If Ana had understood that, if the world had understood that, she'd still be there to tell Alex what a gigantic nerd he was and buy him funny socks for Christmas. If a claim could be biologically made, it could be biologically unmade, and the science was there to prove it. Claim reversal procedures were rare, but not unheard of. There were claim-reversal clinics in New York, Minnesota, and California, but nothing near Baltimore or DC.
There was a desperate need for researchers and practitioners in the field of claim reversals. Alex was going to help fill that need. He got into UVA for pre-med and informed his parents about his plans. To his surprise, despite the controversy surrounding claim-reversal treatment, they supported him. His mother even took up the cause, fundraising and lobbying with the goal of seeing a claim-reversal clinic open at Johns Hopkins within the next decade. As Victoria worked to start the clinic, she gradually began to resemble herself again. As his mother healed, the grim expression on his father’s face slowly faded. They smiled again. Sometimes someone laughed. The Andersons weren’t ever going to be the same, but there were things that needed to be done and there was hope for a better future.
Alex powered through his time at UVA in three years, taking summer classes and intersessions, knowing he wanted to board-certify in two very disparate specialties after med school, and that it would take extra time. He continued at UVA for med school. Then, he matched as a resident in endocrinology at the Mayo Clinic, learning from the best claim-reversal specialists on the planet. Finally, he moved onto UCLA for plastics. At thirty years old, Alex returned to Baltimore, armed with the knowledge, skills, and certifications he needed. The Anastasia Anderson Claim Reversal Clinic opened at Johns Hopkins the following year.
Through the clinic, Alex, Susan, Teneisha and their colleagues had helped a few hundred Omegas achieve a fresh start in the three years it had been open. Outside the clinic, however, right-wing anti-claim-choice protestors often crowded the sidewalks with signs and slogans jeering at their patients: “You asked for it, you got it!” “Alphas First,” “God Hates Claim Cutters,” “God is the Alpha and the Omega,” “Nature Knows What It’s Doing,” “An Omega’s Place Is In the Home,” “‘Forced Claims Are False Flags!”
In spite of the opposition, the patients and the clinic staff collectively pushed forward. Recently, though, Alex had begun to feel bitter about the legal walls they ran into, over and over. There was little legal recourse for an Omega who had been claimed against his or her will, or who wanted to leave a claim relationship. It was also incredibly difficult to get Omegas into the clinic in time for successful treatment because of laws like Florida’s that made it illegal to seek claim-reversal without the permission of the claiming Alpha. There was also significant social stigma around claim-reversal. Gender essentialists, so called “Alphan Rights” supporters, and religious conservatives all pushed back, loudly and publicly, against the Omegan Rights movement, and focused especially on what they considered to be the blasphemy that was claim-reversal. The Claim Choice movement needed to expand its outreach somehow if they wanted to gain any traction on the state or national level, and the clinic needed to be a part of that.
“Whoa. Did you and Fred get into it or what?” said Susan Caris, standing in the doorway and staring at the pile of articulated bones on the floor.
“No, Fred was an innocent bystander who got caught up in the crossfire. Honest to God, Susan. Some days I am so sick of it, sick of the bad laws and the lack of laws, sick of the anti-claim-choice nutjobs and their signs out there on the sidewalk scaring my patients, sick of Omegas being treated like property, sick of my patients being afraid–even of me. I don’t know why, but Gabriel Cooper really got to me.”
Susan winced sympathetically and shrugged. “Yeah, me too. But he’s still got his spark. You did a great job with him today, you even got him to laugh. I think he’s gonna do well, not just medically but in general. And we’re helping to make that possible–at least you’re out there, we’re out there, doing something. The laws can change, society can change, the science will absolutely improve and we’re a part of all of that. We’ve already come a long way. We can’t help them all, Alex, but we can help that one who just left here.”
“Oh, I will definitely help that one. I’m gonna control+Z that Alpha asshole’s handiwork so hard that Gabriel Cooper himself’s not even going to be able to find where it used to be. And you’re right about the progress. I was just having a moment. Maybe I’ll make an appointment with Liza Charles myself.”
“That’s the spirit. Now, apologize to Fred and reset his bones and finish your charts and go home and have a beer with your cat.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Comments (41)
See all