When their cycles finally broke, it found the pair reclining in bed at each other’s side. One of Finn’s scrub tops was consuming Luan’s thin form, the neckline sliding down his shoulder and baring the curve of brown skin in a tempting display. Finn smiled and started to reach for the omega, to pull him down to lay at Finn’s side, but was stilled when his mate shifted nervously, dark brows pinching. 

“Baby?” Finn asked, barely resisting the urge to smooth out the adorable little wrinkle between Luan’s furrowed brows. 

But rather than answer, Luan merely swayed anxiously, gnawing on his lip for a moment. 

"Why didn't you bite me?" he said finally, fingers fiddling anxiously with a loose strand dangling from the duvet's embroidery, as he avoided Finn's still-golden-tinged gaze. 

"Did you want me to bite you?" Finn purred back, the smile evident in his voice as he leaned towards his floundering mate. "You don't think it's a little early?" 

"Well…we're fated mates," Luan began, as if it were a foregone conclusion, his voice monotone, as if he were simply repeating something he'd been told for as long as he could remember. After all, he had always been a perfect puppet for the misleading, toxic lessons he'd been taught all his life, repeating their vitriol as if they had been branded into his very being. Merely repeating words that burnt acrid and sour where they spilt from his lips to splatter against his unsuspecting mate. "We found each other, that's exceptionally rare. You know that as well as I do-- fated mates being bound is rarer than just about anything else in this world. I mean…we were divinely destined for each other, were we not? So isn't bond-marking the inevitable next step? To not choose your fated mate would be ridiculous, it would be a waste of the ultimate potential." 

His voice remained so goddamn empty, so forlorn, that it severed clean through the bliss the alpha had been happily floating in, cinching about his heart with an aching squeeze that made it hard to breathe, agonizing to draw in a single lungful of air, as he turned toward his partner. He watched as Luan’s fingers absently caressed the bite mark scabbing on the side of his throat, but found he was unable to summon the joy he'd expected at the display. 

"Luan," Finn said seriously, reaching out to cup the omega's face, and tilt it up towards his own. "Look at me, sweetheart." 

Finn stayed there, golden-tinged gaze steady, until Luan's wavering emerald one lifted to collide with it, before he offered him a soft smile. 

"Baby, we aren't inevitable," he corrected gently, tracing the curve of Luan's cheek with a soothing, firm swipe of his thumb, over and over as he spoke. "We aren't some foregone conclusion you have to consign yourself to. There is no script you have to live by, nothing you have to force yourself to accept, or be happy with, just because it's what's expected. Fuck that noise, fuck what society expects of you, of us. You don't have to be with me, Luan. I don't care that we're fated mates, you aren't forced to be with me. Our relationship isn't some inevitability you have to doom yourself to even if you don't want it. Luan, baby, your happiness is the most important thing in the world to me, whether that happiness involves me or not. Yes, sweetheart, I love you. I do. I fell for you the moment I met you, and I will continue to fall deeper every moment I have the privilege of knowing you. Will losing you absolutely crush me? Yes, it will. Undoubtedly, entirely, it will crush me. Because that's how I love you. I will not lie to you. I haven't lied to you yet, and I have no intention of starting to now. But, Luan, you aren't responsible for my emotions. You don't have to sacrifice yourself to ensure I have what I want or need or anything else. You are not secondary. Your happiness is not an afterthought. Not to me, and it shouldn't be to you. If you don't want to be with me, if you don't want any part of this relationship…baby, you don't have to. It's your life. Your decision. Not some inevitability, not something you have to do because it's what you're supposed to do. I don't know who told you that, who taught you that it's normal and expected of you, but they're wrong. Sweetheart, you need to do what makes you happy, what you want to do. Not me, not your family or whoever else it was that taught you that. Not anyone else. You're your own person, before anything else. Before you're my mate, before you're your parents' child, you are you. And that matters. You matter."

"Finn…" Luan whispered in a thick voice, his emerald gaze fogged by a haze of tears that blurred the beautiful, kind, sweet man before him. 

"I love you, Luan," Finn continued softly, gently cupping the other side of his mate's face and wiping away his tears with a steady swipe of those strong thumbs. "I loved you the moment I found you, wrapped in the coat you stole, and I will love you even if you choose a different path. I love you as an omega, and I would love you even if our secondary genders hadn't drawn us to one another. If you choose me, I will be elated. I will be the happiest man in this world, and I will devote the rest of my life to you. To loving you, to ensuring you're as happy as I am for the rest of our days. But, baby, that is only if it's what you want. I won't force you to choose me, and I don't want you to force yourself either. There's no rush, sweetheart. I'm not going anywhere. I promise. Even if you choose a different path, even if we go our separate ways, I will always be here. Will always support you, no matter what you're going through. Because I love you, and I always will. I can promise you that. So do what you have to do, baby." Finn leaned forward to press a tender, barely-there brush of a kiss against the tip of Luan's reddened, tear-soaked nose. "If you need to go home, go home." Another, barely-there kiss to that wrinkle between his brows followed. "If you need time apart, take that time, baby." Next came a faint brush of those lips to his left temple, burnish where they passed. "However long you need." A barely-there brush to his right temple came to match the last. 

"And know I will be right here," he whispered as his lips caressed Luan's right, tear-dampened cheek, "waiting for you." His lips traced a ghost of a touch up Luan's wet left cheek. "For however long you want me to." A gentle, phantom scrape of teeth found Luan's chin, rising a shuddering breath to the omega’s tear-dripping lips. "So choose yourself, my love. And know I will always choose you too." 

Finn swallowed the whimpering sob that trembled along Luan's lips with his own, pressing a firm, gentle kiss there. It was barely more than a peck, than a mere press of lips to another’s, and yet, as tears traced Luan's cheeks anew and he wrapped his arms around his alpha's neck to pull him closer, he thought it may have been the best kiss he would ever have. 

****

Luan Vierra had never once, in his twenty years of life, made a single decision for himself. He had never chosen himself, hadn’t even considered it as a possibility. 

Yet, he could not help but allow Finn's words to echo in his mind, over and over as they played, a never ending repeat to fill the void as he stared, unseeing, at the distant moon, and listened to the soothing lull of his mate's breath at his back. 

But the omega could not sleep-- found he could not silence the whispering memory of his alpha’s words within his mind, no matter how long he lay there and let the moonlight consume him. 

So choose yourself, my love. And know I will always choose you too.

Luan Vierra had been called many things in his life, had done many things and had possessed many failings, and yet…never once, in his twenty years of life, had he ever put himself first. 

He had been taught, in fact, that his worth as an omega was intrinsically tied to his ability to mate, to conceive; that without that virtue his existence had no value to it. Yet his mate saw more in him, saw a potential no one else, not even he, ever had.

And so, with the faint tracery of golden, dawning light caressing his skin with burnish encouragement, Luan decided that perhaps it was time to start. 

When Finley Byrne awoke hours later, reaching for his mate across silken sheets, his searching hands met nothing but cold emptiness, and the faintest crinkle of stationary against his skin. A rustling sort of sound came when he swept his hand again, as if he needed convincing that what he had felt was the true, irrevocable fact of his situation. 

And where there had once been a warmth within his chest-- a sweet, soothing heat at the thought of his mate at his side-- came an aching throb laced amongst his ribs that slickened his tongue with the sour, acrid tang of nauseating heartbreak. A sensation that dizzied him even before he allowed his eyes to open and meet the empty spot at his side that another would never be able to fill. 

The alpha forced himself upright, pain lancing his chest with every thundering heartbeat, as he stared at the note at his side as if it were liable to strike-- a beast guised in paper flesh. After a hesitant beat, Finn forced himself to take the note between shaking fingers, and drag the paper ever closer, unwilling to pluck it from the silken sheets, to allow its heft to fall fully into his hold. His other hand shoved into knotted blond tresses, clenching about the strands as if the stinging pain would somehow alleviate the agony he knew awaited him, even before he let the crinkled paper fall open. And after a long, tense beat, he at last allowed himself to consume the words he knew would damn him, that would shatter him forevermore. 

Finn, 

You were right. I have never chosen myself, never put myself first. I don't even know who I am, what kind of person I am, beyond my family's teachings. I don't know what I want, who I want, because of it. 

And that isn't fair to you…or to me. 

So you were right. I need time. Need to find out who I am before I choose forever. 

I don't know how long it will be, when it will be that this all becomes clear. But I need to find out. 

If you are able to wait for me, know I'll return to you someday. And if you aren't…be happy. That's all I have the right to ask of you. 

Always yours, 

Luan. 

The note disappeared into a clenched fist as Finn's back shuddered with misery, as he curled in on himself and released a keening, tortured sort of wail. An agonized cry that the lacquered walls of his massive, empty home merely repeated back, a noise reminiscent of the gilded cage of expectation he had dared to dream might be lifted from his shoulders, that another might carry its weight at his side. 

The sound that met him, echoed over and over by the vast void of his home, was a mockery of the love he thought he'd have, of the hollowness he had dared to hope would fade. 

But Finn had not lied when he'd told Luan he would love him even if he left, for that was the depth in which his mate had burrowed into his very being during those short, blessed days. That was the strength with which he shattered at his mate's absence, sobbing as he wailed, his massive form shuddering with every tortured cry. 

Because it was the strength with which he'd loved him. For, if nothing else, Finley Byrne would love Luan Vierra for as long as he breathed, and would never love another as long as he lived. That, if nothing else in this cursed world, he could guarantee. 

And he would wait, as he had promised…he would wait. 

Even as it tore him to unrecognizable pieces with every passing moment. 

He would wait.