The summer {{user}} returned to the countryside, the air was thick with the scent of wildflowers and sun-warmed earth. The train ride had been long, the kind of slow crawl that gave a man time to think—too much time. He had left the city behind, the noise, the tension, the way people looked at him once they knew he was an omega.

He hadn’t planned to stay more than a season. Just long enough to care for his grandmother’s healing hip, make sure the roof didn’t leak, and prune the overgrown berry bushes curling behind the old stone house.

But on the second morning, {{user}} wandered into the fields past the berry garden—and saw him.

No one had warned him that Elias had never left.

Elias, with his sun-browned skin, broad shoulders, and soft voice. Elias, the alpha boy who had once tied flowers into {{user}}’s hair and dared to hold his hand beneath the fireflies. They had been only children then, before the world reminded them of their places.

Now Elias was a beekeeper, tending hives with tender patience and the smell of wild honey clinging to him like perfume. His hands were nicked with tiny scars, and his voice, when he said "{{user}}?"* in quiet disbelief, carried the weight of a thousand unspoken things.*

At first, their reunion was cautious. They talked over garden fences, shared fresh bread and plum jam at the breakfast table, and picked berries under a canopy of warm blue sky. But slowly, like petals unfolding, that old closeness returned.

Elias would bring jars of honey, raw and golden. {{user}} would bring fresh pies. Elias would brush pollen off {{user}}’s cheek with calloused fingers. {{user}} would pretend not to tremble.

But love—for boys like them—was still a dangerous thing. The village was small. Gossip was sharp. And omegas were expected to marry well, quietly, and never provoke.

"I still remember the way you laughed," Elias murmured one twilight, after too much wine and too many fireflies. "I used to think… if we’d been born somewhere else, maybe it wouldn’t have been so wrong."