Minoh was born to a long line of Alphas who didn’t own land or legacy — just grit and the quiet compulsion to walk toward wreckage. Not politicians. Not CEOs. Paramedics. Smokejumpers. Search dogs with badges and big hearts. His grandfather died hauling strangers out of a flooding gorge. His mother lost most of her hearing in a building collapse during her fourth rescue op.

“We go where people break,” his father used to say, peeling off his bloodied gloves at the end of a shift. “And we help them unbreak.”

So Minoh followed the line like a heartbeat on a monitor. Clean. Steady. Enlisted at eighteen. Special forces medic by twenty-one. He was the kind of Alpha who could stabilize a collapsed lung with a pen cap and a prayer. Who didn’t waste time broadcasting scent. Controlled it like breath. Always understated. Always present.

He figured out early that scent didn’t comfort the dying — words did.

Then came Makassar. Third year in. His first major quake zone. Entire districts razed to splinters. Families clawing through ash. And there — in the middle of the chaos, with dried blood under your nails and a cracked mask pulled low — was you.

The Omega. The one with the too-dry humor and eyes that didn’t blink much anymore.

Neither of you were supposed to get attached. Not when sleep came in forty-minute increments. Not when the air smelled like rust and rot. But you kept ending up in the same places. Grave pits. Crushed stairwells. Collapsing shelters where children might still be tucked beneath beams. Your hands bled together more than once. He stopped bothering to ask whose skin was torn — you or him.

On the third night, you shared coffee brewed in a cracked tin mug over the ruins of a primary school.

“If I don’t make it,” you said, voice light in a way that wasn’t light at all, “pretend I wasn’t annoying.”

And Minoh — bone-tired, soot-smudged, still shaking the dust of death off his back — said, “I’ll remember you exactly as you are.”

He meant it.

He turned away for an hour. Pulled a boy from a trench of broken tiles and coughing dirt. When he came back, you were gone. Not on the rosters. Not on the evac lists. Not a whisper.

He thought you were dead.

Didn’t check. Couldn’t. Some silences felt sacred.

He quit the military. Switched to private trauma response. Grief counseling. Rebuild coordination. Nothing heroic. Just patchwork work. It paid shit. It left him hollow. But at least there was no PR team. No cameras. No secondhand uniforms.

And then — two years later — a new job. A trauma group.

And there you were.

Alive.

Not broken, but different. He couldn’t tell if it was relief or guilt that nearly knocked the air from his lungs.

You weren’t bonded. But you were engaged. A ring. Polished, sharp-edged, unscuffed. Not for love. Someone else told him that. Said you needed stability. Said you’d been drifting. He understood. Or thought he did.

Now it’s your turn for a session. You’d been dodging him for weeks. Skipping. Pushing. Cancelling.

But here you are now. On the couch. Sitting across from him like no years had passed at all — like maybe it was yesterday you handed him a cracked tin mug and told him not to mourn you if it went bad.

His mouth is dry. His pen clicks. His eyes avoid yours.

Then, quieter than usual, he spoke.

“Didn’t think I’d see you again outside rubble and smoke.”

He clicks his pen once more, then glances at the page.

“But… you’re here. So let’s start with what kept you breathing.”