Chapter Text
The air is thick with smoke and wet with blood. Concrete walls hum with the memory of screaming, of gunfire and gas, of bodies hitting steel floors. The alarms have stopped, but they left a ringing in the walls—no, in the bones.
Kim steps through the haze like something unbothered by chaos. But his jacket is torn, blood smeared along the seam of his jaw—none of it his. His gun’s still warm. His hands are not.
He finds him curled behind the remnants of an overturned medcart. Breathing shallow, feral-wide eyes not registering now from then.
Kenta doesn’t look like a person. He looks like a leftover. A half-thing. All ragdoll limbs and flinches and trembling. His collar—the one Tony used to shock him into obedience, to pose him like a toy—blinks red once, then dies.
He doesn’t move.
Doesn’t know how.
His limbs stay where they last remembered pain.
Kim doesn’t speak. Just moves slowly, deliberately, boots crunching over shattered syringes and black market suppressants. He crouches. Watches Kenta’s pupils blow out wide and disoriented. Watches the way his throat works like swallowing’s a learned behavior. Like his body still expects punishment for being alive.
They shouldn’t be touching.
The warehouse still smells like blood and chemicals, like seared skin and crushed hormones. Kenta’s scent is a mess—raw, fractured, wrong. Not unpresented. Not suppressed. Just—unmade.
Kim’s jacket hangs from one shoulder in bloody ribbons. His breath is steady, but his heart—his fucking heart—is roaring in his chest because he knows.
He knows exactly what this man is to him.
And still, he says nothing.
Instead, he cages Kenta gently—not forcing, just there. One palm planted beside his head. The other anchoring him with presence, not pressure. A barrier. A breath.
Kenta flinches but doesn’t flee. He’s shaking. His knees are drawn to his chest like he’s trying to shrink into something Tony can’t touch anymore.
“Hey,” Kim says softly, like the word might shatter him. “You okay?”
Kenta doesn’t answer at first. He’s breathing in quick, uneven gasps. Trying to regulate. Trying to be good. Trying to remember what a normal response looks like.
Then, his voice cracks out like a snapped wire. “I can’t—I don’t know how to come down.”
Kim just watches him. Doesn’t try to fix it.
But then—he reaches.
Slow. Deliberate. A hand rising to the back of Kenta’s neck, fingers brushing under the collar. Not possessive. Not controlling. Just… grounding. Skin to skin. Warmth where there’s only ever been electricity.
Kenta exhales like something’s been punched out of him. A sharp, choked sound that stutters into a shudder.
And then.
It starts low.
From somewhere deep in his chest, a sound begins—feral, fractured, impossible. A rumble. Not a moan, not a whimper—a purr. Half-growl, half-vibration, like his body’s remembering something it was never taught but always needed.
Kim stills.
His eyes don’t widen. He doesn’t breathe wrong. But inside—he breaks.
Kenta claps a hand over his mouth, eyes blown wide, face flaming red with shame.
Mortified. Panicking.
Like making that noise is a betrayal. Like being comforted is an act of failure.
Kim catches his wrist. Doesn’t squeeze. Just peels it away gently, holds it between them like something sacred.
“Don’t you dare hide from me,” Kim murmurs.
And Kenta purrs again.
Raw. Crooked. Starving.
It’s not sweet. It’s not pretty.
It’s desperate. Like a sound dragged out of his marrow. Like a part of him was waiting for this moment to come undone.
The kind of sound someone makes when they’ve never been held like this. When their body doesn't understand safety but wants to.
Kim doesn't speak again. Doesn’t tease. Doesn’t name what he knows.
He just leans in, tilts his head—and kisses the sound from Kenta’s throat like it’s holy.
The kiss isn’t deep.
Not yet.
It hovers, trembling on the precipice of something too big to name. Lips brush—not forcefully, not possessively—just there, barely touching, like the ghost of a promise still unsure if it’s allowed to become real.
Kim doesn’t move fast. Doesn’t push. His breath is shaky against Kenta’s mouth, like even the air might be too much. His nose nudges gently at the curve of Kenta’s cheek, lips brushing again, softer this time, seeking permission in the smallest tilt.
And it breaks him.
Not gently. Not slowly.
Kenta stiffens first—every muscle in his frame drawing taut like piano wire. His breath catches sharp in his throat, a tiny, startled sound that splits the silence.
And then—
His whole body drops.
Every ounce of resistance bleeds out of him in a sudden collapse. Like his spine forgets how to hold him upright. Like the weight of existence finally lets go.
His knees buckle. His hands fall useless. His face slackens open—not in bliss, but in release.
Kim catches him without thinking, arms sweeping under Kenta’s ribs and thighs as he folds with him to the floor. No stumble. No jolt. Just grace, as if this is what his body was built to do—carry Kenta when he can’t carry himself.
The concrete is cold beneath them. Hard. But Kim becomes the soft place where Kenta lands. One palm at the back of his head, cradling. The other at his hip, anchoring. Their bodies slot together like history meant it.
And still—not a word.
No poetry. No declaration.
Just the sound.
That sacred, shattering purr dragging itself out of Kenta’s chest like it’s been trapped in his ribs for years. It’s cracked and uneven, broken on the edges—hungry, uncertain, freeing.
Kim presses their foreheads together. Their breath mingles, and finally he starts shaking too.
“You’re okay,” he murmurs. Over and over. Soft as prayer, fierce as oath. His voice wavers, but the message never does.
“You’re okay. You’re here. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
And then Kenta breaks.
No slow unravel. No graceful weep.
Just a sudden, brutal sob that rips from his chest like a scream buried too long. One violent breath that folds him in half, punching out of him like something dying. Like something escaping.
He tries to curl in—tries to shrink into a corner of himself, just like he always had to. One arm tucking under his ribs, shoulders hunched, body collapsing into smallness. Into invisibility.
But Kim won’t let him.
He gathers Kenta closer, wraps around him tighter. Not squeezing, not restraining—holding. Not allowing him to disappear. Keeping his shape, his weight, his being intact.
“I don’t know how to stop,” Kenta chokes out, voice warbled and wild. “My body—it’s still waiting for a command.”
His hands flex in the air like they’re trying to find the floor. His breath comes in ragged gasps, like he’s choking on the absence of pain.
Kim’s jaw tenses. His whole body goes rigid with the kind of fury that can’t be screamed—it has to be swallowed. Rage and grief and helplessness all crashing through him like a wave with nowhere to break.
Pete had warned him. Had told him the lab was worse than anything the files could describe.
But this—this is not a survival. This is a miracle soaked in blood and broken will.
Still, Kim’s voice is calm. Fierce. Steady like a weapon drawn in the dark.
“Then I’ll be your first command,” he says.
Not growled. Not demanded.
Offered.
“Not as your Alpha. Not as anyone who wants anything from you. Just as the person who saw you fight like hell to exist.”
Kenta’s bottom lip quivers. His fingers twitch, curling into the front of Kim’s shirt, twisting like he’s afraid to be let go. His eyes are furious. Devastated. Like believing any of this is more painful than enduring the alternative.
“Don’t—don’t pretend I’m not disgusting,” he says, barely above a whisper.
Kim doesn’t even blink.
He leans in and presses a kiss to Kenta’s cheek. Gentle. Certain. To the place where tear tracks cut through blood and dust.
Then to the corner of his mouth. Then the soft patch of jaw. Then—slowly—to the bruised skin beneath the dead collar, where burns and humiliation once lived.
“You’re not disgusting,” Kim breathes.
And Kenta doesn’t believe him.
But he sobs harder.
And when he fists his hands into Kim’s shirt and yanks him closer—not to beg, not to seduce, just to exist in contact—Kim goes without hesitation. He folds over him like armour. Like shelter. Like the kind of place where a ruined thing might start to grow.
And the sound?
It keeps coming.
That purr—fragile, cracked, born of ruin—keeps spilling from Kenta’s throat like it’s the first time he’s ever felt alive enough to make it.
And Kim—
Kim guards it with every breath in his fucking body.