A fill from the Tiger and Bunny Anon Meme. Prompt: Alpha/Omega AU. Wild Tiger is the only Omega hero and has staunchly refused every Alpha he's ever met. The network likes to tease his availability (like "Who could tame this Wild Tiger?") Then, Hero TV brings in Barnaby, who is young, good looking, and an Alpha—a perfect match for the Omega Kotetsu. Barnaby assumes Kotetsu will do as he says, but ends up flat-out rejected, since Kotetsu is used to turning down arrogant Alphas who think they can own him. On top of all their other problems, Kotetsu and Barnaby have to find a way to be partners, even while Barnaby remains intent on claiming Kotetsu for his mate, on-camera if possible.

Warnings: Can be read with some dubcon, of the aphrodisiac variety.

Kotetsu couldn't actually remember when he first found out about Scenting. It was something that had been around since before anyone cared to remember, and when he was growing up, the most Kotetsu heard about it was on TV. In some shows, there'd be characters who, rather than having a boyfriend or girlfriend, had an "Alpha" or "Omega." He sort of worked it out that certain people fit in a certain category, and people in that category always paired up, like the two halves of a strip of Velcro. Somewhere along the line, maybe in a health class, he got a scientific explanation of what Scenting really meant. A number of individuals—by no means a majority, but certainly more common than NEXTs—create very strong pheromones that certain other Scented people can smell. These pheromones make compatible pairs absolutely irresistible to each other. Sexually irresistible. It broke down into a game of mix and match, always sending off one dominant Alpha with one submissive Omega. Man and woman, woman and man, man and man, woman and woman. It didn't matter so long as the Alphas and Omegas paired.

Through that entire explanation, Kotetsu just thought, This is way weirder than NEXT powers. So why do people pick on NEXTs but have no problem with Scenting?

Then, about a year after Kotetsu met Mr. Legend, his annual physical at the doctor's office started to include a weird test. The doctor swabbed some cotton under his jawbones and along his neck, then ran the swab through some chemicals. The first time it happened, the doctor said nothing, threw the sample out, and continued with the physical. It happened again the next year, and the doctor also ignored those results.

Finally, when Kotetsu was thirteen years old, that simple swab changed his life forever (which made the third time his life had been changed forever: once gaining powers, once meeting a real hero, and now, this). The doctor ran the sample through that little chemical bath, but instead of tossing it out, the doctor stared at the chemical reaction that had apparently occurred.

"Oh," he said. "Oh. Very interesting."

"What is it?" Kotetsu said, shifting a little on the doctor's table. His heart already started to sink.

"Well, as you've no doubt heard at school, Scenting emerges during puberty," the doctor explained. "And you, young man, are Scented—an Omega cued for a male Alpha."

It took Kotetsu a minute to process what that actually meant. He swallowed the Omega part easily enough—though he didn't like it—but choked when he comprehended that his 'cuing' meant that the Alphas interested in him would be other dudes. He hadn't thought he was gay, and being told at the freaking doctor's office made his guts tangle up in knots. The doctor did his best to explain that Scenting did not dictate his sexual orientation. It was more like a supplement: Kotetsu could be straight and still Scented for male Alphas. The male Alphas that were Scented for him could be straight, too. And of course, Scenting wasn't destiny, either. Kotetsu could spend his life with an unScented companion of either sex, if he chose.

"It's just useful to be aware of your biology, so you won't be surprised when you start noticing Alpha Scent," the doctor said.

Kicking his feet against the exam table, Kotetsu asked, "Why would an Alpha surprise me?"

With a small smile, the doctor reached up on a high shelf and retrieved a flask with a small scrap of white cloth inside. He uncorked it and let Kotetsu smell its contents.

Nothing.

"I don't smell anything," Kotetsu reported.

"As expected," the doctor said. "That's the Scent of an Alpha female cued for males. You're male, but you're not cued for females, so you can't smell it." The doctor returned the flask, chose another nearly identical one, and passed it to Kotetsu to smell.

Again, nothing.

"That was an Omega male cued for males. Or, the pheromone that your sample matched." The doctor put that flask back and chose again. "Now, do you smell anything this time?"

Kotetsu sniffed it. The instant the air entered his nose, wonderful warmth blossomed through his entire body. His vision blurred, his bones turned to jelly, and his pulse thumped hard in his chest. It smelled like electricity and happiness and lazy Sunday mornings and the strongest spirits from the liquor store and every bad word he knew used in all the good ways. His spine sagged a little, leaning toward the flask, and he wanted nothing more than to clutch the little bottle and just breathe that magical scent for hours, filling him with the sensation of bliss and peace.

The doctor pulled the flask away after a few seconds and looked knowingly at Kotetsu. "Did that smell good?"

Face burning like a furnace, since apparently the doctor could tell exactly how much he had enjoyed that odor, Kotetsu stared at his sneakers. "Kinda," he grunted. "I mean, whatever."

"That is an Alpha male cued for males, the pheromone compatible with your Scenting. It's a very desirable smell, and you're going to start smelling very desirable to Alphas in turn."

"Wait—wait, is that going to happen every time I meet an Alpha? How close do they have to be to smell me? Can they smell me already? Will it be that bad every time?! What if it happens in public and—"

The doctor held up a hand and silenced Kotetsu. "Please don't worry. First off, you won't smell anything this strong in the street. This is a hyper-concentrated laboratory sample. Not to mention, your Scent is still developing. Right now, most Alphas will just smell pretty good. Over the next few years, you'll become more sensitive, and correctly cued Alphas will start smelling stronger. Though, with some practice, it is possible to ignore Alpha pheromones, for the most part."

"For… the most part?"

The doctor smiled knowingly, almost irritatingly. "Alphas and Omegas have a magnetic attraction to each other. When you're older, there may come a time when you won't want to ignore an Alpha's Scent."

Like hell I won't want to ignore it.

Kotetsu had every intention of not telling his mother about his Scenting, but the doctor almost gleefully announced the news when she came to the exam room to pick him up. Anju accepted it all pretty easily, nodding at the doctor, and later, shaking her head.

"You could try to be a little less special, Kotetsu," his mother joked. He knew she wasn't really mad—if she was, she would be tugging his ear rather than holding his hand—but it didn't really help him feel any better.

He didn't sleep at all the night of his diagnosis, unable to comprehend what he knew and what he felt. He liked girls. He thought they were pretty. They had pretty hair. And through his short life, he'd already experienced a few super-secret crushes, each one rarely lasting longer than a week, but they were all on girls. But he couldn't forget the smell in the doctor's office, joy and comfort and bliss in a bottle, and in his future, a certain set of men would smell like that: really, really good. But all of those good-smelling men would be Alphas, the ones who were meant to dominate, meant to push him around. The bits and pieces of Scented relationships he could see in the media did not paint the kind of picture Kotetsu wanted to be part of: a strong, composed Alpha caring for and protecting a sweet, docile Omega. Kotetsu could protect himself, and others, just fine!

The fear grew and festered, as Kotetsu tried to find a way out. Was there a way to resist becoming Scented? Could he change his Scenting into an Alpha? Could he disguise his Scent, so no one would be able to tell he was an Omega? His mother put an end to his home-remedy experiments when Kotetsu tried to go without bathing for a week in the hopes that he'd smell so bad no Alpha would ever want him. Anju lectured him very sternly that his Scenting would not be the end of the world: he gained NEXT powers and survived. He can be Scented and still survive.

But that was the problem. As a NEXT, Kotetsu could become a hero. But how was he supposed to be a hero if he was a pushover Omega?

For a few years, the issue disappeared. Oriental Town wasn't large enough to have much of a Scented population, and Kotetsu couldn't even tell who was and wasn't Scented because he could only smell one type of pheromones, the ones correctly cued for him. He didn't meet his first gay Alpha until he started high school. The boy was a senior, captain of the basketball club. Kotetsu's body tingled lightly as he approached in the hallway, and Kotetsu quickly singled him out from the other students by smell alone. Well, good to know, he could just walk on the other side of the hallway, pass him by…

The basketball Alpha had other plans. He stuck out his leg and tripped Kotetsu, and then under the pretense of 'helping him up,' practically pinned him against the wall, spouting bad pickup lines about Kotetsu's smell and inviting the underclassman to sniff his neck. The drop-dead amazing Scent surrounded him, not as strong as in the doctor's office, but powerful enough to make his knees wobble. But that beautiful smell just didn't match the boy's leering eyes, slack jaw, and terrible lines.

Here and now, he had to decide. Did Kotetsu want to be someone who used his powers to protect others, or someone who others held power over? Was he going to stand up, or let this Alpha push him down?

Hero or Omega?

He feared it might not be enough. His legs barely felt like they could support his own weight, but Kotetsu mustered up all his strength and kneed the upperclassman right in the balls. The boy crumpled, and Kotetsu gasped a breath of fresh air to clear his head, then immediately dashed off to class, sliding in his seat a few seconds before the bell rang.

By lunch, word of Kotetsu's legendary defiance had spread through the entire school. No one understood why Kotetsu would turn down the Alpha. Everyone assumed Alphas and Omegas stuck like glue any time they came into contact. Kotetsu almost retched at the idea of being stuck like glue to the basketball captain, and he said so to anyone that asked: "I don't want to spend a single second with an idiot like him."

And by the time the school day ended, word of Kotetsu's complete rejection reached the Alpha, who was not happy. He made another attempt to corner Kotetsu after school, but some teachers broke them up before anything actually happened. The both of them had separate appointments with the principal where they got the same lecture: cut it out, now. No suspicious interaction would be tolerated on school premises, under pain of detention, suspension, or worse.

Kotetsu had no problem 'cutting it out.' He didn't even want the Alpha in the first place, and only saw him in the hallways. The Alpha was much less receptive to the ban, but did his best to work within the boundaries. He started sending some of his friends from the team to rough Kotetsu up, trying to prove this school was 'dangerous' and Kotetsu needed the Alpha for 'protection.' Kotetsu really honed his fighting skills during this time, and he quickly got fed up with the Alpha's false heroics. If he was really so strong, then why wasn't he using that strength to help the people who needed it for real?

The Alpha graduated that year, but his impact lasted. Kotetsu saw first-hand how arrogant and rude gay Alphas were to gay Omegas, and if he didn't think it before, he knew now that all the bullshit about Alphas protecting Omegas was just that: bullshit. Kotetsu could take care of himself, and others, without breaking a sweat. He'd never roll over and submit for someone else's enjoyment.

Freed from the harassment of an Alpha, Kotetsu had another few years to be himself. 'Himself' still included being a fighter, a bit of a slacker, and a NEXT, all of which earned him various degrees of scorn from everybody else, but it all worked out for the best, as far as Kotetsu could tell. After all, he met Tomoe.

It wasn't like he didn't know who she was. They had class together all year. And she was smart, witty, a hero TV fan, beautiful, responsible, brave… He had been thinking of her for a while, but it never quite sunk in that she might have been thinking of him in return. Throughout Kotetsu's first attempts to impress her (their first dates, as he would call them later) he kept wondering, What does she expect from an Omega like me? Kotetsu's body was wired to be with someone completely the opposite of Tomoe, a stupid pig of an Alpha, but his head and heart loved Tomoe more than any of that. Could he make her understand?

Would she ever understand?

Tomoe and Kotetsu flirted and dated through high school, and the subject of Scenting only came up after their graduation. It started with a simple enough question: "What do Alphas actually smell like?"

Kotetsu thought about it, unsure of how to respond. "Well, like Alphas," he said at last.

"But what does that mean?" Tomoe pressed. "Our old biology did an incredibly poor job of explaining this. It gave us all the science but never actually described what Alphas and Omegas smell like."

He chewed his lower lip a bit. He knew he couldn't explain this much better than a textbook could. "They smell like a bunch of things that aren't supposed to have smells," he decided. "They're just… Alphas. There's nothing else like it."

"It must be enjoyable, being next to an Alpha."

"No way. It sucks."

"But they smell good, don't they?"

"I guess…"

"This could just be my perspective as a Beta, but I think it would be very exciting to be Scented."

"Trust me, you're lucky you don't have to deal with this."

"Why?"

"Scenting makes more trouble than it's worth. I wish I could be a Beta and just not deal with this."

Science generally called normal, non-pheromonal people unScented, but pop culture adopted the term 'Beta' as a way to include normal people in the Scented game: Alphas and Omegas, and then the Betas, stuck in between. The label 'boring Beta' quickly emerged, highlighting differences between their relationships. Supposedly, Alphas and Omegas found Betas boring because they didn't have an 'exciting' smell, but Kotetsu thought Tomoe was the most interesting person in the world.

"Please, tell me, Kotetsu," Tomoe asked in a very gentle tone. "Why do you wish you weren't an Omega?"

"Alphas are just… assholes. There's no way to describe it. They've all been told that they're supposed to be dominant, but it just makes them jerks. I'll never be with someone just because he smells nice, and since none of these nice-smelling people are actually nice… It's just annoying."

"It's probably annoying to them, too. They wouldn't try so hard if they didn't want you."

Kotetsu shook his head. "They want me, so they treat me like dirt? That doesn't make any sense."

"Well, suppose one of them didn't treat you badly. If someone, someone you liked, if they smelled like an Alpha… For instance, hypothetically, if I smelled like an Alpha, what would you think of that?"

Kotetsu sighed again, rather relieved that the conversation had gone in this direction. "Don't bother with Scent application stuff. Believe me, I did some research on it. All the cheap stuff is fake and all the expensive stuff is… well, expensive. And totally unnecessary," He scooted a little closer to Tomoe and kissed her cheek. "I love you. That's all I need."

His answer reassured her, at least a little. Tomoe's intentions were in the right place, he felt it. She just wanted to match Kotetsu's Scenting, and relieve the worry for the both of them. But Kotetsu almost felt like he couldn't enjoy Alpha pheromones. Being too close to a correctly cued Alpha messed with his whole body. He felt sluggish around them, lazy and dull and dumb, and he had no control over it. He had no idea what would actually happen if he ended up in a romantic situation with someone who smelled of Alpha pheromones. He didn't trust what his body would do with that chemical in the air. He didn't trust that he could actually stay himself.

His 'self' was a hero, not an Omega. He wouldn't let Scenting threaten his dream.