The pharmacy was just down the block from the clinic, tucked between a flower shop and a bakery. Ordinary, almost cozy. The bell above the door chimed when he stepped in, and the sweet tang of roses mingled with the yeasty warmth of bread drifting through the walls. It felt wrong; everything was too normal for what he was about to do.
He slid the card across the counter with hands that wouldn’t stop trembling. The pharmacist, a young woman with hair tucked into a tight braid, barely glanced at him. She read the card, tapped at her screen, and nodded once.
"Two weeks’ supply," she said briskly. "Capsules, taken once every twenty-four hours. Morning’s best."
Chris nodded, throat dry.
A plain white box appeared on the counter, heavier than it should have been. The label was clinical, stripped of anything human: just the medication’s name, composition, and dosage instructions in neat black print. No branding, no warnings beyond the standard "keep out of reach of children."
No trace of him.
He paid too much, almost obscene, and stuffed the box deep into his backpack before walking out.
It wasn’t until he was back in his car, windows fogged and the city’s noise muffled through the glass, that he let himself open it. The blister pack gleamed under the weak sunlight, pills lined up like tiny promises.
His hands shook as he popped the first one free. For a moment, he stared at it, small and pale against his palm. The end of one world, the beginning of another.
He swallowed it dry.
The effect wasn’t instant, but it was steady. Subtle. A creeping quiet that began at the edges of his awareness and moved inward. The world dulled. His too-sharp senses, always tuned like wires straining for some pitch no one else could hear, softened.
The constant hum of scents and sounds he hadn’t even realized were weighing on him... blurred.
For the first time in months, he could breathe without counting each inhale. His chest loosened, and his shoulders dropped. The ache in his skull eased, replaced by a muted nothing.
Silence.
Not the panicked silence of the clinic, not the suffocating silence of his car, but something else. A quiet he could exist inside of.
Chris leaned back against the seat, closed his eyes, and let the world dim around him.
For the first time, it felt survivable.
—
The inhibitors became routine. Morning meant a pill before anything else, washed down with tap water that tasted faintly metallic. He adapted faster than he thought he would. The dulling effect was double-edged; it softened the sharp edge of his panic but also numbed things he hadn’t realized he’d miss. Coffee no longer hit as hard, laughter from Mia and her friends sometimes slid past him like static instead of warmth, and music... music sounded flat. Alcohol never hit the spot.
But it kept him safe. That was enough for him.
To make sure the little white box never ran out, Chris picked up a part-time job at the mechanic’s shop on the edge of their small town. Andrew thought he was doing it for pocket money, for a car fund maybe. Mia rolled her eyes at him whenever grease stained his jeans. Neither of them knew that most of his pay went straight to the pharmacy, tucked into a lockbox he treated like oxygen.
It worked. For a while.
Then came the letter of acceptance. A university in the city, an escape from the small town where everybody knew everybody. Andrew had beamed, pride spilling from every word of congratulations, and Mia had told him not to come back too smug.
Chris had packed his pills before his clothes.
The city wasn’t what he expected. The campus was a flood of pheromones, constant and thick, layered one over another until it felt like walking through invisible smoke. Alphas brushing past, omegas laughing in packs, the invisible currents of their presence tugging at him even through the chemical haze of the inhibitors.
He tried his best to accommodate and be one of the freshmen with too much time for partying and not enough sleep for studying.
He lasted a month on campus. There were some of the alphas that picked up that he was something else, the recessive ones especially; they would linger and ask twice if Chris was sure that he was a beta.
One of their seniors, Dan, a recessive alpha, attempted to force a kiss on Chris but was knocked out by Chris’ reflex.
After that, he found a tiny apartment barely large enough for a bed and desk, the kind of place where the walls groaned when the upstairs neighbor sneezed. He attended classes remotely, submitting work through a patchwork of online systems and long email chains. Professors didn’t care as long as the assignments came in clean and on time.
To pay rent, he took freelance work. Subcontracted administrative tasks that no one wanted but everyone needed: paperwork for permits, drafting plans, sketching layouts for projects he’d never see finished. He was good at it, quick, thorough, and uncomplaining. Money trickled in steadily enough to keep the pharmacy visits unbroken, and that was all he required.
Years blurred this way: inhibitors, work, and classes. The days stacked neatly, almost mechanically. When he finally received his degree, it arrived in the mail in a padded envelope. He slit it open with a kitchen knife, stared at the embossed letters of his name, and then set it down on the counter without ceremony.
Chris kept the envelope on the counter for weeks, unopened after that first glance, as if ignoring it would stop the hollow ringing inside his chest. Mia had sent him a quick message, half congratulations, half complaint about how he hadn’t even come home for the weekend. Andrew had called once, his voice full of pride, but Chris had cut it short with the excuse of work. They didn’t push him and fortunately his family was healthy enough to know about boundaries. They thought it was just his way.
That was the mercy of it; they never asked too closely why he didn’t want to celebrate.
Inhibitors dulled the threat and kept him flatlined enough to move through the world unnoticed. But they didn’t change the truth he carried like a secret burn under his skin. Heat never came. Not once. And Chris couldn’t decide if that was safety or danger in disguise.
He told himself he didn’t want it and didn’t trust himself to live through it if it ever did arrive. Alone in his cramped apartment, he imagined doors breaking down, strangers following the scent, and his body betraying him. The thought was enough to keep the pills lined up on the counter like sentries, never missed or late.
He had survived one more thing: the years between boyhood and adulthood, between the clinic and this muted life. Survival became his talent and was good at it.
But at night, lying on the mattress with the hum of the city leaking through the walls, survival felt like another kind of prison.
He wondered sometimes, when they had some difficulties, if everything would be fine if he would just tell the world who he was and sell himself off, but then remembered what really could happen and he would decide to survive again.