Dirty Switch

Ssshhh.
It was just the sound of water dripping from the faucet, yet it felt like a gaping hole had opened in Taehyun’s chest, and rainwater was steadily filling it up.

Joo Taehyun instinctively hid his trembling hands under the blanket, forcing himself to stay composed.
Even if there was a chance, the odds of him actually being pregnant right now were astronomically low. Weren’t they? His body had only started becoming something strange—neither Alpha nor Omega—after he showed abnormal heat symptoms at Yeonhwagung.
It hadn’t even been a full month since then. Pregnant already?

Sure, he had slept with Seo Baekhan countless times. So many times, in fact, it felt pointless to even count how much of Baekhan’s cum he had taken—both up top and down below.
Even if he were pregnant, symptoms showing this clearly this early on didn’t make sense. He barely knew the basics of this kind of thing, thinking it had nothing to do with him, but he at least knew that morning sickness didn’t usually hit in the very first stages.
And besides… Oh, right. Above all, he’d heard that even between an Alpha and an Omega, getting pregnant wasn’t easy. So—

Taehyun bit down hard on his lip without realizing it. His dry, cracked lips tore open easily, and a small drop of blood appeared. And even now, even now, the faint scent of Seo Baekhan’s pheromones, mixed in with that blood, was so intoxicatingly welcome it made him feel like he was losing his mind.
What the hell am I supposed to do.
I need to quietly deal with the unilateral imprinting first, but now you’re telling me I might be pregnant?

Even if he wasn’t… then what the hell was he supposed to do from now on?
He’d been prescribed sex—ejaculation inside him—as a treatment to stabilize his pheromone abnormalities. He couldn’t exactly tell Baekhan to use a condom. And saying they should stop having sex altogether? That was even more ridiculous.
What the hell… Oh—birth control pills! Maybe he should say he wants to take birth control, just in case. If he asked Dr. Woo to pass the message along, it wouldn’t even come off as that unnatural.

“Speaking of Seo Baekhan, h-holy crap! Hey! Joo Taehyun! You’re b-bleeding!”
Taehyun wiped away the blood dripping down his chin in a daze. As Cheon Seungpil reached to press the nurse call button, Taehyun quietly muttered the only name that felt even remotely like an ally right now.
“…Seungpil. I… I have something to confess. I’ve never told anyone before. Not even my own family.”

“What the hell, why’re you being so dramatic all of a sudden?”
“Kim Seungjun went to see you and started spewing bullshit, right?”
“Yeah. He came waving around some sketchy photo saying you, what, went out buying ‘Dirty Switch’ or whatever. That kind of crap.”

“It’s true.”
Seungpil twisted his head nearly ninety degrees, blinking in confusion as he mumbled, “Huh?”
“Hey, Taehyun. Dirty Switch—that, that stuff…”
“The photo and video Seungjun has—it wasn’t from when I actually went to buy it. But regardless, I have taken Dirty Switch before.”

“What?! Wait—what?! That’s d-drugs…!”
Seungpil yelped loud enough to rattle the windows, then abruptly slapped a hand over his mouth and glanced around in panic.
“The test results just resembled a drug reaction. It can’t be officially called a drug.”

“Still! It’s legal in the U.S. but not in Korea! Holy shit, what the hell are you gonna do?! Does Baekhan know?! Wait—was it Baekhan who told you to take it? No—no way… Holy fuck. Hold on. Are you saying that if you took the Switch… then you actually slept with Seo Baekhan?”
Seungpil’s face turned as red as a boiled tomato. His voice, which he had tried to keep down, steadily rose in pitch and volume until he nearly screamed the last sentence.
“Y-you were what, twenty when the whole marriage thing got announced? That’s barely twenty in Korean age! And that bastard Seo Baekhan, he gave that shit to a kid seven years younger and fucked you?!”

“…No, that’s not how it happened.”
“Then what?! For fuck’s sake, do you have caramel sauce smeared all over your mouth or something? Why do you keep starting to talk and then clamming up?! You’re gonna drive me insane!”
Worried Seungpil might actually go on a rampage, Taehyun hurriedly explained the whole backstory.

That he lost it when he heard Baekhan was being set up with someone else. That he’d lied about taking Dirty Switch to get Baekhan’s attention—and it had worked. That he’d used that lie to push for marriage, and afterward, continued pretending to buy the drug from the U.S. to keep fooling him. That, in order not to get caught, he kept stacking new lies—and now his body had started to go strange.
“So you’re saying you have to keep fucking that bastard Baekhan to keep your body stable?”
“…Yeah. Roughly speaking.”

Now came the hardest part.
Unilateral imprinting.
Even Taehyun himself had a hard time accepting it. What would it look like to Seungpil, a Beta?

He’d probably think, How obsessed with Baekhan do you have to be, how pathetic does a person have to be, to get this far gone all on their own? But Taehyun had to explain it if he wanted Seungpil’s help.
Since things had gotten this far, Taehyun planned to borrow Seungpil’s name while he was staying in Pyongyang. He felt bad dragging him into this mess, but he needed someone to pose as the patient to discreetly find another clinic, or maybe look into procedures for breaking an imprint.
Even the faintest possibility of pregnancy had completely nuked any sense of shame.

But then—
“You crazy fuck! Hey! Have you even used a pregnancy test?!”
Seungpil suddenly screamed about something completely different—then barely held back from exploding and dropped his voice to a whisper.

“…Pregnancy test?”
Even though he’d thought about the possibility of being pregnant, he hadn’t considered using a test. He was just that out of it. He hadn’t had the bandwidth to think that far.
Right… Most people, when something like this happens, would start with a test.

“You’re supposed to be smart—how come your brain shuts off when it comes to this shit? You said you’ve been fucking Baekhan for the sake of sharing hormones or pheromones or whatever! Did you use a condom? No, right?! Then what about birth control pills?! Did you take any?!”
“…”
“Oh, for fuck’s—! God, hold on. Are any pharmacies even open this late? Well, we are near a hospital… Whatever! You stay right here, got it?!”

Even as he yelled, Seungpil kept muttering “No, no, no…” under his breath. Then he let out a hollow, dumbfounded laugh and walked out of the room.
At first, he seemed to forget the door was a sliding one and clumsily tried to push and pull it open. Then he rushed back in to grab his phone and wallet. A moment later, he burst back in just to rage at Taehyun, waving his finger in his face, then finally stormed off down the hallway with loud, stomping steps.
Taehyun sat there watching Seungpil’s whole theatrical scene with a blank expression—then let out a small, helpless laugh.

“Seriously. That guy…”
The chuckle that made his shoulders shake slowly morphed into a smirk, and then into a dry, bittersweet smile.
There’s no way he’s pregnant. Statistically speaking, it was nearly impossible. It couldn’t be.

But still, if by some slim chance, he really was carrying a child…
He wasn’t afraid of what the public would say. “You were supposed to be an Alpha—why are you suddenly an Omega?” “Were you hiding your secondary gender all along?” “Are you even Chairman Joo’s biological son?”—sure, those kinds of filthy rumors would spread, but he’d always been the type ★ 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 ★ to brush off nonsense from people who didn’t know anything.
Because he had people—his family—who would hold him up so he wouldn’t break.

They’d all be shocked, of course. His parents would probably explode at first—How could you keep something this important from us?!—but in the end, they’d be happy. Just like always, they’d hold him tight and say their youngest had gone through so much.
“Wait—hold up. I mean, still. I’m not ready for this… A baby from Taehyun?! You’re telling me there’s a baby, inside a baby?! Is that even biologically possible?!”
“Let’s see… Huh, the age gap between our kids isn’t that big after all! Wow! They might even end up in the same grade at school!”

“Right? Same for mine! Holy crap, isn’t this insane? Your kid, my kid, and Taehyun’s kid—all lined up in matching school uniforms? Hey, you hear me, baby brother? Your kid’s definitely going to that private elementary school where all the cousins go, got it?”
He could practically see his family already, making a fuss and getting excited. Just like they always had been for him. Just like they were now for their nieces and nephews. His child would grow up the same way—drenched in nothing but overwhelming, unconditional love.
Maybe, just maybe, this whole pregnancy situation could clear up the Dirty Switch suspicion too. He could say he was never an Alpha but actually an Omega, that there had been a mix-up when he was young. If he made it official, said he had no need to take Switch in the first place because of his real secondary gender… It would be the kind of story Assemblyman Seo would love. Even Prince Yi Hwang’s faction would gain momentum in pushing related legislation. Public opinion was always the real battlefield, after all.

But…
The most important problem of all had no clear solution.
Would Seo Baekhan actually accept this?

Even Taehyun himself felt lost and overwhelmed—would Baekhan really accept a child that just happened to exist? A child that came not from a woman, not even from a proper Omega, but from him?
During the weekend getaway they took instead of a honeymoon, Baekhan had said something very clearly—