A breathless, almost painful sigh escaped Jayu's lips as he executed another pirouette, his body turning upon itself with a grace acquired through years of labor and sacrifice. He loved this — dance. The way it made him exist fully, transforming his body into something greater than what it was, freer than what the world allowed him to be. He had specialized in classical ballet since he was eight years old, had learned to love the familiar friction of slippers against the floor, the slight burn in his toes that reminded him he was alive, that he was working, that he deserved his place in the spotlight. He loved his pale pink satin slippers, worn thin, and he loved even more the moment he had to buy a new pair — as if each new pair represented a new chapter, a new promise made to himself.
Since childhood, he had nurtured this dream with an almost stubborn consistency: to become a danseur étoile, like his mother before him. He remembered watching her dance when he was three years old, eyes wide in the darkness of the theater, convinced she didn't really touch the ground. He had grown up with that image etched behind his eyelids, luminous and intact.
But as he grew, the world had taken care to trample that light.
Jayu stopped abruptly, muscles burning, lungs on fire, and looked at his reflection in the large mirror that covered an entire wall of the dance studio. He observed the man he saw every evening — black hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, a supple and strong body, the dancer's legs his mother had always told him were those of a born artist. An artist who would never have his place.
Because he was an Omega.
That word tasted like metal in his mouth. A label stuck on his back at birth that no one, absolutely no one, bothered to peel off. Omegas were a subspecies, they said in the hallways, in the newspapers, in the glances that slid over him without truly seeing him — a subspecies that existed only to satisfy the urges of dominant Alphas, to bear children and keep homes, to be silent and smile and disappear in someone else's shadow. Not to shine. Never to shine.
He hated it. He hated himself for it — for this body that carried this nature he hadn't chosen, for these heats that arrived like shameful illnesses, for this scent he masked with suppressants that gave him headaches. When people spoke to him, it was almost always to remind him, with icy politeness or blunt brutality, that he didn't belong among them. You're a low-district Omega, go back to your place. He had heard that phrase in so many different forms that it had eventually settled in his head like a bad song you can't get rid of.
His parents, though, had never said that to him. They worked hard — his father at the factory, his mother as a nursing assistant doing double shifts some weekends — to pay for these expensive dance classes. That was what made every failure even more painful. It wasn't just his dream at stake. It was their sweat, too.
---
The studio door opened with a familiar creak.
Madame Cho entered, his teacher for six years, a Beta with a gentle, tired gaze who didn't understand — couldn't truly understand — the battles Omegas fought every morning just to exist. She was kind, Jayu didn't hold that against her. But kindness had limits that privilege drew without realizing it.
She offered him a smile that said everything before she even opened her mouth. That smile — that sorry, tilted smile, meant to be tender but feeling like a knife — Jayu had seen it too often in his life. He clenched his fists in the sleeves of his dance jacket and waited anyway, because that's all he had been taught to do.
Wait. Hope. Take it.
"I'm sorry," she said softly, her voice measured as one places something fragile on a surface that might break. "Your application to join the national conservatory has been rejected."
The silence that followed was deafening.
Jayu felt something crack inside him — not suddenly, not with a crash, but slowly, like ice in spring, with dull, deep creaks. He swallowed, eyes fixed on his reflection over Madame Cho's shoulder, and did what he always did: he looked for logic where there was only injustice.
"But I'm just as talented as the others," he said, and there was something raw in his voice, almost childlike in its sincerity. "Why am I the only one rejected? They were there, at the performance. They all congratulated me. They shook my hand."
"Yes," she replied with a sigh that seemed to weigh tons. "Because at first, they thought you were a woman."
Jayu blinked.
"It was only afterward they discovered you're a male Omega," she continued, and she had the decency, at least, not to look away.
There was a moment — a fraction of a second suspended in the air of the dance studio, between the practice barres and the merciless mirrors — where Jayu felt absolutely nothing. Just a clean, sharp void.
Then the rage came.
"What is that?" he burst out, his voice rising despite himself, cracking at the edges. "What's the problem with my gender?"
He didn't really expect an answer. He knew that answer. He had known it by heart since he was twelve, since the first time a classmate asked him why he danced like a girl, since the first time a teacher told him he should maybe consider something else.
Madame Cho scratched the back of her neck, a weary gesture, and explained what he already knew — the heats, potential absences, pregnancy, the irrational fear of those men in suits he had made applaud standing ovation just two weeks earlier. He had never chosen to be Omega. He hadn't chosen his body, his heats, his nature. He had chosen none of it. And yet, he was the one paying.
"You know," she said after a silence, "it's not over."
Jayu looked up. There was still, somewhere in his chest, a small stubborn flame that refused to go out. A last glimmer of hope he hadn't yet had time to kill.
"You could join a conservatory if you find yourself a sponsor," she continued, and the flame flickered. "Listen to me, you're handsome, you're magnificent — look at yourself in that mirror. You can use your charms to seduce a wealthy Alpha who might sponsor you, and then—"
She didn't finish.
Jayu didn't give her the chance.
---
He gathered his things in silence — his bag, his half-empty water bottle, his towel still smelling of sweat from the last three hours — and left the dance studio without another word. He hadn't even taken off his tights or his satin slippers. His feet trod the cold hallway of the building with that particular sound, that soft friction of satin against tile, which in other circumstances would have soothed him.
Tonight, he heard nothing.
He checked his phone mechanically: past eleven o'clock. The hallways were empty, deserted like the promises made to him, bathed in the cold light of neon lights humming dully overhead. He was used to leaving late. He trained every evening until complete exhaustion, pushing his body's limits with a discipline his Alpha and Beta classmates admired quietly, because working twice as hard was the only strategy the world had left him.
And for what?
To be told to sell his body.
He pushed open the door leading to the roof.
The night air hit his face like a welcome slap — cold, sharp, carrying the city's scent: exhaust fumes and wet asphalt and something electric in the atmosphere, as if the sky itself were holding its breath. Jayu walked to the edge and stopped there, hands at his sides, gaze lost in the luminous panorama stretching before him.
The city never slept.
Skyscrapers blinked with a thousand lights — advertisements, lit windows, traffic signals — like stars too close, too garish, too noisy to be beautiful. Below, cars sped through the dark, moving night, their headlights tracing white and red lines on the asphalt like the steps of a choreography no one watched.
His dream had just been trampled. Not gently. Not with regrets. With the same casualness one crushes an insect on a sidewalk.
Jayu raised his head toward the sky — the real sky, the one almost never seen in the city, drowned behind the orange clouds of light pollution — and wondered for the first time in his life, with a weariness so deep it resembled peace, why he was born into a world that used people like him as stepping stones.
His eyelids grew heavy.
Heavy like his legs after seven hours of training.
Heavy like the silence of the dance studio after bad news.
Heavy like all the dreams one is never allowed to carry.
He didn't see the ground coming when his knees gave way beneath him. There was a dull thud — his body collapsing on the roof — immediately swallowed by the deep rumble of the city, indifferent and eternal, continuing to turn without him.
.
.
.