(Loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooove~)

Harutsugu finishes stitching Tōkan up and tells him to go see a doctor if he starts getting a fever or anything like that, observing that alpha males are more prone to infection than the rest of the population.

"You are? Why?"

"I think we have higher rates of immunodeficiency," he explains. "Omegas have better immune systems, that's one of the reasons why we think your sister's a beta even though we can't fully tell yet, she's caught a lot more colds than you had by her age and you hadn't even ever caught a flu by then."

"Hm."

The cookies are done soon enough, and they all relocate to the tea room to have them. Inori, of course, continues to be an absolute black hole. Tōkan supposes they never did get that ice cream anyway.

But after they're all done (which means Harutsugu, Kuroji, Tōkan, and Suzume have had some cookies and tea while Inori inhaled everything they didn't consume) and Suzume's excused herself to go back to her room, Harutsugu says, "Tōkan-kun, Inori-kun, could you stay here for a few more minutes? There was something Kuroji and I wanted to talk to the two of you about."

"Is this gonna be boring?"

"Probably," says Kuroji, "but it's important."

Tōkan continues kneeling and listens attentively.

"So... you're an alpha/omega couple," starts Kuroji, rubbing a hand against the back of his head. "There are some... unique challenges to that nowadays."

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

"How are your parents taking this, Tōkan-kun? 🤔" asks Harutsugu. "I realise we've been remiss in not asking about them all this time."

"Ah, heh, that's... a subject."

"His dad's a shitstain and his stepmum doesn't care about him," he summarises.

"Inori!"

"Not... not entirely inaccurate," Tōkan says, and now it's his turn to scratch the back of his head awkwardly. "My biological mother was an omega, and my—my father—their relationship was not entirely—consensual."

That was very much not what they were expecting, although Harutsugu seems less surprised than Kuroji.

Figures. "She loved him, and... I think my father came to love her too, after a fashion. But he hid her, I'm sure you'll never hear anything about Kokonoe Tochima and an omega. As far as his image's concerned, his alpha wife is my mother."

"I... see," says Harutsugu. "Your mother... was... an omega?" he asks, carefully.

"She's dead. Died when I was small. And I was raised by the man who—did that—to her—her and who continually told me that alphas are superior to omegas and we should never intermingle, all my life. He got married to a woman who didn't want kids, so it was great that he'd already acquired an heir."

"Like I said. Shitstain."

This time neither of his dads berate him for it.

"So, yeah, it's hard for Kokonoe High to not have that... culture... about alphas and omegas when the headmaster and owner is like that. And I haven't told him about Inori."

This is clearly throwing some of the conversation they had planned for a loop. "And you don't plan to...?"