Poison Ivy Ch. 02

ETA: This is the revised edition of Chapter 2. If you are new to the story or re-reading it, just be aware that some minor things have changed and may not line up with the next chapters. I'm slowly working through all of them and will have revised all chapters before posting the final. Thanks for your patience!

Hi again! Thanks to everyone for the feedback, I wasn't entirely confident about this story so I'm glad some of you like it!

Another disclaimer, lots of cursing in this story and lots of military lingo. If cursing offends you, please don't read it.

For those who haven't read the first chapter yet, this is an Omegaverse story. If you're unfamiliar, I suggest you google it first so you're not entirely lost with the Alpha/Beta/Omega dynamics.

Okay! Thanks for sticking with me! Hope you enjoy!

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The room sung out its emptiness to her before she even opened her eyes. Ivy squinted, scanning the monstrous place for signs of Sir Alpha, just to be safe. Finding herself truly alone, a thing she had almost never experienced in her five years as a medic except for the occasional solo cold-water shower, she peeled back the fresh dressing covering her bullet wound. It had been stitched up by a skilled hand and no longer ached quite as much, and she found herself feeling grateful for that otherwise terrible Beta who had attacked her with that fucking needle. And maybe she felt a little guilty for punching him in the jaw. A little. Maybe.

Officer Muscles apparently had better things to do with his time than to babysit her all day. Good. She didn't think she was quite ready to face him after what had happened the night before. She looked over at the luxurious, oversized leather recliner at the other side of the room, blushing furiously at the memory of what he'd done to her on that chair.

Had he drugged her? It made sense. Why else would she have been so... responsive? She had never felt anything like that before, the insane sensations from having his fingers buried in her core that went all the way through to her bones. And that... stuff... that had come out of her, in response to his goddamned growling. The slick. What an appropriately disgusting word.

Nope. No fucking thanks. She was going home. She had, no doubt, already been replaced by one of her medics, which was just fine with her. She hadn't wanted the shitty supervisorposition to begin with. She would sneak her way back onto Chid Forward Operating Base if she had to, but she was going back to Rico Battalion if it fucking killed her. No way was she sticking around with the overgrown, arrogant Lieutenant General (Leon? Liam?), who had, by the way, essentially sexually assaulted her because he had mistaken her for some newly discovered, lost-in-the-wild little Omega.

Fuck. That.

She swung her legs over the side of a bed so huge that her toes dangled several inches off the ground. She was a modest girl, but she took pride in keeping her body strong in order to keep up with the Betas in her battalion. However, there was only so much lifting weights and daily runs could do for a girl whose father had once called an angry kitten. The implication was clear. She could work as hard as she wanted, eat as much spinach and eggs as she could stomach, and she'd still be only a miniature version of the strong Beta soldier who had raised her. For whatever reason, once she had reached a certain point, she had just... stopped growing. The toned muscles in her body could do little to hide her nearly childlike bone structure. It was infuriating. So Ivy had found other ways to kick ass and take names.

Namely, by kicking ass and taking names. It was a rare Beta who knew how to react to a tiny girl who could throw a punch, and she used hesitation and confusion as advantages. Her handicap, as it were.

And holy shit. She was naked again. Shocker.

That son of a bitch.

She hopped to the polished marble floor and strode over to the "walk-in" (if walking-in meant doing laps in a space bigger than her apartment). The light switch on the wall illuminated a small army's worth of designer dresses, designer jeans, designer blouses, designer shoes... Okay pretty much everything in this room was designer. She looked up. Including the crystal chandelier, apparently. Sir Alpha claimed this entire room was meant for her. Or, more accurately, the Omega she was being mistaken for. She swallowed, overwhelmed. Where did one even begin looking for something to put on in this department store of a closet? If she wore a single outfit every day, it'd still take her five, maybe six years to make it through everything in here. Fuck it, he could take his closet and shove it up his ass. Or maybe sell a tiny fraction of it, and use the proceeds to save a bunch of disposable lives.

Rifling through a relatively safe-seeming section of muted colors, she wasn't at all surprised to find that every single item of clothing was either skin tight or shamelessly revealing. If they thought she was Omega, they would have wanted her to put herself on display for the benefit of the Alphas, one of whom she might one day be given to. She shuddered.

She felt sorry for the Omegas, the rare group of beautiful women who were put up in what were essentially palaces, given every comfort, and eventually parceled out as gifts to high-ranking Alphas like some gold retirement plaque. Their futures were so limited. Everything was decided for the supposed submissive dynamic; Their daily activities, hair color and wardrobe selections, even the food they put in their own bodies. Eventually, even their mates were chosen for them. It was not a life she envied, and she didn't for one second buy into all that submissive shit. Dynamics usually presented themselves in adolescent years. At least some of those girls had to have been broken in like wild horses. Ivy thought of herself at that age and what it would have been like to have been plucked from her home and sent to live like isolated royalty.

It would not have gone well. Not that her father would ever have let it happen.

In the end, she decided on a pair of black gym leggings and an army green jacket with running shoes and a black beanie. All well made. All designer brands. The jacket was perfectly tailored and would have cost her three month's pay.

None of it really even mattered. Once they found out what Muscles had done, coming up with this crazy theory that she'd been suppressing heat cycles or whatever the fuck he'd said, and then procuring what had to be the nicest room in this place and the priciest wardrobe to boot, they'd punish him and send her back to her Battalion. This stuff was crap, anyways. Crap compared to her little family back in Chid. Her mother was long dead, her father more recently, but still just as dead. Serg, Kentucky, and the rest of her boys... They were all she had left.

And Officer Dickwad had called her family fucking disposable. Fine. If they were disposable, they would be disposable together. She wasn't going to wait around for the morons running this operation to figure out how badly they'd fucked up. She was going back. Now.

She walked over to the door she had watched the medic come through. Kind of ridiculous that one room had so many doors, and only one of them lead to the outside, but whatever. Holding her breath, she clutched the doorknob and twisted.

It turned.

She let out a low whistle and cracked the door open a few inches. A shamelessly luxurious hallway, complete with a thick, royal blue carpet and gold inlets filled with pretty trinkets, stretched for several yards on each side. It was lined with doors similar to hers, polished, blackwood masterpieces adorned with what she suspected were pure gold knockers.

Honestly, were Alphas that lazy that they couldn't use their fucking hands to knock on a damn door?

She thought about the meager supplies that were delivered every week to Chid FOB and clenched her hands into fists. There was never enough medical gear in the boxes that were unceremoniously dropped outside her tent by stone-faced soldiers from the main base. She and her boys worked their asses off coming up with creative ways to stretch what they had and made (or creatively acquired) their own supplies in order to make sure there was at least the minimum amount of what was needed to patch up the 1,500 men in Rico Battalion.

A box of tampons was dropped off to her every month when they eventually noticed there was a female on the roster for Rico battalion. She worked out so often that she had never gotten a period, so they used sliced-up sections of the absorbent sticks to shove into gunshot wounds in the field when they were low on the grey powder they used to staunch heavy bleeding. They collected and washed old fatigues to cut into strips and paired them with used pens to function as tourniquets. Shit, they even found herbs and roots from the forest outside base gates to use as sedatives, pain killers and fever reducers. They made do.

But staring around at the hallway, the freakin hallway, where even one of the little golden trinkets in the alcoves lining the walls every two yards or so could buy enough supplies to save hundreds of the men who ended up in her medical tent after sustaining horrible injuries in combat... It was sickening.

Shaking her head, she re-focused on the task at hand. Like a tactical ninja, she crept out the door and silently melted into the walls (the immaculate white marble walls, where, to be fair, anyone who wasn't legally blind would immediately be able to spot her from the opposite end) until she reached a larger, especially opulent door that she figured must lead to the outside. Hmm, no knocker. She inched the door open a sliver and peered out. A black tar roadway, damp from a dreary, overcast afternoon, separated the building she was in from a neat row of dark green canvas tents across the way. A formation of Beta soldiers marched by singing cadence as green netted army vehicles rode past. A group of guys in PT gear jogged past the door, making her startle and jump back a little, biting back a surprised yelp.

The satellite base in Chid forest, where she'd been stationed, lacked the rigidity and organization of this much larger, much more established foothold. They never sang cadence in Chid, or had to wear the standard-issue Army physical training gear when they worked out. Without the presence of Alpha Officers constantly over their heads, Chid had relaxed the tight restrictions on Army life. That wasn't to say that the work they did, or the way they did it, was any less than the work done on this base. Perhaps even the contrary. Without so much of the focus being centered around merely looking like badass rockstars, the soldiers stationed in Chid actually were badass rockstars. She wasn't sure how often the units on main base ever left main base to do anything except for supply runs, but she knew it couldn't be anywhere near as often as Rico Battalion sent teams out to patrol Chid forest.

Ivy knew that the reasons they were in still in Torrin, after a nearly 35 year-long campaign, had to be largely financial and entirely political. She got behind it for one reason, and one reason only. As backwards thinking as Lostra could be about women (of all dynamics, really, since even Alpha females were barred from most military positions), they at least didn't enslave, torture, rape, and brutally murder rebellious girls and female prisoners of war. But Torrins did.

Oppressed to a staggering degree, as she understood it, Torrin's female population was forbidden to go to school, procure employment, travel outside the country, or... really, anything that didn't involve serving a man and his needs. Her father used to say that anytime a population is put under such strict, impossible restrictions, revolt and rebellion will inevitably follow. Maybe small and secret, at first. But as Lostran bases became more established throughout the entire country, more and more Torrins began showing up at the gates, sometimes half-dead, asking for help and safe passage to a less restrictive country. When Torrin's political elite began to catch on, they set up special Factories solely dedicated to the rehabilitation of renegade citizens.

It still made Ivy sick to her stomach, thinking about the images she'd seen, taken by undercover operatives, of the inside of some of those Factories. Tortured and starved, raped and beaten, the creatures that had been immortalized in those infamous black-and-white prints resembled little more than spectral wraiths.

So whatever the real reasons Lostrans found themselves in Torrin, the handful of fleeing women and girls (and occasionally, the men who hoped for a better future for their families) who were picked up every month by patrols helped, in some small measure, to justify their military presence. And Chid, her dinky little outpost in the middle of nowhere, picked up more of these runaways than any other base in Torrin, including the vastly overmanned, vastly overfunded main base. Speaking of...

A large group of leisure Alpha Officers sat watching the hustle and bustle of the base around them from a covered patio nearby. Being served lunch. On china plates.

Goddamnit...

She figured she must be looking at the main road and peeked around at some of the drab buildings nearby. Three buildings down, four trucks were being loaded up with stacks of supplies and laundered linens. What day was it? Deliveries always came from main base on Tuesdays. The disaster that was the Officer's arrival on Chid, and her subsequent kidnapping, had happened on Sunday. Had she really lost more than a whole day? How much of that sedative did they give her?

If she could sneak her way into the building and find out which truck was going to Chid, she could hide among the supplies and get back to base that way. With spotty running water and little electricity, washing uniforms could be a struggle. Ivy preferred to take hers to a little stream tucked behind the medic tent with some soap her dad sent her every week... Well, had sent her, before he died. Most of the base did the same, washing their clothes by hand in the few streams and one lake (really more of a puddle) around base. Some soldiers, however, preferred to send their uniforms with the supply truck every week to be washed, which they'd receive back with the next shipment.

The trick would be getting a set to fit. Maybe she would be lucky enough to find a pair of trauma scissors and some sutures in the box of medical supplies, although she doubted it. She'd figure something out.

She quickly opened the door and slipped out, closing it silently behind her and moving to the side of the building. She kept her eye on the group of Alphas, seated comfortably at what looked like an expensive hotel patio, as she went. She knew it wasn't unheard of for an Omega to be at the main base, to visit a mate or spend her first few weeks with a fresh pair-bond, but she wasn't Omega and it would look damn strange to anybody who noticed to see a Beta female slinking around in Civilian clothes, and the last thing she wanted to do was bring attention to herself when he could be nearby.

She shouldn't have worn the jacket. It was late autumn, just on the cusp of winter, but it felt more like the middle of summer. She wiped the sweat from her brow and moved in the shadows to the next building, and then the next. Eventually she was just around the corner from the supply hangar, the trucks poised just past the entrance, close enough to listen to any idle chatter that might give her a clue about which truck was headed to Chid. She chanced a quick glance. Two soldiers carrying linens walked toward the vehicles. She ducked back down again, crouched in a hunched position, listening.

"... shittiest base in Torrin."

"Yeah dude, but they have that hot little shorty medic there. Fuck, I'd like to spend a couple of hours alone with her."

"I bet you anything she's a crazy bitch though. Hot chicks are always fucking crazy."

Ivy bristled. It took all her self-control not to stomp around from her hiding spot and show these two asshats how much of a crazy bitch she was and --

"What the fuck are you doing?"

Ivy yelped and spun around to see an unusually tall Beta peering down at her, arms crossed. He reminded her a little of Turbo. Only this dude was still skinny as a string bean. Also, their faces weren't anything alike. And they had different hair. And different skin tones.

Okay so they were both just really tall.

"Uh... I'm a little lost. I'm looking for medical? I'm a new medic, just reporting."

He narrowed his eyes. "Where's your uniform? New soldiers showed up four days ago. You mean to tell me you've been fucking around for four days?"

"Uh, no Corporal. They sent me separately. You know..." she gestured to her curves. What little there was of them. "Being female and all. They wanted to keep me separate." She flashed him her flirtiest smile.

"Why are you making that face? Are you sick?"

Fuck, she needed to practice her flirting skills.

"No, Corporal. Sorry. I'm just nervous. So, ah... The medical building?"

"The uniform?" he retorted.

"Right. That. My gear was lost in transit. I only had my workout clothes with me. They said they had spare fatigues waiting for me at medical."

He glared at her suspiciously.

Please believe me, please believe me, please believe me. She knew she was a shitty liar, but... Come on. The universe really owed it to her to cut her some slack.

"Medical tent's right down the way, directly across from the Alpha barracks. You know... The giant mansion." Even this hardass had a little bitterness in his tone.

"Right. Thank you."

The Beta turned on his heel and stormed off, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She turned her attention back to the trucks. The same two dickwads were loading up a handful of cardboard boxes. There was a little white container on the top of crazy bitch guy's load, and she looked closer. Tampons.

Bingo!

She was the only female stationed on any of the satellite bases. Those tampons were headed to Chid, and she was going with them. She waited until the Betas had turned around for more supplies and skittered over to the tampon-mobile. Heaving herself up over the lip of the truck, she quickly scanned the dark interior for any easy hiding spots. There wasn't much in the way of spare space, but she was little and could squeeze herself into some pretty tiny places. She had learned of this particular skill set in boot camp during an obstacle course, when she had mistakenly crawled under a net that was low to the ground instead of balancing on top of it, like she was apparently supposed to, and then hoisted herself up through the rafters of the inclined rope climb immediately following her crawl, wriggling out from the tight space on the top just ahead of her peers.

Her drill sergeant had not been amused.

She picked a spot between two boxes that were relatively hidden from view by the laundry piles and settled down. Tweedledee and Tweedledum walked back to throw a few more boxes in, then slammed up the trunk bed and climbed around to the front seats.

So far so good.

The engine roared to life, and suddenly they were driving away, off main base and onto the road leading back to Chid, back to her little makeshift medic family.

She breathed a sigh of relief and rested her head against the cardboard box at her back. Her eyes closed, the rumble of the engine lulling her into a relaxed stupor, and she soon found herself fighting to keep her eyes open.