Vastervik: Chapter 1
A note on the omegaverse here, so you can make an informed decision
I write male omegas with intersex physiology. An external cock, vaginal opening (the slit), and the capacity to carry children. Casper’s body is described with anatomical specificity, not euphemism. If you’re coming from an omegaverse where male omegas are built like cis men with added slick, this one’s different. The biology matters to the story. It’s central to how Casper is controlled, how he reclaims his body, and what freedom eventually looks like for him.
I understand this might not suit everyone’s taste, so please check out my other fics if this one’s not for you.
—Marlowe
Toby had been on the boat for forty minutes and his phone had lost signal thirty-seven minutes ago.
He’d checked twice. Three times. Then put it back in his coat pocket, where it sat heavy against his leg. His coat was Loro Piana, cashmere, and it was not warm enough. Nothing he’d packed was warm enough. His assistant had Googled “Vastervik weather June” and come back and told him that it would be “bracing”. Toby had packed accordingly, piling mid-weight coats and smart jumpers into his suitcase. He’d lost all trust in Georgia at this point, particularly since she’d described Vastervik as “characterful” and “rustic” which meant fuck all in relation to the actual reality of the country.
The boat was clinker-built, wooden, with a square sail furled against the mast and an outboard motor bolted to the stern like an afterthought. The motor was doing the work. The sail was for show, or for tradition, or for whatever reason these people did anything.
Toby had been flying in and out of Nordhavn for three months, locking down the infrastructure deal, and he still couldn’t get a read on the Vasterviksk. They had the bluntness of Norwegians and the warmth of a Scotsman who’d just been glassed. Every conversation felt like he was being assessed by people who’d already decided what they thought of him but were too amused by his Britishness to shut him down completely.
Edmund sat at the bow with his legs crossed at the ankle, doing his best impression of a man who found all of this anthropologically interesting rather than deeply inconvenient. Their father stood beside the skipper, one hand braced on the gunwale, nodding along to something the skipper was saying.
Guðmundur Sigurdsson, Minister for Trade, sat across from Toby on the bench. He took up most of it. The man was built like something you’d find carved into the prow of a longship with shoulders that strained the seams of his wool coat, and a beard the colour of dark copper, braided into two thick ropes that hung to his sternum. He had hands that could have palmed a basketball. Toby couldn’t keep his eyes off them as he listened to the man talk about fish stocks.
“The Skalavik fishermen have maintained sustainable yields for six hundred years,” Guðmundur said, in the particular cadence of someone who’d done a doctorate on the thing he was talking about. “Not because of regulation. But because the Consort blesses the fleet.”
“The consort,” Toby said.
“The Consort to the Sea.” Guðmundur scratched his beard. “He’s a major religious figure for us Skalaviksk. He lives with the Ri’s household, and you will meet him when we arrive. He will welcome you to the island, as is tradition.”
Toby looked out at the water. Grey, flat, unreflective. The island ahead was a dark bulk rising out of the North Sea, treeless on its south face, green where the hills rolled back from the cliff edge. Skalavik. Two thousand residents. Subsistence farming. Almost no tourists. The briefing document had been four pages long, which was three more than he’d expected and one more than he’d read.
“What does the consort actually do?” Toby asked.
“He is the bridge between Vastervik and the sea.” Guðmundur said. “He blesses the boats. He reads the tides. The fishermen bring him offerings before the season opens. They touch his feet for luck.”
“His feet,” Toby said, taking care to keep his expression neutral.
“He is very finely built. And his feet are very small.” Guðmundur scratched his beard. “Like a child’s.”
Toby waited for the punchline.
Guðmundur adjusted his weight on the bench. The wood creaked. “You will like Skalavik, I think. The Ri likes it best of all the outer islands. The people here still live according to the old ways.”
“So I hear.”
“You will see.” Guðmundur’s mouth moved behind his beard. “When the Consort welcomes you.”
“Right,” Toby said. “And the consort is—what, a priest? A monk?”
“He is a male omega.”
Toby’s hand stopped halfway to his coat pocket. His eyes darted to his father, and then his brother. Then back at Guðmundur.
“A male omega,” he said. “Here.”
“Yes. He was born here on Skalavik,” Guðmundur continued. “He was identified at birth. One in two million, as you know. So of course, the Sea God claimed him.”
A male omega. Toby had never seen one. He knew of three people in his circle who claimed to have had one. Anders Lindqvist at that weekend in Gstaad, Khalid over too many whiskies at the Dorchester, and Seb, who wouldn’t shut up about it for the better part of a year and got unbearable at dinners. The details varied depending on how drunk the teller was and how badly they wanted to impress, but the throughline was always the same: tighter, wetter, built differently on the inside in ways that made alpha knots feel like they were supposed to be there. Seb had once described it, with the glassy-eyed sincerity of a man on his fourth whiskey, as a religious experience. Toby had told him to fuck off, thinking him a bullshitter. But he hadn’t forgotten it.
“He was raised in the Ri’s household,” Guðmundur said. “Educated alongside the royal children. He speaks four languages. He’s a bright boy, our Casper Halvorsen.”
“And does he have a role beyond the ceremonial?”
“Beyond.” Guðmundur repeated the word like he was tasting it. “There is no beyond. He is the Consort. That is his life. That is the entirety of who he is.”
The boat rounded the headland and Skalavik opened up below the cliffs. A natural harbour, crescent-shaped, with stone jetties reaching into water that had turned from grey to a dark, glassy green. Houses climbed the hillside in tight rows. Built with stone walls, turf roofs, smoke threading from their chimneys. There were a few larger buildings near the waterfront. No cars that Toby could see. A single paved road ran along the harbour front, and on it, was what appeared to be a horse.
Henry straightened his coat. Edmund stood and brushed down his trousers. Toby put his phone back in his pocket.
People had gathered at the main jetty. There were thirty, maybe forty, dressed in wool and oilskin, their faces raw from wind. Several children sat on the harbour wall with their legs dangling over the water. An older woman held a bundle of dried herbs that smoked faintly in the salt air. It looked like a scene from a documentary Toby would have watched about an insulated primitive society.
Guðmundur rose to his full height, which blocked out most of the sky, and lifted one massive hand in greeting. The crowd responded with a low, collective sound that wasn’t cheering. It was more a melodic hum, rising and falling, like a sea shanty stripped to its bones.
“Ah,” Guðmundur said. He sounded pleased. “He is already in the water. Good. He does not always come down for visitors.”
Toby followed Guðmundur’s gaze past the jetty, past the moored fishing boats with their chipped paint and salt-crusted ropes, to the shallows at the far curve of the harbour.
The omega was standing in the sea.
He was waist-deep and bare from the chest up, with a strip of linen wrapped low around his hips that clung where the water had soaked it through. His skin was so pale it looked almost blue against the dark water. He had ice-blond hair, wet, pushed back from a face that made Toby forget what he’d been about to say to Guðmundur.
The omega’s cheekbones were cut high, his jaw narrow. He couldn’t have been older than twenty. He stood in the water with the stillness of someone who was used to being constantly looked at.
The boat bumped against the jetty. Ropes were thrown and caught by people onshore. Toby climbed out after his father, and his shoes, Church’s, the brown suede pair he’d thought would be appropriate for rustic island terrain, sank into something wet and organic between the harbour stones. He didn’t look down.
Casper was walking out of the water in no apparent hurry. The linen clung to his thighs and hips, and he was narrow and slight and moved with a loose, unselfconscious grace that drew stares. Every person on this harbour was watching him avidly
In his hands he carried a golden chalice, dull and old, the surface worked with patterns too far away to make out.
“The chalice holds rendered seal fat,” Guðmundur said, leaning down to Toby’s ear. His breath smelled of coffee and tobacco. “Mixed with herbs. Aromatic, healing. Casper gathered them himself.”
“Lovely,” Toby said.
“Naked.”
Toby looked at him.
“Under the new moon. It is tradition. The herbs must be gathered without barrier between the consort’s body and the earth.”
Guðmundur’s face was perfectly straight. Toby searched it for any sign of irony, for the slight crack at the corner of the mouth that would tell him this was a performance for the tourists. He found nothing. The Fulbright scholar, the Oxford man, the minister with an advanced degree in international trade policy, was telling him that a nineteen-year-old omega gathered herbs naked under moonlight to be ritualistically used, and he meant every word of it.
“Right,” Toby said.
Casper reached the harbour stones. Water ran off him in sheets. The linen had gone translucent where it clung to his hips, and Toby could see the shadow of blond hair beneath it, the faint dark line of the omega’s slit pressed against the wet fabric. He stared. He knew he was staring. He couldn’t route his eyes anywhere else.
A hand landed on his shoulder. Heavy. Guðmundur’s fingers closed around the joint and turned Toby to face him. The minister’s expression hadn’t changed — mild, pleasant, informational — but his grip said something different.
“His feet,” Guðmundur said, still holding Toby’s shoulder, “are very fine. You will notice. Not a callus, not a scratch. The ground is kind to him.”
“Right. His feet.”
“Skalavik watches out for the consort,” Guðmundur said. He let go of Toby’s shoulder. “The island spirits. And the people.”
Casper went to Henry first, because Henry was the eldest, and Toby had time to notice that the boy’s hands around the chalice were steady. No trembling. No performance anxiety. He’d done this before. He’d done this his whole life.
Casper dipped two fingers into the chalice and drew them out gleaming. He pressed them to Henry’s throat, just below the jaw, and then to each of his wrists. Henry — who did not like being touched by strangers, who had once fired a valet for adjusting his collar without asking — stood perfectly still while the seal fat caught the grey light and glistened on his skin. Then Casper leaned in and pressed his cheek against Henry’s, left side first and then right, with the deliberateness of a European greeting. Scent-marking. Toby watched his father receive it without flinching.
Edmund was next. He bent his head slightly to make it easier for Casper to reach him. They went through the same ritual, seal fat to the throat, wrists, the press of cheek against cheek. Edmund caught Toby’s eye over Casper’s blond head. His pupils were blown wide as a result of ceremonial intimacy from the male omega.
Then Casper turned to Toby.
He was close enough to study the colour of his eyes properly. Grey-blue, pale as sea glass, with a ring of darker colour around the iris that made the centre look lit from behind. He had a scatter of freckles across his nose and the tops of his cheeks. His eyelashes were white-blond and wet and clumped together from the seawater, and he looked up at Toby with the same steady composure he’d given Henry and Edmund.
Toby’s brain went completely, startlingly quiet.
Every thought he’d been carrying, the deal, the infrastructure proposal, the four-page briefing document, Georgia’s incompetence, his ruined shoes, simply dropped out of his head like items falling off a shelf, one after another, until there was nothing left except the omega standing in front of him with seal fat on his fingers and water still running down his stomach in thin, slow lines.
Casper dipped his fingers into the chalice.
Toby smelled him before the touch came. It hit the back of his throat first. His scent wasn’t floral, not sweet. It was something underneath those categories entirely, something that bypassed the rational part of his brain and just went straight to the part that handled the wanting. The longing. The omega smelled of salt and, cold skin and something herbal and crushed-greenery.
Casper pressed his fingers to Toby’s throat.
His touch was cool and firm and not at all tentative. He pressed the oil into the pulse point under Toby’s jaw with the confidence of someone performing a sacrament they believed in completely. His fingers moved to Toby’s left wrist and then his right, and Toby stood there and just let it happen. He just breathed the male omega in.
Casper leaned in and pressed his left cheek against Toby’s. His skin was cold from the water and impossibly smooth. Toby felt the faintest drag of friction where Casper’s jaw moved against his, the omega’s scent gland pressing against the skin just below Toby’s ear. Toby’s hands stayed at his sides. He could feel his pulse in his fingertips and in his throat where the oil was warming against his skin.
Casper pulled back, turned his head and pressed his right cheek to Toby’s and held it there. He held the contact with him for a beat longer than he had with Edmund.
“That’s enough, little consort.” Guðmundur’s voice came from somewhere behind Toby’s left shoulder, low and fond. A hand closed around Toby’s upper arm. The fingers dug in. Not a friendly grip. It was the grip of a man who knew exactly what he was interrupting.
Guðmundur pulled Toby back one step, then another, enough to break the proximity and let the salt air fill the space between them.
Casper stood with the chalice held in both hands, the water drying on his shoulders, his face perfectly composed. He didn’t look at Toby again. He turned back towards the crowd, and the people of Skalavik closed around him like the sea filling a gap between rocks.
Guðmundur’s fingers stayed on Toby’s arm. His thumb pressed into the muscle above the elbow with a pressure that would leave a bruise.
“Come,” he said. “The Ri is expecting us for supper.”
He let go.
Toby followed his father and brother up the harbour steps with his arm throbbing and his throat slick with seal fat and the scent of Casper Halvorsen under his jaw and on his wrists and soaked into the cashmere of his coat where the boy had pressed his face. He didn’t look back. He wanted to look back. He looked at the steps instead, at the worn stone, at his ruined Church’s leaving wet prints on the granite.