Taekook Oneshots

Leader of The Pack

(A oneshot where Tae is the Luna of the pack, and then his mate arrives, and it's kook. also jihope and namjin are there. A request from a very patient wonder!)

My mother always told me that leadership isn't a given, that one cannot ever assume they have total power over anyone simply based on traits they were awarded by a lottery at birth. She was a strong believer in the idea that someone's ability to influence others in a positive way was driven by their own motivations, their patience, their own personal skillset. Inheritance was important, sure, but it wasn't everything.

I've always thought that a good leader comes naturally. A good leader comes out of necessity, not out of greed or the longing for power. It takes experience, learning to be comfortable with one's own decisions. It takes some confidence to stand in front of a group and promise them that you know what you're doing. 

I never considered myself a leader, and maybe that is precisely why I ended up with the position, when my parents passed on. Maybe that's why my mother eventually became a leader herself before she died, as the mate of the Head Alpha. She always seemed to know what she was doing, and yet at the same time I always saw a look of confusion in her eyes, a glint of panic whenever someone came to her with a new problem she'd never tried to solve before. 

When I was born, the entire pack thought I'd be an alpha. They weren't expecting me to turn around and present as a beta, my eyes glowing bright amber the first full moon after my fifth birthday, just before I shifted into wolf form. They were expecting something more massive, something a little more intimidating. But my mother merely shifted her own form into that of a wolf, and taught me how to function in this new body. I'll never forget the look of pride in her eyes when I returned from my first solo run, a decade later. 

My father wasn't too bothered either, maybe because he thought he'd end up having a second child, someone who could be the Head Alpha instead. He didn't agree with my mother's ideas about leadership, not as much, and he wanted his own child to take the mantle of Head Alpha after he died. But he allowed her to teach me everything she wanted, because he loved her. And he didn't see the harm in making sure someone understood the basics, the things that the pack would need. 

I truly believe my family loved each other. I honestly do. I know it's weird to say it out loud, but I had a lot of faith in the relationship my parents had, and I count myself lucky for that. Many Lunas, like my mother, never got a say in how the pack was run. They were merely trophies of sorts, arm candy for some arrogant alpha who paraded them around to show off how good they were as a homemaker. 

My father always told me that a good Luna made a good Alpha. They were a partnership, not a hierarchy. And that's the way he always seemed to act, turning to her for advice if he wasn't certain on something, accepting any decisions she'd made in his absence. He trusted her, implicitly, and the rest of the pack did too. Perhaps even more so than he did, sometimes. 

It's hard to truly know, now. 

My father passed on as a result of an accident, much earlier than any of us were expecting.

He was out on a normal run, with some members of the pack, myself included. It was a scouting mission, as I remember, just checking the edges of our territory, in the middle of the forest. A great crash suddenly echoed through the trees, and my father stopped short, out of nowhere, and collapsed. 

We all crowded round him, as he lay there, in the middle of some horrifying contraption: a trap, with great metal teeth, which had snapped around him without warning. We knew about these traps, placed by poachers to catch various creatures. But we hadn't expected to see one on our usual route. 

He didn't even make the journey home, as the trap had bitten directly into his head. My mother already knew, of course, that he was gone, by the time we got back. I was crying, all of us were, and she was already in the throes of grief. She'd felt the connection break the moment his life winked out.