Tines like train tracks descended from above, the light of the distant dining room chandelier glinting off their silver. Nick's lip hung open as he watched, a little more than awe-struck. It was easy to see he could've easily stretched his body between each spike of the fork.

            The prongs of Christine's utensil plunged into the wet brown terrain that occupied the plate, swirling sauce and releasing plume after plume of steam from within the mess of synthetic protein mixed with the punctured sides of cooked animal.

            From his elevated platform next to Christine's plate, the Beta couldn't help but watch boggle-eyed through the clear fencing, taking in the casual mealtime carnage. Her plate alone was large enough to be the cul-de-sac by his apartment. She mopped up gravy and flecks of mashed potato that could've just as easily made the tips of snow-peaked mountains for Nick, then slowly drew the ravaged bundle away from the surface. Those fingers that had so easily offered a fortress of flesh and muscle to Nick on the way here now just as effortlessly grasped a trident between them and brought up approximately one quarter of a cow toward her mouth above.

            The meat passed over her lips into the darkness, beyond where the Beta could even see. Her mouth closed around the tines, their metal streaking quietly along her teeth within before she set about chewing through the bite with strength more than capable of gnashing brick and mortar. Faintly, he could make out the crunch of the animal's tiny bones in his girlfriend's cheeks.

            She apparently noticed his dwindling stare on her, because once she'd gulped down a couple hundred pounds of food in one normal-sized swallow, Christine turned her head to her date. Her fingers brushed through seeming miles of chestnut hair.

            "Everything taste good, Nick?" she asked. She smiled, her violet irises luminescent under the ceiling's glow.

            "Yes. Yes. It's... delicious," he said. "Thank you."

            She nodded, eyes flashing to the opposite side of the table to confirm her son was still brooding just as aggressively as last she checked, and returned to eating.

            Nick never got sick of watching her plant the fork in the landscape of food and draw another mouthful out. Or watching her do anything, really. He'd always been amazed by the scope of any given activity completed by an Omega. It was like continually watching a fleet of hot air balloons lift off for the very first time. Wonderment and awareness unrolling in one. The way space stretched forward into the beyond was never quite the same again after experiencing scale of that kind.

            Somehow it was different, though, when he knew someone of such titanic proportions personally and felt very strongly that he'd like to spend the foreseeable future in her company. Comforting. Protective. Also surprisingly titillating, if the sudden pants tent he found himself sporting was any indication. It meant the world and then some to know she was willing to test her relationships with her children at this table by bringing him before them. He was not only small enough to be mistaken for grit under their mother's fingernail, but young enough to be their older brother. There were more than a few hurdles to cross. As self-conscious as he felt now, he knew her anxieties had to be worse.

            Nick watched Christine's fork hover back over the plate and draw up another stabbed clump of meat. In this particular moment, as he sat by her powerful left hand upon the endless plain of white tablecloth, any distraction was welcome.

            Especially when there was a young man with arms like time-weathered mountain ridges seated across that cloth plain, shoveling in a herd's worth of salt-and-peppered livestock. Bennett had not yet blinked even once as the foursome took their dinner in near-silence, and the Beta was beginning to feel a tad unnerved.

            Nick looked down to his own plate again. He took the fork and knife in both hands. Sylvia had been kind enough to set out his food for him, given the significant challenge it would've presented for both her mother or her brother to prepare a dish not much larger than a grain of coarse salt to them.

            He delicately carved away another shred of meat from the frankly massive chunk he'd been given, and pondered just how many of his entire portion's worth Bennett might have caught between his teeth at this particular moment. The Beta was willing to wager at least thirty-seven, but it was hard to say. It was an awfully large set of jowls grinding literal tons of meat and potatoes as the corresponding eyes shot withering glances at least once a minute.

            "Did everyone have a good day?" Christine spoke up with more than her already substantial pep. It was the third time she'd attempted to initiate a conversation between Nick and her children, and she was not ready to give up yet. "Sylvia?"

            "Yep," the Alpha said from her own six-foot-long dinner surface that still fit easily upon the Omegas' aircraft carrier of a dining room table. She picked at the mashed potatoes, stirring them into a near-liquid state but never picking any up. Nick was pretty sure he hadn't seen her take a single bite yet.

            "School was good?"

            "It was okay, Mom."

            "Bennett?"

            The young Omega grumbled, his mouth still full of food, but didn't look up at his mother across the table. Instead he picked up a cup of water that could've doused a forest wildfire. He chugged it then slammed the towering glass down again.

            Nick's dining platform trembled. His own glass toppled, splashing into his plate of food.

            Bennett's fist remained squeezed around the glass cylinder, the ends of his bulky fingers flushing white.

            "Hon?" Christine said softly. "Is everything all right?"

            "Perfect," he grunted, his fork already en route to the plate again.

            It was bizarre for Nick to watch his wise lover keeping so serene in the face of her tempest of a son. Not that he blamed the kid for his attitude; he couldn't help but imagine he might feel the same, were their places reversed. Still, Beta tantrums were just a little less intimidating than Omega ones, in the same way that a sneeze was a little less intimidating than a hurricane.

            "Is there anything I can do?" she asked.

            "No," Bennett said, his gaze burning through the translucent wall separating him from the three-inch dinner guest. His thumb pounded on the rim of his empty water glass. "But I'll let you know."

            Christine bit her lip, momentarily defeated again, and looked apologetically down to Nick by her hand. He nodded in answer, giving her a conciliatory smile, and took a deep breath.

            She was giving this her all. He owed her the same.

            "I hear you're in the school musical, Sylvia," Nick said. Invisibly he felt his voice amplifying out of his tabled tower toward the eighteen-year-year-old Alpha and hoped he wasn't making a mistake.

            She looked up, this time in the Beta's direction, her face a blank canvas.

            "Cabaret, right?" he continued.

            She shrugged and looked back down to her plate, recommencing the endless stirring. "Yeah," she mumbled. "It's not a big deal."

            "Not a big deal? Aren't you Fräulein Schneider, though?"

            The girl looked up again, her gaze more focused this time. "Yeah."

            "Well, that's pretty important."

            "Not really," Sylvia countered. "She's just the old lady who owns the boarding house."

            "But she sings the first number after the opening. I have to think that makes her at least kind of a big deal."

            The Alpha raised an eyebrow. "You've seen it?"

            "Only... I don't know, fifteen times?" the Beta said animatedly, encouraged by the girl's unveiled curiosity.

            "That's funny. It's a super-old show," the Alpha said, her gaze shifting up to Christine's face. "Older than Mom, even."

            A warm chuckle rumbled above Nick's head.

            "It is pretty old, yeah," he said. "But back in my home town, my mother used to do a lot of local theater. She played Sally Bowles a couple times, actually. Once even at a place just down the road from the Tyler Convention Center-"

            "-the Starguise Theatre, yeah. Huh," Sylvia managed, cocking her head. "That's pretty cool."

            The Beta felt amazingly calm. He was only subconsciously aware of both Omegas looming beyond, one watching him with disinterested disdain, the other with increasing adoration.

            "For sure," he said. "But I bet you'll have their Fräulein Schneider beat."

            "Uh-huh," she said, blatantly unconvinced.

            "That probably sounds like I'm trying to make you feel better, right?"

            "A little."

            "I'm thinking you're a better singer, though."

            Sylvia looked like her eyes were on the verge of rolling all the way around. "You haven't even heard me sing."

            "I've heard your speaking voice, though. And I know you're in the choir. Your pitch changes but it never breaks at all, even when your voice is low. You know what I mean?"

            "I guess," she said.

            "You're... what, a soprano? But I'm guessing alto when you need to be. Like, maybe you can hit a high A on a good day, but you've got the transition to middle C down-pat any day of the week. So you probably have to cover the regular altos sometimes because you can blend."

            "Y-Yeah," Sylvia responded, the hospitality returning to her softened voice. Nick thought he could make out the ghost of a smile on her face.

            "Trust me, I can catch the little things in voices. With ears this dinky, they have to be good for something, right?"

            The girl stifled a giggle, embarrassment flashing through her eyes for just a second, before she let up and allowed a grin to cross her lips.

            "Yeah," she said. At last her fork dipped into the plate and ladled up her first bite. "I guess they do."

            Out of the corner of his eye, Nick could just make out Christine absolutely beaming.

            "Well, that's nice," Bennett muttered loudly. "That's really nice."

            "I think so, too," the other Omega said sweetly but through gritted teeth, silently warning her son.

            "No, I mean it," the boy said. "He just knows her so well. It's really cute. Is it my turn yet, though? Is it my turn for him to tell me what I'm really good at?"

            The Beta felt his stomach rotating like a pig on a spit.

            "Bennett-" Christine sighed.

            "No, I mean it. I'm really curious," the Omega fumed. He planted his fork and knife on the table with a seismic clack on opposite curves of the plate, then rested his chin inquisitively on his fist, gazing directly into Nick's walled-off glass tower. "C'mon, man. I'm waiting. What am I into?"

            "Well... I, uh... I know you... do a lot of work outside the city, building up facilities by the shorelines."

            "Oooh good one. It's like you looked into my brain and just pulled that right out. It's like magic."

            "Bennett," Christine repeated.

            "Hey, I'm just "giving him a try," just like you asked us to do, Mom," he fired back, his voice never rising in volume above the same cold drone.

            All the same, it made the Beta shiver.

            "I think that's enough," she said.

            "But we barely know anything about each other yet. I mean, how else is he going to convince us he just loves Mom and only wants the best for her?" Bennett scowled. He looked back to Nick. "That's the goal, isn't it?"

            "Why do you have to be like this?" Sylvia piped up at last to her brother, surprising Nick with the defensiveness of her tone. "He didn't do anything to you. He's just trying to be nice."

            "Didn't "do" anything? That's not a surprise. How could he from the little tic-tac box she keeps him in?"

            "Shut up," the Alpha snapped.

            "When I'm ready," the Omega said.

            "Hon, do you need to take a break from this table? Go for a walk, maybe?" Christine offered, the severity serrating her syllables. She'd risen to her feet, long fingernails alighting defensively mere feet away from Nick's speck of a table. "Because I've had just about enough."

            "Yeah," the larger Omega snarled. "I think I do need a break." He too stood to full height, easily dwarfing his mother as he leered above the table, which, despite its seemingly-infinite stretch of white cross-stitches in Nick's eyes, looked like a footstool by comparison. Brow stiffened, shoulders spread wide, fists knuckled into iron, the young man was a force of nature.

            The Beta's throat fell dry.

            "Have fun playing house with cool new tiny Daddy," Bennett bellowed back into the dining room as he stormed toward the porch. The door slammed cataclysmically behind him, rattling the walls from their stone foundations and up to Nick's paltry knees, which were quaking now harder than ever in his life.

            This wasn't going so well.