nine mistakes we might have made

by eneiryu

Summary:

Uncomfortable conversations don’t stop being uncomfortable just because they keep happening.

Notes:

Edit because ArtZeppo made an absolutely stunning piece of art for this fic, and everyone should drop everything that they're doing right now and go look at it.

Written because after the series finale, my brain went, "of course Theo joins the pack," and then, "but they're seriously going to have to talk about it first," and nearly 17,000 words later, they've definitely done that.

POTENTIAL TRIGGER WARNING: I have no idea if I should actually warn for this, but erring on the side of caution - there are two *very brief* references to what could be seen as suicidal thoughts. Take care of yourselves, folks.

Available in Russian on ficbook.net thanks to the very generous lissara22: nine mistakes we might have made.

i. it wasn’t yet twilight but they said it’s a new day, a new way

Gabe’s body is still warm when Mason finally pulls Theo away from it, but only just.

It hadn’t been a conscious decision, coming back to stand over Gabe’s body; Theo had just found himself drifting that way after Liam’s brief, one-sided conversation with Monroe. The hospital had still been a mass of confusion, the Sheriff, Parrish, and Scott’s dad still sweeping through the halls relieving suddenly-pliant hunters of their weapons, Ms. McCall rallying the remaining medical staff in that quintessentially Beacon Hills way to start triaging the wounded. It’d left Liam, Theo, Mason, and Corey at something of loose ends while everyone tried to reconcile themselves to the sudden end to the fighting. To victory, whatever that meant.

To Theo, standing over Gabe’s body.

Eventually Scott calls from the high school, the Anuk-ite dead and everyone in more or less one piece. The sudden spike in Liam’s scent, gone hot and sharp with anger when Scott tells him that Monroe got away, registers with Theo — who’s spent the past few days keeping an incredibly close tab on Liam’s moods — but it registers only dimly, like he’s sensing everything from under water.

The touch on his arm breaks that trance, though. Mason’s expression is soft when Theo looks at him, open; he looks tired, a little heartsick when he darts a quick look at Gabe, fiercely satisfied with their success but aware of its cost. He swallows, Theo watching his Adam’s apple bob, and his hand clenches quickly around Theo’s arm before relaxing.

“The Sheriff and Scott’s dad are taking care of—” Mason trails off, understandably; Theo’s not sure how he would describe what the Sheriff and Scott’s dad are going to do, either, beyond saying take care of this mess, but there’s a corpse of a teenage boy cooling at his feet and he’s trying not to be that person anymore. “Anyway, Ms. McCall is going to give us a ride back to Scott’s place, everyone’s meeting there.”

Theo nods dumbly but doesn’t move. He thinks, the veins under your hand were black not that long ago. Mason was the one who’d told him, a few days and a million years ago, that you can’t take pain if you don’t care. Theo feels a ridiculous question bubble up in his throat, swallows it back down before he can ask Mason if he saw, if he realized what it meant; it’s not the time, and anyway Theo’s never been the type of person to show the vulnerable parts of himself like that.

But Mason’s cannier than he looks, or the thought is written all over Theo’s face, because he meets Theo’s eyes and says, “You surprised me, at the end there. I would have expected…”

He trails off again, but Theo doesn’t need him to continue. Mason has always been too kind for his own good, too soft for the kind of company he keeps; it was one of the cards that Theo always kept in reserve when he was worming his way into the McCall pack. Something to use against Liam if needed, or Corey; Mason’s essential goodness distilled down to a strategic asset that Theo could wield like a weapon against his friends.

No, Theo doesn’t need him to continue. He can imagine exactly what Mason would have expected Theo to do with — to — a wounded enemy on the battlefield. He swallows down the bitter taste that floods his mouth at the thought.

Theo looks back down at Gabe, feels the phantom, surreal sensation of Gabe’s pain flowing through his veins, “He was just a stupid kid.”

Mason doesn’t say anything for a few long seconds, and when he speaks next it’s quiet, a little contemplative, “We all were — are, really — if you think about it.” He pauses for another few seconds, and Theo listens to his heartbeat thump-thump steadily, no rise or fall or uncertainty, “Even you.”

Theo looks at him in surprise, and Mason lets him study his expression, lets Theo search out whatever it is he needs to search out.

“I would have killed you in a heartbeat if I’d known you were the Beast earlier,” Theo blurts out suddenly, half a confession, half an accusation; he’s not used to receiving absolution, from a too good-hearted teenager or otherwise, and it stirs something animal in his chest; a feeling almost exactly like being cornered.

Mason smiles wryly, “Of that, I have no doubt.” Then he claps Theo once on the shoulder and turns on his heel towards the elevators, “C’mon, they’re probably wondering where we are.”

Theo hesitates, but after one final glance at Gabe’s body, he follows.

 

ii. you said let’s trade tangible objects for intangible things

Ms. McCall drops them off at her house and turns right back for the hospital, a little wry and a little manic and a lot resigned, and Theo can recognize gallows humor when he sees it. He stands in the driveway and watches her car disappear, wonders how many times she’s done the same thing, papered resolve over trauma and kept treating patients, kept defying death, because it’s what she does, who she is; her own version of a superpower. He should know the number — does know it, actually, memorized it along with everything else about the McCall pack before he ever set foot in Beacon Hills in the service of the Dread Doctors — but he’s too tired to think of it now.

When he turns to head inside he sees Corey, stops short. Liam had been restless through the car ride, all useless adrenaline and conflicted emotions — victory was victory, but Brett and Lori’s murderer had escaped — and he’d disappeared into the house almost immediately, Mason hot on his heels. Theo had been sure that Corey was with them and he’s surprised at himself, a little, his instincts usually sharper than that.

“Corey,” Theo finally acknowledges after a few slow seconds crawl tortuously by, Corey doing nothing but staring at him through shuttered eyes.

“Do you ever think about them?” Corey suddenly asks, “Do you ever regret what you did to them?”

For half a second Theo’s tempted to play dumb, ask who?, but he can see the way that Corey’s balled-up fists are shaking, the minute tremors wracking his tense frame. And anyway, Theo knows exactly who; he sees Josh and Tracy every night in his nightmares, can remember the exact feel of their flesh splitting open around his claws. Some nights he wakes up trying to press their stolen powers back into their lifeless bodies. Some nights he tries not to wake up at all.

“Everyday,” Theo finally confesses quietly, and wonders if there’s any chance at all of Corey believing him. Theo mastered lying long before he mastered telling the truth.

Corey makes a high, hurt noise, but it’s not a disagreement or a denial. He presses his fists hard into his biceps, folds into himself, and Theo has to fight the urge to go to him, to offer comfort. Once he would have been able to fool himself into thinking they were alpha instincts, things that never go away, but he knows better now; he was never Corey’s alpha, not really, and this isn’t the kind of pain he’s newly able to take.

“I hated you,” Corey spits out, “I was so mad at Liam when he brought you back, you deserved to keep rotting in hell.”

Theo flinches but doesn’t respond, doesn’t defend himself. He can hear the sound of traffic on the highway a few blocks away and the sound of Corey’s teeth chattering as he shakes, and anyway Corey’s right. The worst part of it, the absolute worst part of it is the knowledge that sits up high under Theo’s ribs most days, choking him: the irony that the only reason Liam brought Theo back was so Theo could use Josh’s stolen power to help them, and Theo hadn’t even managed to bring that back with him. Of the three parts of him that have ever been any good, only his sister’s heart had returned with him, and Theo wakes up to that knowledge everyday.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Corey demands, voice cracking, and Theo jerks his head up, catches the salty sting of tears as Corey loses the battle with himself to keep hold of whatever riot of emotions is obviously battering his insides, “No witty comeback? No snide remark?”

Theo stares at him helplessly, the cornered-animal feeling from before back and clawing relentlessly at his chest, “Corey, I—”

Corey cuts him off, shaking his head fiercely, and Theo closes his mouth, doesn’t try to speak again. Corey heaves in a few shaky breaths, then suddenly asks, “Why did you come to the hospital?”

“Scott asked me to,” Theo replies automatically, caught off-guard by the sudden topic change.

“Because you thought he’d let you into his pack if you did?”

Theo recoils, stung, but forces himself to remember Josh’s betrayed yell as Theo buried his claws in his stomach, Tracy’s desperate begging as Theo buried his claws in her back, “No, I didn’t...that’s not why."

“Then why?” Corey presses, takes a step towards Theo as he does and Theo has to consciously stop himself from stepping back, from retreating.

“Scott said the hunters were going there to kill you all, to kill—” He cuts himself off before he can say Liam — he doesn’t need to give Corey that ammunition — but from the narrowed look in Corey’s eyes he heard it anyway. Theo grits his teeth, forces himself to keep looking at Corey, “I wanted to help.”

Corey studies him. The scent of tears has faded, though Theo can still see the tear-tracks dried tacky on his face. It’s hard, standing still under the scrutiny; it’s one of the hardest things he’s ever done. Of all of his sins, what he did to Corey and the other chimeras is probably the worst of it. After all, he was the one who raised them from the dead and declared them his pack, and he was the one who betrayed each and every one of them, one coldly calculated move at a time.

“You saved Mason’s life in the tunnels,” Corey says finally, “You saved Liam’s.” Corey pauses, and Theo is shocked to hear the slimmest thread of amusement woven through his next words, “You saved his life a lot.”

Theo doesn’t say anything, just stares mutely at the ground in front of Corey’s shoes. He can’t look at Corey’s face, can’t risk seeing his expression; he’s already feeling wounded, scratched raw from the inside-out. If he looks at Corey’s face and sees hatred, sees Josh or Tracy staring accusingly back at him, he doesn’t know if he could take it.

“I hated you,” Corey repeats, and Theo grimaces, then stops, caught, plays Corey’s words back through his head and puts the proper emphasis where it belonged, where Corey had placed it; hated, past tense. He looks up at Corey in surprise before he can help himself.

Corey’s jaw works but he doesn’t take the words back or try to qualify them. Then he jerks his head away from Theo and deliberately, purposefully, turns his back and starts walking away, towards the front door. Theo stares mutely at the space between his shoulder blades, his breath leaving him in a rush, stunned by the act, by the implication. He stands there, the beast in his chest going quiet, listens to the slam of the front door like a gunshot, like punctuation.

He stands there a long time.

 

iii. the map in my hands said east but the stars in your eyes said west

Ms. McCall keeps a stash of cheap sweatshirts and sweatpants in the upstairs linen closet, purchased in bulk at the Beacon Hills Costco and regularly replaced, because some parts of her son’s life she can fight and some parts she can’t, and the pack’s near-routine need for clothes that aren’t ripped or covered in bloodstains is one of the latter. Theo pulls a set from the closet on autopilot, still reeling from his conversation with Corey in the driveway. If he listens, he can hear Mason and Corey talking quietly in the living room. If he listened harder, he could hear the words, but he doesn’t.

Instead he stares down at the nondescript gray cotton in his hands, flexes his fingers just to hear the cheap plastic packaging crinkle and snap. Theo had come inside with the second wave of pack members, Lydia and Malia spilling out of one car, Scott, Stiles, and Derek out of another, all talking in the slightly manic, too-loud voices of people who have just survived something that they weren’t fully expecting to. The others had walked past Theo standing alone and obviously shaken with little more than confused glances, but Scott had stopped, put a hand on Theo’s shoulder, let it rest there for just long enough for the warmth of it to start seeping through Theo’s shirt.

Then he’d continued on into the house, and Theo had followed.

He can hear Scott now, three levels down and cocooned in the basement with Derek, the two of them trying to calm Liam down. Every now and then he can hear Liam’s voice deepen into a growl, into a roar, and it stirs something primal in him that he has to keep shoving down, has to keep caging in his ribs. He’d meant what he said to Liam in the car all those days ago, it’s why you get angry when you’re afraid, and the distress he can hear soaked through every one of Liam’s furious shouts pulls at him.

It’s why it takes Theo a minute to register that Liam’s distress isn’t the only one snarling up his insides. He looks up and to the left, towards Scott’s room and the soft glow of moonlight spilling out into the hallway from the half-open door. Theo hesitates, but only for a moment, and then he pads his way slowly to the doorway and presses his palm against the wood to gently push it the rest of the way open.

Malia snarls at him but Theo doesn’t flinch, can smell the surprise and the lack of anger in her scent, no one’s instincts working right tonight, everyone’s conscious senses burned out. She relaxes quickly, anyway, the blue fading and her teeth once more blunt. She stares at him for a few more seconds through narrowed eyes then abruptly dismisses him, gaze dropping back down to her lap, to her open palms fallen heavy on her knees.

Theo studies her in the weak moonlight, one hand on the door jamb and one hand clutched around the still-wrapped packages of sweats. There’s what looks like plaster dust in her hair, covering her clothes. She’s getting it all over Scott’s bed but that’s hardly the worst thing that’s ever happened to it. Theo wonders what she’s seeing between her twitching fingers, in her bloody palms; wonders if it’s an old ghost or new.

“Can I ask you something?” She asks abruptly, and the sudden shattering of the silence means Theo nearly puts five new holes in the wall.

Malia stares at him intently and Theo eyes her warily, but eventually nods. He expects her to just blurt out whatever it is with her usual complete disregard for social niceties or personal boundaries, but she doesn’t reply immediately, just looks back down at her hands and starts calling forth her claws, one flicked finger at a time. Theo watches her and waits and is surprised, a little, that the thought of leaving never crosses his mind through the long, syrupy minutes that pass before she speaks again.

“Why do you think Peter came back?”

She asks this of her hands, not of Theo; all Theo can see is the top of her dusty hair, her shoulders hunched low over the vulnerable parts of herself. Theo was there at the animal clinic when Peter stalked in covered in ash and soot, his burnt-out steering wheel clutched in his hand like a talisman, like a prop, so Theo knows she doesn’t mean the obvious.

It’s one of the facts he hates most about himself but Theo understands Peter in a way different from the way he understands the rest of Scott’s pack. The others he’d studied, obsessively but still detached, had learned their contours from the context of their histories and filled them in with logic, with reason, the way archeologists reconstruct whole individuals from bones or anthropologists recreate whole societies from stones. But Peter...Theo had never had to try to understand Peter. Instead he’d simply had to look at his own face in a mirror, survey his own bones, ask his own blood.

He’d never had to try and understand Peter because he’d already understood himself.

“You don’t really need me to tell you that,” Theo finally says carefully, partly because he can’t bear the thought of putting any of that into words — because Theo knows the answer, knows why Peter came back in the same way that he knows that he lied to Corey earlier, technically, when Corey asked why did you come to the hospital — but mostly because it’s true; Malia doesn’t actually need him to tell her why Peter came back.

Malia meets his eyes and he sees that same knowledge reflected there, but he can also see that it doesn’t matter; Malia holds his gaze and doesn’t let him hide from the truth, and Theo knows in that instant that they’re not talking about Peter anymore, not really.

“Tell me anyway,” She demands, and Theo has to choke back an inappropriate laugh as he recognizes the trap that he’s walked into, that she set for him, consciously or not. He thinks about telling her I guess you are Peter’s daughter after all, but even though it’s true it’s a complicated truth, and Theo knows what those do to people.

So instead he breathes, breathes around that cornered-animal feeling in his chest — nearly normal, now, nearly a trusted companion — and braces himself, “He loves you.” Theo tells her, no uncertainty, no room for interpretation or differences of opinion, three things not long hidden and breaking through, harsh and bright and unyielding, “He came back because he loves you.”

Malia jerks a single nod and it’s not an acceptance of what he’s just said, because she already knew that; it’s an acceptance of what he’s just admitted, because she wasn't sure he did. Theo swallows and hears the distressed-animal cry of Liam still fighting with Scott and Derek, still fighting with the despair that Theo can smell souring his scent even from two floors away, his senses still as helplessly tuned to Liam as they have been for days, now, for weeks.

It’s the same scent that Theo had smelled on himself in the elevator at the hospital during the long ride up to the floor on which Liam had been fighting the hunters, the scent accompanied by the non-stop, looping, frantic voice in his head asking but what if you don’t get there fast enough? But Theo knew what would have happened if he hadn’t gotten there fast enough. If the doors had opened on Liam’s corpse Theo would have slaughtered each and every one of Monroe’s hunters, and then he would have gone looking for the skinwalkers, for Kira, and he would have begged.

Malia watches him think these things like his thoughts are playing out on his face like a movie, like a newsreel. He watches her back, broken open and unable to help himself, resentful that she’s pulled this from him but maybe a little grateful, too, that this isn’t something that she thinks he should have to hide. She keeps him pinned there with a look for a little while longer, like she wants to make sure he’s not going to retreat from the truth he’s just given weight to, given life, and then she closes her eyes for a few long seconds and when they open again they’re clear, untroubled, centered.

“You should go to him,” She tells him bluntly, and Theo jerks, hunches in on himself like he’s taking a blow. Malia waits him out, then says again, equally firmly, “He’ll listen to Scott but he wants you, you know he does.”

She looks back down at her hands again, a clear dismissal, but Theo doesn’t move. He stares at the top of her head, at the stone dust coating her hair and the coiled strength of her forearms as she flicks, flicks, flicks her claws out and away, out and away. There’s a feeling burning in Theo’s chest now that he’s afraid to give name to, foreign and terrifying, and he thinks out of everyone in Scott’s pack of supernatural misfits, maybe Malia would understand it best.

“Does it matter?” He asks her, ignoring the way his claws have made splinters out of the door jamb after all, “After everything he’s done, all the horrible shit he’s tried to pull, does the fact that he loves you mean anything?”

Malia doesn’t answer him for a long time, the burning feeling in Theo’s chest slowly turning to ice. But then she sighs and clenches human hands, taps her closed fights thoughtfully on her knees, “Of course it does.” She doesn’t look at Theo when she says it but the truth of it is there on her face, in her steady heartbeat, “I don’t know what, yet, exactly. But it means something. It matters.”

She stands, suddenly, abruptly done with the conversation, and Theo jerks a surprised step back, his claws coming free of the door jamb with a muted screech. Malia rubs the back of one hand across her eyes, then stares in almost comical surprise at the dirt smeared across her skin, like she’d somehow forgotten she’s covered in dust and dried blood. Without looking back at Theo she heads for Scott’s bathroom, fingers already reaching for her hem to strip off her shirt.

“Go to him, Theo,” She repeats over her shoulder, then shuts the bathroom door.

Theo goes.

 

iv. a wise man said, if we sail the oceans, sail the seas, it’s not because we’re searching for other people

It takes less effort than Theo would have expected for Liam to finish calming down, once Theo steps into the basement. Derek gives him a look when he steps off the stairs, the weight of Theo’s reputation heavy in his eyes, but he moves aside without hesitation from where he’d been blocking Liam’s route to the stairs, to the outside world and Brett and Lori’s murderer still walking free.

The sudden open space gives way to Scott, arms extended and hands clenched on Liam’s shoulders as Scott murmurs quietly to him, low and soothing. Scott occasionally has to flow with him as Liam tries to duck, to dodge, to pull out of Scott’s grip and away from his reasoned explanation of Monroe’s escape, of the pack’s exhaustion, of terrible things happening to good people with no rhyme or reason at all. Liam’s eyes are burning gold and his mouth is fanged, but even though Theo knows Liam could do Scott some serious damage — encouraged it, once, spun him up like a wind-up toy and pointed him at Scott — Liam doesn’t attack with anything other than his words, spitting out accusations and plans that are only half-sensical, the rest just animal hurt.

Scott registers Theo’s presence almost immediately, and if Theo didn’t know any better he’d say the look in his eyes was relief. All at once Scott releases Liam and Liam stumbles in the absence of Scott’s bracing hands, nearly falls, but then he sees Theo and surges forward in a rush. Theo can sense Derek moving into place behind him but he knows Liam isn’t actually going for the stairs, catches him as Liam barrels into him. His clawed fingers pierce Theo’s upper-arms but Theo doesn’t flinch, knows Liam doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.

“Theo,” Liam says, half-begging, and Theo knows, he knows; he was the one who stopped Liam from killing Nolan at the zoo, he’s the one who’s been following Liam around for days, has winced along with him every time he forgets himself for a second, for a moment, and the memories of Brett and Lori’s deaths came rushing back to him.

“I know, Liam,” Theo assures him quietly, bringing his hands up to cup Liam’s elbows gently; pressure and presence, not resistance, “I know.”

It’s like all the fight goes out of Liam at once; he just crumples. Theo folds with him, brings them both to their knees and lets Liam press his forehead hard into Theo’s breastbone, doesn’t flinch as Liam’s clawed hands start to clench and unclench rhythmically around his biceps, as he feels blood start to stain the sleeves of his shirt. He can hear Liam whispering, voice bone-dry and a little broken, saying she killed them, Theo, she can’t just get away with it, over and over to the muscle, to the bone, right over Theo’s — his sister’s — heart. Theo wraps one arm around Liam’s shoulders and wraps one hand around the back of Liam’s neck, shifts until he can press his forehead to Liam’s bent head and answers, every time, I know, I know, I know.

Theo loses track of time, wrapped up in and around Liam, all his senses focused on the wounded sounds he makes, on his scent gone sour and bitter with grief. At some point Liam begins to calm, his words slowing and then finally stopping, his shaking muscles going slack. Theo doesn’t realize that Liam’s fallen asleep until he feels Scott’s hand on his shoulder, pulling him back to the moment.

Theo glances up at Scott and Scott tries to smile at him, though it really comes off more as a grimace, “Derek’s going to take him upstairs to the guest bedroom. He should be out for a good few hours.”

Theo hears the rest of what Scott doesn’t say, though it’s there in the exhausted silence; that hopefully Liam will be back to himself some, by then, ready to listen to reason rather than throw himself into a suicide mission. Theo swallows and begins to untangle himself from Liam, the effort harder than it should be, even given how stiff and sore his muscles are. Derek steps in once he’s done, picks Liam up gently but effortlessly, and disappears up the stairs, Scott following closely in case Liam wakes up after all.

Theo thinks about following, too, but finds he can’t; every muscle and bone in his body suddenly made of lead. He shifts until he’s sitting with his knees pulled into his chest and buries his head in his hands. Almost immediately he’s flooded with Liam’s scent, half his ridiculous shampoo for his ridiculous mane of hair, half sweat; fear and anger and grief. His first wild instinct is to jerk away, but he thinks of Malia saying it means something, it matters, and all at once he gives up, gives in, puts his head back in his hands and lets Liam’s scent overwhelm him.

When he blinks back to himself later, when he drops his hands away from his face, it’s to Stiles sitting silently on the steps, watching him.

The first thought that crosses Theo’s mind is immediate, vicious, a little petulant, I can’t deal with this right now. And he can’t, he really can’t; the entire room still reeks of Liam’s grief, the scent of it like ash coating the back of Theo’s throat, and Theo knows that Stiles has a lot of truly legitimate reasons to hate him, but he can’t.

But Stiles doesn’t say anything, just continues to sit and watch him in a silence getting heavier by the minute. His stillness makes it worse, somehow; Stiles isn’t just quiet, he’s settled, sat a few steps up with his legs spread wide, elbows braced on his knees and clasped hands hanging down between them. The only other time — the only other time — Theo can recall Stiles being this still he was possessed by a thousand year-old Japanese spirit, Theo watching and waiting for his chance.

But this stillness isn’t possession, or danger; it’s just Stiles. Grown up some, maybe, grown into himself. Theo thinks it again, deliberately this time, I can’t deal with this right now, but maybe he can. Maybe he has to.

He meets Stiles’ eyes, squares his jaw, and waits.

“That was a neat trick,” Stiles finally says, tone giving nothing away, “Scott and Derek had been down here trying for the better part of half an hour before you came down.”

Theo doesn’t say he knows, though he does; Stiles isn’t telling him this just to tell him. Whatever point he’s angling towards, this is just the opener.

Stiles snorts a humorless laugh when Theo doesn’t respond, looks away, rubs his hands over his face in that rough, full-bodied way he has and Theo thinks, there he is, before he can strangle the thought. When Stiles looks back at Theo his expression is a little wry, like he knows what Theo just thought and knows that Theo tried to stop it. Knows that, ultimately, Theo couldn’t.

“You want to hear something interesting?” This time Stiles doesn’t even pretend to give him an opening to respond, just continues, “An ancient shape-shifting evil with Medusa powers escaped from the Wild Hunt, Scott nearly permanently blinded himself to make sure we could kill it, there’s a fanatical hunter out there probably gathering more insane followers as we speak, and we spent the entire ride back from the school talking about you.”

He spits out the last word, but it’s more incredulous than venomous, a little amused, like Stiles recognizes the absurdity of it, too, like he’s trying to share the joke. Theo’s still in the middle of trying to figure out what to say to that when Stiles’ unnatural stillness just gives way, just collapses all at once, and Stiles laughs. Just folds his arms over his spread knees, drops his forehead onto them, and laughs.

“I told Scott he was insane for trusting you again,” He mumbles to his forearms, but it doesn’t matter; Theo would hear him if he was whispering, he’s suddenly so desperate to hear the rest, his whole body strung tight like a piano wire, like a bow-string, “I reminded him what you did to Lydia, to Liam, to Malia, to your pack. Hell, I thought he’d have to agree with me when I reminded him that you killed him. I pulled out all the stops, Theo, even you would have agreed with me, I swear.”

And truthfully Theo probably would have. Stiles doesn’t have quite the same silver tongue as Theo but he has something else, something better, an earnestness that makes people trust him. It’s an instinct that Stiles triggers, something in the lizard-brain; believe me, believe in me. It was one of the first things that Theo realized he was going to have to sever from the McCall pack, to poison, if he wanted to succeed in ripping them apart. It was one of the first things he did.

But even if that wasn’t the case, the objective truth — that Scott is insane for trusting Theo again — would still be exactly what it is; the truth.

“So why didn’t he?” Theo finds himself asking, voice barely more than a rasp, an exhausted scrape.

Stiles doesn’t raise his head but he turns it so that he can look at Theo through one dark eye, study Theo’s face. Theo doesn’t know exactly what his expression is giving away but there’s a hollow in his chest where his usual brutal rationality resides, the constant strategies and plans of the voice in his head gone quiet like radio static, and all Theo feels is raw, like an exposed nerve. If Stiles can see all of that on his face then so be it; he’s too exhausted to try and paper his usual facade over it.

The corner of Stiles’ mouth quirks up like he can see that thought, too, and when he speaks next it’s not to answer Theo’s question, “Do you think people can change, Theo?”

Theo watches him for a few long moments, wonders what answer Stiles wants to hear, if Stiles even knows. He thinks about the McCall pack — once Talia Hale’s pack, once Peter’s, once Derek’s — thinks about its long and checkered history. He looks at Stiles and he sees the empty spaces where some of the McCall pack’s members should be but aren’t, sees some of the spaces where its surviving members stand and how the outlines of those spaces have morphed over time, evolved.

He thinks of black veins flowing up his wrists and the feel of Liam’s forehead pressed hard against the heart of himself.

“I don’t know,” Theo finally answers, because he doesn’t.

Stiles quirks another of those humorless smiles and snorts another of those humorless laughs and then says, wry and a little defeated, “Neither do I.”

Then he sits up and grabs something sitting next to him on the step, tosses it to Theo. Theo catches it one-handed and looks down at the packages of sweats, the ones he’d pulled out of the closet earlier and left at the top of the stairs before he’d come down. He looks back up at Stiles questioningly but Stiles is already up and moving.

“C’mon,” He says, halfway up the stairs, “Scott’s spent the past fifteen minutes agonizing over how to ask you to sleep in front of Liam’s door tonight, make sure he doesn’t wake up and go on a kamikaze mission after Monroe. You can volunteer and put him out of his misery.”

Theo stares after him for a few long seconds, and then he gets to his feet.

 

v. she said in the beginning we were ashes, in the beginning we were earth

Theo doesn’t actually spend the night sleeping in front of Liam’s doorway, but its really only a matter of degrees.

Instead he helps Mason and Corey inflate one of Ms. McCall’s truly absurd collection of air mattresses, accumulated over the years during and for nights just like this, and then works with Derek to carry it as silently as possible into the guest bedroom where Liam’s sleeping. Originally Stiles had grabbed a corner until Derek firmly pushed him aside, saying we just got him to sleep, you trip and wake him up, you’re dealing with him. Stiles had looked righteously indignant for about half a second, and then he’d grimaced and gestured towards the mattress; yes, fair, be my guest.

Theo lays underneath an UCLA School of Nursing throw and stares up at the ceiling, listening to the rest of the McCall pack as they finish inflating air mattresses, as they divide blankets and pillows up between them. Liam’s breathing just a few feet away is deep and even, exhaustion winning out over nightmares, maybe, and Theo closes his eyes and breathes with him; tunes all his senses to the sound of Liam’s heartbeat and just breathes.

He comes awake with a sickening jolt some time later, old instincts ringing in his head. He’s rolled off the mattress and crouched beside it, eyes flared gold and mouth full of fangs, before his conscious mind even registers Lydia standing in the doorway looking soft and a little lost, her gaze focused on Liam. Theo squeezes his eyes shut until he can feel them fade back to human, until he can feel his mouth return to its usual shape, and then he squints at Lydia in the darkness, confused and on the edge of concerned, but the house when he stretches out his senses to check is quiet, still, calm.

“Lydia?” He finally prompts in a whisper, voice hoarse.

She jerks and turns to stare at him like she’s just registering his presence. But in the next instant she’s turned to look back at Liam, at where he’s kicked off the blankets and is lying flat on his back, throat and belly and all the other vulnerable parts of him bare and unprotected. Theo feels his slowly-fading anxiety resurge, thinks wildly, she’s had a premonition.

Theo darts a quick look at Liam and then makes a decision, stands and walks quickly but silently towards Lydia until he can gently crowd her back, out of the doorway, and he can shut the door behind him. Once he hears the latch click shut he moves away a few feet, gives Lydia space. She’s staring at the now-closed door like she can still see Liam behind it, and who knows? Maybe she can.

“What did you see?” Theo asks, voice still a whisper but the clenching of his guts turns it into a demand, turns the ends of his words sharp and biting.

That seems to snap Lydia out of it and she looks up at him, her eyes clearing some. She blinks back at the door as if seeing it for the first time and then shakes her head, presses the heel of one hand to her temple and squeezes her eyes shut. As Theo watches he can almost see the way that she carefully reconstructs her defenses, muscle by muscle and bone by bone, deliberate and steady and practiced; a habit, by now.

“Nothing,” She finally says, and at Theo’s skeptical look she adds, “Nothing like that. Just a dream.”

The rational part of Theo wants to push, to challenge, anxiety still coiling his guts and clenching his chest, but some deeper part of himself understands immediately; if he saw the types of things she did on a regular basis he’d want to assure himself that dreams are just dreams, too. He watches as her gaze slides helplessly, instinctually back to the closed door and touches his tongue to his bottom lip, considers.

“Lydia,” He says, gently this time, and when she looks a question at him he jerks his head silently towards the stairs. She considers him for a moment and then nods, lets him lead her downstairs.

Theo moves for the kitchen, stepping carefully to avoid waking Mason and Corey sprawled on an air mattress in the living room and Stiles and Derek on another in the dining room, but Lydia turns for the front door instead. Theo’s breath catches as the hinges creak, muscles tensing, but Corey and Derek don’t stir. Exhaling, Theo slips through the front door that Lydia left cracked for him and closes it softly behind him.

He catches sight of Lydia standing silvered in the moonlight in the middle of the driveway. His senses coming fully online, finally, as he finishes shaking off the last of sleep, he realizes for the first time that Lydia’s clad in nothing but a too-big shirt that smells of Derek, that her skin and hair smell like Stiles. Caught off-guard a bit, he studies her silhouette, the strands of her copper hair twisting gently in the light breeze, and finds himself thinking, oh, thinking, good. Thinking, of course.

“We could hear him,” Lydia tells him as she hears him come outside, “Liam. We could hear him making plans to go after Monroe, even from upstairs.”

Theo reconstructs Lydia's dream easily enough, after that; Liam, enacting one of his plans, and failing. He bites his lip and then comes to stand next to her, looks down at her bare toes curled on cold concrete, curls his own in sympathy. Lydia always looks so goddamned fragile but when he was planning his infiltration of the McCall pack she was his second biggest concern, after Stiles.

Scott’s heart has a habit of running off without his brain and Liam was easy enough to point and shoot, once Theo figured out how to arm him. But Lydia has always matched Theo when it comes to cool intellect, and she’s never been hobbled by his same flaws. At the end of the day Lydia Martin is dangerous primarily because she’s a banshee, sure, but that’s always only ever been a part of it.

“Scott means well but his heart is maybe too far in the right place, you know?” She murmurs after a handful of minutes pass, an explanation and a little bit a confession, “It’s hard for him to understand Liam’s anger. And Derek…”

She sighs, runs her fingers through her tangled hair, then drops her arms back down; moving for the sake of moving, maybe, or trying to shake off the last of her dream. It strikes Theo how very Stiles of a movement it is, and he has to turn his head away, for a moment, hide an amused smile.

“Derek has the opposite problem,” She finally concludes.

Even in context the assessment sounds harsh, but Theo knows what she means, and it’s not an indictment, just a statement of fact. Some things take hold of you, hook themselves into your ribs, and they don’t ever let go. It doesn’t matter how much time passes or how the McCall pack grows in and around Derek; there will always be a burned-out husk inside of his chest where his family should be. Theo’s not surprised that Lydia realizes this; he wonders if the others do.

Theo thinks all of this while standing quietly at Lydia’s side, his eyes tracking the street lamps as they make wraiths out of the shadows, as Lydia uses the cool night air to clear her head of the last of the dream’s clinging webs. He hadn’t really come out here with the conscious intention of being a protector, a bodyguard, but he realizes it’s what he is, what he’s doing; standing between Lydia and the dark of the night. The absurdity of it strikes him, then; less than a year ago Theo trapped Lydia in a state worse than death as a means to his own selfish, doomed ends, and yet here she is, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him, letting him soothe his own nightmares by helping to soothe hers.

“Lydia,” He starts, stops, starts again, something about the chill night, about Lydia standing close enough that half her face is silhouetted by his shadow, pulling at him, “About before. About...” The Dread Doctors, and Eichen House, and me, “I—”

“Don’t.”

Lydia’s voice when she interrupts him is steel, stone, unyielding. When Theo looks at her she’s looking back, expression hard. Where in the quiet minutes before she’d begun to look settled, at peace, maybe a little content, now her eyes have gone flinty where she glares at him, where her fingers are digging furrows into her arms, crossed now like a barrier over her chest.

“Don’t,” She repeats, softer but still a warning.

Theo closes his mouth, nearly takes a step away from her but can’t bring himself to do it; it’d take her out of his shadow, out of arm’s reach, out of the roles they’ve temporarily assigned themselves; guard and guarded. Beside him Lydia is inhaling harsh breaths through her nose, exhaling them out in controlled rushes, scent spiked with anger, and buried underneath it, just a touch, fear. But she doesn’t move, lets him keep standing between her and the dark street, and eventually she lets out a quiet, bitter laugh, and some of the tension leaves her body.

“God, how were you even planning to finish that sentence?” She asks him, and Theo expects anger, disbelief; what he gets is genuine curiosity, a hint of a humor cultivated firmly in the gallows.

He hesitates, but she’s right; of course she’s right. The second he realizes that he can’t help but quirk his own knowing, self-deprecating, self-aware smile, ”I hadn’t...actually thought about it.”

“Clearly,” Lydia agrees, but there’s more laughter bubbling in her voice.

They stand there for a few more minutes in silence and then Lydia sighs heavily, tilts her head back to the sky, eyes closed. They stand there for long enough that Theo wonders if this is it, if this is all that Lydia’s going to permit him; no opportunity to apologize, maybe, but the opportunity to see her soft and vulnerable with interrupted sleep, to be a living, breathing reminder that she’s not alone with the demons in her head on nights that they start to scratch. It would be, Theo thinks, a better deal than he really deserves.

But it’s not all she has to give; she blows out a long breath and tips her head back down so she can look at him, so she can ensure he’s paying attention, “You’re always going to be the person who did the things you did, Theo,” She tells him finally, “But…”

And here she drops her head briefly, her hair falling like a curtain down between them for the briefest of moments before she pivots, suddenly, to face him directly. She waits until he turns to face her head-on, too, until he meets her eyes, and then she speaks, carefully, deliberately, like she wants to make sure he gets this, like it’s important to her that he does.

“But that doesn’t have to be all you are.”

And then Lydia gives him something else; she stays perfectly still, perfectly poised, and lets him hear the truth of it not from her mouth but from her heart, from her skin. She stays perfectly still like someone used to running with wolves — with walking, talking, supernatural lie-detectors — and then she smiles at him, slightly, and tilts her head towards the dark street like she’s sharing a secret, asking a favor.

“Think you can spare me a few more minutes?”

And Theo, who knows he’s the one being given something — Theo does.

 

vi. we were checking the windows, checking the doors, but when we saw you outside we said come in, come in

Theo wakes up before the rest of the pack out of habit, mostly, ears ringing with the phantom tapping of flashlights and knuckles on his truck’s window, hearing stern voices telling him to move on, move on.

When he tilts his head back to check the bedroom window, trying to get a sense of what time it is, he catches the muted gray steel of pre-dawn. Exhaling softly, he drops his head back down and glances at Liam, sees that Liam has turned towards him in the night, one hand dangling over the edge of the bed. Theo stares at that hand, at the bumps of Liam’s knuckles and the dried blood still staining his skin, for longer than he’s willing to admit, and then he forces himself to turn away, to get up.

He’s standing in the hallway on the way back from the bathroom, trying to decide what to do with himself — the danger gone and with it Theo’s primary excuse for still trailing after the McCall pack — when Ms. McCall appears from her bedroom and catches sight of him. She looks surprised for a split-second before she catches herself; Theo can visibly see the way that she shoves her first, second, third immediate instincts down, away, can see when she comes to some other, conscious decision.

“Oh good,” She says, a hair too brightly and a hair too late for it really to be natural, “Somebody’s awake. You, with me.”

She points at him and then crooks a finger, come here, follow me. Theo stares at her, speechless, and some of her resolve flickers before she forcibly puts it back. She tilts her head, widens her eyes, what, and she’s a terrible actress, every move exaggerated, but Theo finds himself oddly comforted by it. This, he thinks, is what normal people do in uncomfortable situations that they’re nonetheless determined to see through, for whatever reasons they’re determined to see them through; they strap on nonchalance like a breastplate and go out to face the world.

“Right,” Theo tells her after his own too-long hesitation, sweeps his arm out in his own forcibly casual, overacted gesture; lead on.

To her credit, she hesitates for just a second before jerking a nod and heading downstairs. She leads him into the kitchen, which contains a small forest’s worth of plastic bags and also the Sheriff, sat at the kitchen table with a mug and a half-full pot of coffee. As Theo watches, the Sheriff finishes off the last of his current cup and reaches for the pot, refills his mug and takes a long sip of that. He meets Theo’s eyes over the rim and raises his eyebrows, but the challenge there is toothless, early-morning easy. Theo’s lips quirk without conscious thought, amused in spite of himself.

The Sheriff holds his eyes for a beat longer and then turns to look at Ms. McCall, saying, “Argent and the others ran to the diner to pick up their stock in donuts and bagels and coffee, should be back before the ravenous horde wakes up.”

Ms. McCall nods absently, already elbow-deep in plastic bags and pulling out packages of bacon and cartons of eggs, then lining them up on what little counter space remains like she’s prepping a serious operation, “Great. We get to work and we might actually manage to keep them from eating my furniture in desperation.”

She turns and shoves a mixing bowl into Theo’s hands, drops a whisk into it and points him towards the section of counter containing the egg cartons.

“You’re on scrambled egg duty,” She tells him, “We’re going for quantity over quality, here, no need to give them the Gordon Ramsey treatment. I’ll find you a baking dish.”

She leaves him standing in the middle of the kitchen holding the bowl and whisk to go digging through cabinets, ignoring the way that he stares bemusedly at her back. In the next instant she holds up a Pyrex dish in mute victory, which she waggles in Theo’s direction until he switches the bowl to one hand and takes the dish with the other. Her hands now free, she dives back into the cabinet from which she pulled the dish and comes back out with three baking sheets, which she immediately proceeds to line with aluminum foil.

It doesn’t take her long to realize that Theo hasn’t started scrambling eggs as directed; that he hasn’t, in fact, moved at all. She turns from where she’s started peeling open packages of bacon and laying them out in strips on the sheets to raise her eyebrows at him, unimpressed.

“Eggs, Theo,” She orders, pointing a greasy finger at the cartons, “Have you ever seen a pack eat the morning after a fight like last night’s? We don’t have a mid-sized buffet’s worth of food ready and I’m going to be replacing the dining room table.”

Last night’s fight apparently took a lot out of Theo, too, or else his series of forced confessions throughout the hours afterwards did, because he has to swallow down the urge to respond to Ms. McCall’s rhetorical question. To say, no, I’ve never seen a pack eat the morning after a fight like last night’s; he’s never seen a pack do anything this unashamedly domestic, at all. Instead he clutches the mixing bowl and baking dish a little closer and goes to the counter, arranges them both to the side of the egg cartons, gets to work.

Ms. McCall and the Sheriff start up an easy conversation as Theo cracks eggs into his bowl, as Ms. McCall sets the oven to preheat and the Sheriff continues drinking his coffee. It’d be easy, so easy, for them to cut Theo out of it, but they don’t, finding small, natural ways to bring him into the small universe they’ve made out of the kitchen; the Sheriff setting a mug of coffee at his elbow when he brews a new pot, Ms. McCall putting a hand on his shoulder as she leans over him to shake a healthy amount of pepper into his bowl of scrambled eggs.

Theo doesn’t know what it is, exactly, that they’re trying to do, and there’s a part of him that wants to tense, to look for a trap, but mostly he ignores that part of himself. Instead he pours his current bowl of eggs into the dish and hands it off to Ms. McCall so she can put it in the oven, accepts an empty one to repeat the process, and hordes the warmth of his gifted coffee, of Ms. McCall’s hand on his shoulder, of the quiet, easy morning and his place within it.

The house has started to smell warmly of food when the front door opens and Argent, Scott’s dad, and Parrish walk in, their arms laden with boxes that smell strongly of the diner a few blocks from the Sheriff’s station. Ms. McCall and the Sheriff greet them without pausing in their various tasks and so Theo keeps at his, too, though he can feel a few curious stares between his shoulder blades.

“Where do you want all this?” He hears Argent ask, smirks to himself as he sees the absolute mess the kitchen has become and the complete lack of any place to set anything, really, down.

Ms. McCall pauses and eyes their laden arms thoughtfully, then glances at the oven, filled with two dishes of scrambled eggs and three sheets of bacon, “Dining room, I think. Give us a minute, Theo and I will bring out the rest.”

The others disappear with their burdens, the Sheriff with an armful of juice bottles and glasses. Ms. McCall jumps slightly when the oven timer goes off, then leans over to pull open a drawer to retrieve a handful of pot holders, which she holds out to Theo.

“Pull those out, will you?” She asks, “I’m going to find some bowls to put the eggs and bacon in.”

Outside of the kitchen, Theo can hear the rest of the pack waking up as the smell of food and the addition of three new bodies breaks what was left of the morning quiet. He pulls dishes from the oven one by one, playing an ad-hoc game of Tetris to figure out how to make all of them fit on top of the burners without setting any of the hot dishes down on Ms. McCall’s counters. He murmurs thanks when the Sheriff reappears at his elbow and lines the counter with dish towels, starts shifting some of the baking sheets over.

He steps back when he’s emptied the oven and turned it off, lets Ms. McCall step in, spatula in hand, to start loading up empty serving bowls with eggs, to load up another with bacon. These she hands to the Sheriff, then waves a hand at Theo.

“You, wait there. Let me get plates and silverware.”

She makes for the cabinet with the plates as the Sheriff heads out to the dining room with his armful of food, where he’s quickly greeted by joyous shouts as the pack tags what he’s carrying. Theo listens to the flow of easy conversation, finds himself taking deep drags of the smell of food and warmth and easy camaraderie, and it isn’t until he feels Ms. McCall take ahold of his hands that he realizes that they’d started shaking.

He glances up at her in shock. Behind her on the counter he can see the stack of plates topped with forks that she’d abandoned on one of the empty countertops, and he thinks, absently, how did I not hear that? But he has some idea; the cornered-animal feeling in his chest back and snarling up his insides, his chest tight, so tight, as he listens to the sound of the pack just a handful of feet away and thinks, what the hell am I even doing here. Stood in front of him, Ms. McCall watches his expression, whatever it’s doing, and grips his hands harder when his shaking only gets worse.

“I don’t know exactly what you’re thinking, but I can take a guess,” She interrupts his looping, pointless thoughts, every circuit kicking the anxiety in his chest up higher. Her voice is quiet, so quiet, because she’s lived with werewolves and were-coyotes and chimeras for years now, and she means this just for him, “Theo…”

She pauses, her hands tightening around his and Theo stares down at them, still feeling the minute tremors shaking them both, now. Then she seems to come to some decision and looks back up at him, pumps their joined hands once like a statement, like punctuation.

“You killed my son, once,” She says, and doesn’t flinch though he does, just tightens her hands around his and doesn’t let him pull away, “But he’s in the other room, having the same sausage-versus-bacon fight that he’s had with Stiles for nearly his whole life, now.”

Theo swallows, can feel his eyes start to burn, and bites down savagely on his tongue to try and get some control of himself.

“You put Lydia in Eichen House, but she’s in the other room, right now, surrounded by two men who would do anything for her,” And Theo can’t help it, his shoulders start to shudder and his mouth floods with copper as his teeth — blunt, human teeth, but sharp nonetheless — pierce his tongue, “Mason, Corey, Stiles — if you really want to fall down this rabbit-hole, we can do that,” She assures him, digs her blunt human nails into the backs of his hands, and keep going, “We can walk through every terrible thing you’ve done, every way you’ve hurt them.”

Hurt me, she doesn’t say, but it’s there in the air between them, held in their clasped hands.

“But some of those people in the other room are only alive because of you, now, including my son,” She reminds him, and then she releases one of her hands so that she can place it over Theo’s — his sister’s — heart, “Theo, look at me.”

He does, helplessly, vision swimming and throat tight and defenses gone, just gone.

“Since Scott was bitten, I have seen things and done things that I never would have believed were possible.” Here she pauses, holds his gaze and won’t let him look away, “You turning out to be one of the good guys? That won’t be the strangest thing to ever happen in this town.”

And then she smiles at him, keeps one hand wrapped around his and one hand over his heart for a moment longer, and smiles. He watches through blurry eyes and breathes through a cramped chest as she takes a deep breath, seems to resettle herself, and then she turns to retrieve the stack of plates and silverware, her hands falling away from him.

She starts to head towards the dining room, then pauses when she gets to his side, “Come join the rest of the pack when you’re ready, okay?”

She waits until he nods, then leaves him in the kitchen with his shaking shoulders and bloody mouth; with the sound of the pack, right outside, waiting.

 

vii. the king of second chances looked at us and said, the secret is there’s no secret at all

Two hours later and Theo is sitting on the McCall front porch, cradling a cup of coffee long gone cold.

He had, eventually, joined the rest of the pack, but it’d taken a good twenty minutes before he’d been able to unlock his stiff muscles, to take his tongue out from between his teeth and let it heal. The fact that no one had set foot in the kitchen in that time almost definitely means that Ms. McCall was running interference for him, and on a different day Theo would be mortified by that fact. But that part of him — the brutal, strategic agent of other people’s and his own destruction — had felt hollowed out and numb, and mostly he’d just been grateful.

When he had come into the dining room, mouthful of blood rinsed out in the kitchen sink, the pack had been arrayed around the living and dining rooms, empty plates and half-drunk mugs of coffee and juice scattered around. The room had been full of easy conversation, permeated with the scent of food and coffee and sleep-warm bodies, and Theo had accepted the plate that Corey held out to him — loaded with a selection of food and topped with another, upside-down plate to keep it warm — with a quiet thanks, sat down at Corey’s side when he’d scooted closer to Mason to make room on their shared air mattress. Liam, sprawled on the floor in front of them and being closely — if surreptitiously — watched by Scott and Derek, had darted a look at him and then away, but when he got up to get another cup of coffee and sat back down, it was close enough to Theo that Liam’s shoulder was brushing Theo’s leg.

Theo can still feel the phantom warmth in his calf as he sits on the porch and continues to roll the cup in his hands back and forth, back and forth. If he listens, he can hear various members of the pack inside as they call dibs on showers, make plans to pick up cars and clothes from around town, as Ms. McCall loudly interrupts them to inform them that no one is going anywhere until this mess is cleaned up. She doesn’t mean him, which Theo knows from an hour ago when he’d muttered I’m going to get some air, and Stiles had protested, familiar enough with Ms. McCall’s post-breakfast rules to realize what was coming, but Ms. McCall had just shaken her head, said Theo helped cook while you were still comatose, and shooed Theo out the door.

Liam had watched him go the whole time, his gaze a physical presence like an itch between Theo’s shoulder blades. But he hadn’t said anything, and when Scott had crouched next to him, murmured something in his ear, Liam had dropped his gaze and nodded, got up to follow Scott to the back door where Derek was waiting. Theo had heard the three of them take off towards the preserve, and hoped that Scott and Derek had the right of it; that whatever they were planning, Liam would come back smelling less like despair, however muted it had become, the taste of it still sharp in the back of Theo’s throat.

Distracted as he is with his thoughts, he still tags it when the front door opens, Scott coming through it smelling like woods and sweat and Derek’s full-wolf form; like someone who just tried to run Liam ragged, and may have even succeeded. Theo watches Scott as he comes to Theo’s side and drops down on the step next to him with a quiet sigh.

They sit in silence for a few minutes, listening to the sound of the pack inside the house and the sound of the rest of the world outside it, and then the curiosity burning in Theo’s chest gets the best of him, “How is he?”

Scott doesn’t hesitate, which Theo takes as a good sign, “Better. Still hurting, but the run helped, I think.” Then his expression goes a little savage, just a hint of red licking at his pupils, “Hearing that we’re not just going to let Monroe go helped the most, I think.”

Theo feels his own instincts rise at that, responding to the aura of alpha that Scott likely doesn’t even realize he’s bleeding off. But in the next instant Scott blinks, expression going a little bemused like he’s just surprised himself, and that fierce aura falls away until he’s just Scott again. He quirks a half-embarrassed smile at Theo and then reaches down to pull up a handful of grass that he begins to methodically shred, stalk by stalk, human nails pulling them apart.

“You heard, didn’t you,” Theo realizes after a few long seconds of watching Scott, of trying to decipher the hesitance he can feel from him; it’s not a question.

Scott colors and his hands jerk, his handful of grass scattering from his grip, “Yeah, I did.” He grimaces and Theo finds himself oddly amused by Scott’s apparent disappointment in himself that he’d eavesdropped on a conversation between his mother and someone who had once, without exaggeration, killed him, “I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry. I don’t think anyone else did, though; Stiles had distracted Derek, and the rest of them were pretty focused on the food.”

Theo nods, but finds himself less bothered than he should be. Probably he’s too exhausted to be properly humiliated, but somehow Theo doesn’t think that’s it. He watches Scott pull up another handful of grass, looks back down at his cold cup of coffee, at his reflection on the surface of it. Then he sighs, sets the mug down, leans back against the porch and gazes up at the sky.

“Absolution from your mother,” Theo muses lightly, unsure where this urge to wipe away Scott’s lingering uncertainty is coming from, why he wants to give this to him, “I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting that.” Then he pauses, considers, adds, “Though I do feel like I finally understand where you get your ridiculous optimism from.”

He’s expecting a grin, maybe, or a quiet laugh as Scott accepts the dig with his usual good grace. But when he turns to look at Scott after the silence has dragged on a hair too long, Scott’s expression is indecipherable. His eyes meet Theo’s and Theo freezes from where he’d been about to glance away again, caught by the intensity there.

“It’s not optimism,” Scott finally says, breaks his stare to look away, lips twisting in a grimace, and Theo has to blink, mentally shake himself; a little whiplashed from Scott slipping in and out of alpha again so quickly.

Theo studies him and realizes that he’s touched a nerve; a wound still raw, if not still bleeding. Scott is staring out at the street but Theo knows he’s not seeing Stiles’ Jeep or the leaves of the oak tree across the street waving serenely in the breeze. Scott’s scent has gone sharp, a little distressed, and Theo wonders, suddenly, what it’s like to be the true alpha when everything is falling apart, winces.

“It’s not optimism,” Scott repeats dully, tossing away the mutilated remains of the stalks of grass he’d been shredding, “It’s self-defense.”

He doesn’t bother to explain but the uncomfortable truth is that Theo doesn’t need him to. Once — not that long ago, really — Theo had deliberately, mercilessly picked at Scott’s rough edges until he’d bled, pulled at his loose ends until he’d unraveled. So Theo knows that when Scott says it’s self-defense, what Scott means is that his bleeding heart is permanently pinned to his sleeve, and Scott knows it. That what people — including his pack, his closest friends — mistake for true alpha intuition or strength is more often soft, desperate human vulnerability; that Scott doesn’t want to live in a world where the worst of people is all that matters, and so he doesn’t.

Theo also knows that he wasn’t the first to twist that trait against Scott.

But Theo knows a lot of other things, too, a not-insignificant number of them learned at the feet of the McCall pack — sometimes literally — so turns his gaze back to the sky and says, deliberately not looking at Scott, “Well, whatever it is. Speaking as someone who’s been on the other side of it, it’s effective.”

The way Scott jerks to look at him, his look of absolute bafflement, would be comical at any other time. But here and now Theo just keeps his posture easy, relaxed, casual, lets Scott listen to his steady heartbeat, test his unchanged scent. It’s such an unexpected reversal of roles that Theo has to bite back an incredulous laugh; he can see out of the corner of his eye the exact spot on which he and Lydia stood just a few hours ago while she allowed him the same liberty.

And then all at once the moment breaks and Scott laughs, nonplussed and a little bewildered, maybe, but easy, back to his usual self. Theo can’t help but grin at him, senses tagging how Scott’s scent clears, levels out; the acrid taste of distress replaced with something softer. Scott grins back at him and laughs again, quietly, nods his head in silent acknowledgement.

Then Scott perks up, Theo’s ears catching the same sudden burst of noise. Inside, a handful of feet from the closed door there’s a flurry of noise as various pack members pull on shoes with muted thumps and, in Stiles’ case, some swearing, as they locate jingling keys and confirm which car is going where.

Scott jerks his head towards the front door at Theo’s narrowed look and explains, “Everyone is going to go grab a couple changes of clothes and then meet back here. Derek, Liam, and I ran the perimeter of the town this morning and we’re sure Monroe and whoever she has left are gone, but…”

But Scott would rather have his pack close, and Theo’s positive its various members feel the same. Ignoring the sinking feeling in his chest, Theo reaches for his abandoned coffee mug, gets to his feet.

“I should get going, too,” Theo agrees quietly, mind already working as he calculates how long it’ll take him to walk back to the hospital to get his truck, how far he can get on his current tank of gas; far enough away to be out of range of Monroe and her remaining hunters, maybe, if he sticks to back roads and doesn’t hit the midday traffic.

He’s so caught up in his thoughts that he misses what Scott says as Scott climbs to his feet, too, “What?”

Scott, who’s now thoroughly distracted by Malia coming through the front door, glances back at him, “I said that’s a good idea, the hospital is weirdly strict about guest parking. You can park in front of the Jameson’s house, though, they’re pretty used to there being a million cars at my house by now.”

Since Scott has already turned to kiss Malia on the cheek as she deliberately bumps into him, he misses Theo’s baffled expression. Derek, on the other hand — who’s just a handful of steps behind Malia and had clearly heard the entire exchange — Derek gets this look on his face like he knows exactly what Theo’s thinking, and before Theo can respond to Scott, he jerks his head towards Stiles’ Jeep.

“C’mon,” He says, tone easy but layered underneath with steel, immovable, “Stiles is going to give me a ride to my car and then I can run you by the hospital while he swings by his place.”

Theo stares at him but Derek doesn’t blink, even when Stiles comes flying through the door in a flurry of flailing gestures as he finishes pulling on his coat and yanking his keys out of his jeans. He just waits, cocks his head at Theo in a question, a challenge, and waits.

It takes Stiles laying on the horn half a minute later to break the tension, Stiles leaning out of the open window with an irritated, “What’s with the staring contest, c’mon, let’s go, the curly-fries place is on the way back from dropping you off at your ridiculous car.”

Derek swings an arm out, after you, and Theo...Theo has no idea what else to do, so he goes.

 

viii. and the wary-eyed watchman said slow, slow, slow

The ride to Derek’s car is uneventful after Derek overrides Stiles’ initial confusion by simply ignoring all of Stiles’ questions about why, precisely, Theo is joining them.

Theo has clearly fallen down Stiles priority list, because after the third time he asks Derek and Derek just repeats we’re giving him a ride, Stiles throws up his hands — letting go of the wheel as he does it, to Theo’s chagrin — and lets it go, instead launching into a long-winded, winding, and primarily one-sided conversation about anything and everything that seems to cross his mind.

He’s still in the middle of ranting about how a guidance counselor — a guidance counselor! — becomes a self-made werewolf hunter, ignoring Derek’s snarky because a bunch of high school sophomores were so much more equipped to handle the supernatural, when they pull up to Derek’s car, parked a few blocks away from the warehouse where Derek and Stiles had met up with Scott the night before. Theo climbs down from the Jeep while Stiles is still nagging Derek to agree with him and stands awkwardly by until Derek finally ends the argument by leaning over and kissing Stiles solidly on the mouth, then jumping down while Stiles is still too distracted to protest.

“It’s unlocked,” Derek tells Theo over the sound of Stiles yelling at Derek’s back that that isn’t always going to work, asshole, though Stiles sounds so pleased that it undermines his whole point.

Theo climbs into Derek’s front seat while Derek finishes convincing Stiles to go, Stiles clearly salaciously interested in why Derek has, for all intents and purposes, practically kidnapped Theo for a conversation. It’s a feeling with which Theo has immense sympathy, if slightly different motivations; he, too, would like to know what the hell Derek wants, but probably not for the same reasons.

Theo had studied Derek along with the rest of the McCall pack in the months before his actual appearance in town, but Derek’s hunt for Kate meant that Theo knew him only by reputation and the photo-negative of the space he’d occupied in Beacon Hills before he’d left. The question mark over Derek’s motives for this little side-trip makes him wary, but there’s nothing coming off of Derek but fond irritation — directed at Stiles — and an absent-minded focus, no threat that Theo can sense.

Derek swings into the driver’s seat once he’s successfully convinced Stiles to drive off, confirming, “Your truck’s at the hospital, right?”

“Yeah,” Theo answers after a beat, accepting that this is an only-way-out-is-through kind of situation.

Derek nods in acknowledgement and starts to drive, takes a left on Main to point them towards the hospital and keeps them within an easy fifteen miles of the posted speed limit. He leaves the radio off and, to Theo’s increasing agitation, doesn’t say a word. Five minutes in and twenty more to go and Theo can’t take it anymore.

“Whatever it is you want to say, you should probably just say it,” He finally tells Derek, intending to sound bored but instead sounding preemptively defensive.

Derek shoots him a cool, amused glance and then turns back to the road, “Answer me something first. What do you think I want to say?”

Theo glares at him, “How the hell should I know? I met you for the first time last night. This, right now, is the longest conversation you and I have ever had.”

But Derek just smirks at him, a knowing glint in his eye, “Maybe, but I bet your files on me were pretty comprehensive.”

Theo nearly says something snide, something like I didn’t need files — not when he had the Dread Doctors’ resources and a small town whose main export seemed to be gossip — but he bites it back; certain, suddenly, that he’s walking right into some kind of point Derek’s trying to make. Instead he keeps his jaw clamped shut and glares mutely at Derek, waiting.

Derek sighs and some of his amusement bleeds away, gets replaced by something harder; Derek coming to the point of this exercise, finally,  “Stiles wasn’t joking when he said he spent the whole ride last night trying to convince Scott that you couldn’t be trusted.”

Theo swallows down the rush of bitterness that coats his mouth at that, “And you think he’s right.”

But Derek shakes his head, “Like you pointed out, I don’t really know you. But I saw you with Liam,” Theo jerks at that, but Derek doesn’t pause, “And I heard Melissa.”

“And Lydia told you about last night,” Theo realizes, suddenly sure of it.

Derek nods, “They’re right, you know. Or they can be.”

Theo looks at him when he doesn’t immediately continue, the car simultaneously feeling too small and yet cavernous. He’s not sure what motivated Derek to have this conversation, though he can take a guess, because Derek’s right; present or not, Derek is such an integral part of Beacon Hills, of the McCall pack, that learning everything about one meant learning everything about the other, and Theo knows that Derek’s arrival at his current status within the McCall pack was winding at best.

“Look. If you want to do this, if you want to try and be part of Scott’s pack,” Derek stops here, pins Theo with a look that clearly says and we both know you want that, “It isn’t going to be easy.”

That same small, vindictive part of himself that he’d swallowed down earlier resurges, wants to snap I’ve literally been to hell and back, but he clamps his teeth around the words, meets Derek’s steady gaze.

“No matter how much time passes, when something happens, there’s always going to be a part of them that wonders what you’re going to do, how you’re going to react. You’re going to have to prove to them, everyday, that you’re the kind of person that you woke up today wanting to be, that they want to believe you are. It’s going to be the hardest thing you’ve ever done.”

It takes Theo a few long seconds to realize that the reason his fingertips are aching is because he’s put his claws through the handle of the door and the side of his seat, respectively. There’s no way that Derek missed that fact but he doesn’t say anything, just turns back to the road, the silence in the car expectant, somehow, but Derek doesn’t push him, just lets him quietly retract his claws, lets him settle stiffly back into his seat.

“Why tell me all that?” Theo finally asks.

He’s expecting something grandiose, Derek’s penchant for the dramatic clear even through Theo’s second-hand knowledge, but what he gets is quiet, unfiltered honesty, Derek’s voice neutral but Theo can sense the lingering iceberg of things unsaid, “Because I wish someone would have told me.”

He looks at Theo straight-on, finally, and Theo realizes that they’ve arrived at the hospital and are parked next to his truck. Shaken, Theo glances back at Derek, opens his mouth a few times but can’t find anything to say.

“There’s a part of you that wants to run,” Derek tells him, and Theo flinches, because he’d just been thinking, I’ve got enough gas to make it out of the city, at least, but this is Derek speaking from experience again, not telepathy, “Once Scott thinks about it a little bit more he’s going to kick himself for not escorting you to your truck and back to the house.”

Theo snorts a bitter laugh, “Is that why you did it, instead?”

Derek shakes his head, “That’s not what I’m doing. What I said before, about proving to them what kind of person you are?”

Theo waits but Derek doesn’t answer until Theo looks back up at him, shows Derek that he has Theo’s full attention. Then Derek leans over Theo until he can grasp the passenger door handle, shove the door open.

He sits back, jerks his chin at Theo’s truck and its half-tank of gas, “That starts now.”

 

ix. and that night i said, beneath the roiling summer there’s a storm setting in

Even after Derek’s unorthodox approach to life-coaching, Theo still spends fifteen minutes idling at the corner of Maple and Elm, torn.

Left is the McCall house and the space in front of the Jameson’s to park his truck, right is the quickest way out of Beacon Hills and State Route 20, which would get him most of the way to Oregon. He’s spent the past twenty-four hours fighting with a bunch of fear-poisoned, fanatic hunters, confessing his various sins to various members of the McCall pack, being confessed to, and every bone in his body feels leaden. In the closed space of the cab, alone for the first time, really, since the danger passed, he can still smell traces of the pack’s breakfast, of their sleep-warm, contented bodies on his clothes, his skin, but he can also remember the feeling of staring down at his phone, thumb hovering over Scott’s number before Monroe’s hunters took him.

It’s the same feeling he has now, metallic and sharp coating the back of his throat; the maybe, maybe, maybe of not knowing what happens next.

He swallows, drops his forehead onto his steering wheel, breathes. His head’s a riot of thoughts, of emotions, memories from his various recent encounters mixing and matching, all of them too fast, too slippery for him to hold onto. When Theo came to Beacon Hills with the Dread Doctors he’d had a plan, resources; he knew he was going to war. This time he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.

A few deep breaths later and Theo’s brow furrows and he flares his nostrils, a subtle scent catching his attention. He tips his head towards the passenger seat, thinking Liam, and Theo remembers, then, shoving an unconscious Liam into the passenger seat after he’d knocked him out to keep him from killing Nolan. Theo had been sure he’d cleaned most of the blood off but apparently not, the smell of it weak but enough to clench something in Theo’s chest.

Theo stares at the passenger seat for a beat longer, and then he turns left.

Back at the McCall house twenty minutes later, he identifies the Jameson house primarily because it’s the only one nearby whose street parking isn’t already filled with cars. Theo sees Stiles’ Jeep back in its pride of place in the McCall driveway, Ms. McCall’s beat-up sedan next to it. Lydia, Malia, and Derek’s cars are parked on the street to either side, so Theo slides in behind Derek’s — in front of the Jameson’s hydrangeas, he assumes — and kills the engine.

He’s taking a moment, psyching himself up, some of his corner-of-Maple-and-Elm bravado faded again, when his passenger door suddenly jerks opens. He jumps and stares mutely at Liam as Liam climbs into his truck and calmly and without a word reaches over to grab Theo’s keys. He rips them out of the ignition and then leans back to throw them out of his still-open door before slamming it shut, leaning back against it with his arms crossed over his chest and a mutinous expression.

“Really?” Theo finally manages, though he has to get it out around the sudden tightness of his throat, “You realize you’re going to be the one finding those.”

Liam ignores him, “Where were you?”

Theo narrows his eyes at him, gestures vaguely to the vehicle in which they’re both sitting, “Getting my truck. I’m sure someone told you.”

But Liam shakes his head, unsatisfied, “Stiles and Derek were both back twenty minutes ago. Where were you?”

“Liam,” Theo says, exasperated, but he can smell the sudden spike in his own scent, which means Liam can, too.

“You were going to leave,” Liam accuses, his own scent going hot.

“What are you talking about, I’m right here,” Theo counters, but Liam’s already shaking his head, scent transitioning quickly from angry to furious.

“I heard you talking to Scott before you left, you said you should ‘get going,’” Theo can hear the air-quotes Liam puts around the last two words, feels his shoulders try to hunch, “Scott’s too good of a person to realize that you’re a giant asshole and that what you meant is that you were going to run away!”

Theo’s still too tuned to Liam’s moods, too accustomed to being Liam’s screwed-up Jiminy Cricket in the most absurd twist of the century; the overwhelming smell of Liam’s fury and the too-quick thunder of his heartbeat in the contained space of the truck’s cab are messing with Theo’s head. All he can think is his own words, said to Liam a handful of days and several millennia ago, it’s why you get angry when you’re afraid. Liam may look angry, may reek of it, but he’s not.

Theo knows he’s not.

“Liam,” He starts, hands clenched on the steering wheel to stop himself from reaching out.

“Don’t try to deny it, I can hear your heartbeat,” Liam interrupts hotly, and Theo grimaces.

“Liam,” He tries again, and this time when Liam goes to interrupt him Theo lunges for him, slaps a hand over his mouth.

His other hand lands on the window to the side of Liam’s head and Theo instantly realizes that he’s now caging Liam in, but he shoves down the confused spike of emotion that realization evokes and instead looks Liam dead in the eyes. Liam had put his hands up when Theo came at him and they feel like brands where one rests on his upper arm, one over his — his sister’s — heart, even through his cheap cotton sweatshirt.

“You’re right, okay?” He admits, “You’re right.”

Liam’s eyes widen over the top of Theo’s hand like he maybe wasn’t expecting Theo to admit to it so readily. The feel of Liam’s damp breath against his palm officially starting to dominate his thoughts, Theo shifts his weight to lean back and finds he can’t, Liam’s fingers knotted in his sweatshirt and holding him in place. Theo freezes, pulse kicking up, his senses absently tagging it as Liam’s does the same.

Close as he is to Liam, focused as he is on trying to read what little he can see of his expression, Theo can spot the exact moment that Liam comes to a decision. He narrows his eyes and then uses the hand that had been on Theo’s arm to drag Theo’s hand away from his face, his other yanking Theo off balance and in until he can pull Theo’s mouth to his.

Given that Theo had been at least partially bracing his weight over Liam, their mouths collide with more force than Liam likely intended. In the next instant Theo tastes blood, Liam’s blood, and he moans helplessly, presses in harder and licks into Liam’s mouth when he opens it, chasing the taste. Both of Liam’s hands are in his hair, now, on the back of neck, just the hint of claws pricking his skin as Liam holds him in place, doesn’t let him pull away even an inch.

Muscles burning from the awkward position, Theo twists his head away until he’s panting against the corner of Liam’s mouth, “Wait, come here, sit up.”

He wraps one hand around the back of Liam’s neck, slides the other up and over his shoulder blade until he can urge Liam to sit up with him, to follow him back until they’re kneeling in the middle of the seat, one of Liam’s knees in between Theo and the cushion and the other braced down in the footwell. Theo tightens the hand he has cupping the back of Liam’s head and brings their mouths back together, the other dropping to wrap around Liam’s waist so he can haul him closer, settle him more firmly on Theo’s lap.

The movement drives Liam’s hard cock against his stomach and Theo drops his head away from Liam’s mouth with a muted cry, presses his forehead against Liam’s shoulder and pants, feels his own hips jerk helplessly against Liam’s ass. Liam doesn’t give him a chance to breathe, leaning down to bite at Theo’s neck, one hand slipping inside Theo’s collar to scratch at the bare skin of back.

“I thought you’d left, you asshole,” Liam snarls, his hips continuing to move against Theo’s.

“I almost did,” Theo confesses helplessly, dropping both arms now to Liam’s hips so he can pull him down harder against his own aching cock, pull Liam in closer to give him something to rub against, “I sat at that stupid turn for fifteen minutes and then I smelled you.”

Liam’s breath hitches at that and Theo surges upward, catches his mouth again.

“You bled somewhere in my truck, you prick,” Theo says against his mouth, but Liam’s only response is to grin savagely, to flash suddenly golden eyes at him and get his hands on Theo’s shoulders, shove down.

Theo’s head barely clears the driver’s door but it leaves Liam straddling him, looking pleased with himself. Lust spikes through Theo and he gets one knee up on the seat, uses it to push Liam forward until his ass is perfectly settled over Theo’s cock and Theo bucks, moaning. But Liam goes still, leans down with his hands braced on Theo’s shoulders until his lips are hovering right over Theo’s, all the anger in his eyes gone mischievous.

“Try getting me out after this,” He breathes, and reaches down to take hold of Theo’s cock.

It’s meant to be a threat, probably, but Liam’s never exactly been Machiavelli; Theo bites off a cry and strains into Liam’s grip, thinking please, please, please. Liam kisses him again though Theo can barely respond, mouth open as the pleasure in his gut winds tighter, tighter, so Liam mostly ends up biting at his jaw, sucking at his neck. He can feel the back of Liam’s knuckles skimming his stomach, can feel Liam’s helpless jerks of his own cock against Theo’s hip. He closes his eyes, clenches one hand around the door handle above his head and buries the other in Liam’s ridiculous hair, and comes.

Liam strokes him through it and then releases him when Theo groans out a protest, knocks Liam’s arm with his other knee, over-sensitive. Even through his post-orgasm lethargy Theo can feel Liam practically vibrating and he grins, lazily, gets his hands around Liam’s head until he can pull his lips back to his own and kiss him thoroughly.

Then he braces himself, braces Liam, and flips them in one smooth movement. Liam lands flat on his back with a startled oof and Theo smirks down at him, at his eyes gone bright and wide with arousal. Leaning down, Theo kisses him again, hands going to Liam’s hips until he can urge him up, some, pushing lightly.

“Sit up some for me, okay?” Theo murmurs against his mouth, keeps his hands as guides on Liam’s hips until he’s partially braced on the driver’s side door and staring down at Theo in mute anticipation, already having some idea where this is going.

“If the Sheriff comes out and arrests us for public indecency, I’m telling him this was entirely your idea,” Theo threatens, but the grin in his voice ruins it.

Liam’s still nodding frantically, helplessly, when Theo leans down and takes him in his mouth. There’s absolutely no room for this, really; Theo’s truck is big, but not two-fully-grown-adults-having-a-tryst-on-the-front-bench-seat big, and Theo is halfway in the footwell, halfway contorted on the seat. Whatever discomfort he may have noticed disappears at Liam’s first broken moan, though, Liam’s hands coming to his hair as Liam tries and mostly fails to brace a foot next to Theo’s hip in the footwell.

All joking aside, Theo doesn’t really feel like tempting fate or the Sheriff, and so he swallows Liam down as deep as he can take him, closes the rest in one fist. Liam keeps making these helpless little jerks and Theo gets his free hand on Liam’s hip, squeezes in encouragement.

“Oh God, really?” Liam moans, but it’s either rhetorical or he can’t help himself, because his jerks become thrusts as he takes Theo up on his offer.

It only takes a few more thrusts before Liam’s coming, his cry muffled by the wrist he shoves in his mouth at the last moment. Theo swallows, gentling him through it, and then carefully sits back, resettling Liam’s sweatpants over his spent cock as he does. Liam stays panting against the door, expression gone open and slack, but he manages to flail an arm out and grab Theo’s collar, pull him in until he can kiss him.

They stay like that for a few long minutes, just kissing as their heartbeats settle. Eventually Theo pulls softly away, settles his forehead against Liam’s and closes his eyes, breathes.

He opens them when Liam speaks, voice sex-rough but also just rough, some of his earlier emotion bleeding through as he repeats, “I thought you’d left, you asshole.”

Theo squeezes his eyes shut, presses his forehead harder against Liam’s, “I know, I’m sorry.”

Then Theo freezes, something occurring to him, and before he can help it he’s sitting back and laughing helplessly, big, deep belly-laughs that shake his whole body. Liam squints at him in confusion and Theo reaches out, wraps a hand around the back of Liam’s neck; it’s not you, I’m not laughing at you.

After a few minutes Theo gets back control of himself, though he occasionally can’t help but snort more laughter as he tries to explain.

“Do you know how many conversations — confessions — I’ve had over the past twelve hours?” He says, sees Liam’s brow furrow, “A lot. Nine, I think, including this one.”

Liam gets this look at his face, like he’s maybe thinking of saying something salacious like we’re calling this a conversation, are we, but he restrains himself, “Oh—kay.”

Theo snorts another laugh, neck going loose enough for him to drop his head, so he’s speaking to Liam’s chest, to his heart, when he says, “All those confessions, and this is the first time I’ve actually said the words ‘I’m sorry.’”

His shoulders shake with another laugh, but suddenly it’s not as funny; he has to bite down on his tongue to keep his laughter from turning a little hysterical. Liam, tagging the change in his scent, maybe, the sudden spike in his heartbeat, shifts forward until he can get his hands on Theo’s arms, duck his head to look into Theo’s eyes, trying to see what’s wrong.

“I am sorry, though,” Theo tells Liam, and now there are tears, of course, because this day hasn’t been unbelievable enough, “I’m so sorry.”

Liam studies him for a few long seconds and then he darts in to kiss him, uses the pressure to tilt Theo’s head back, to make him straighten. Once Theo’s no longer hiding beneath his hunched shoulders Liam pulls back, smiles at him.

“I know, I’ve known,” He says quietly, and then he hesitates, looks back towards the McCall house, “We all know.”

Theo looks back over his shoulder at the house, too, and then back at Liam. Liam smiles down at him and runs his fingers lightly down Theo’s face, opens his arms when Theo surges into him and buries his face in Liam’s chest. They stay like that for several long minutes, until their heartbeats calm and Theo’s eyes stop burning.

“We have to go inside at some point,” He finally mutters, pulling back.

He means generally, but also specifically, because while Theo is a gentleman and got Liam off in a spectacular and mess-free way, Liam’s enthusiastic handjob has left Theo’s sweatshirt in pretty poor fashion. Liam looks down at Theo’s shirt and grins, self-satisfied.

“We’re going to reek of sex,” Liam points out, because even if Theo takes off the sweatshirt and manages to hide the obvious stains, the pack is made up primarily of supernatural creatures with supernatural senses, and even if it wasn’t, based on the smell of the cab, even the humans are going to notice.

Theo sighs, drops his head back and then brings it back up to look critically at Liam, “That was your phone I felt in your pocket earlier, right?”

Liam gets that same desperately-resisting-making-a-dirty-joke look on his face but masters the urge and reaches into his pocket to pull out his phone, waggling it in front of Theo’s face demonstratively. Theo bats it away from his nose and bites Liam’s jaw in retaliation.

“Text Mason and see if he’ll bring us out new sets of sweats. It won’t completely erase the smell, but it’ll help.”

As Theo hasn’t leaned away from him, Liam ends up texting Mason from behind Theo’s back, Liam’s chin hooked over his shoulder and his arms looped over Theo’s. His scent is sliding quickly back towards arousal as Theo keeps after his neck, Theo’s hands sliding underneath the hem of Liam’s shirt to feel his bare skin, scratch lightly over his hip-bones. Liam finishes texting Mason and drops his phone, becomes an active participant in the action.

Theo stops them when he tags the McCall front door opening, though, recognizes the sound of Mason’s footsteps coming towards the truck. Liam protests when Theo pulls back, but Theo ignores him, gets one hand in the middle of his sweatshirt to yank him back fully upright and forcibly shift him to the passenger’s seat, then slides over him to settle back into the driver’s seat and opens all the windows. The effort is almost definitely going to be wasted, because Mason is not an idiot, and why else would they need clothes brought out to them? But there’s a difference between accepting the inevitable and rubbing it in Mason’s face, since Theo’s guessing — if this experience is anything to go by — he’s going to need some of those get-out-of-jail-free cards later.

“Hey guys,” Mason says when he reaches the open passenger side door, doing an absolutely abhorrent job of keeping the shit-eating grin off his face; so the half-assed effort at subterfuge was completely wasted, great.

Theo rolls his eyes, motions for Mason to hand over the packages of sweats. Mason does, Liam playing middle-man to get them over to Theo, who ignores both of them and starts ripping open the packaging.

“You’ve got good timing,” Theo hears Mason tell Liam as he’s yanking his soiled sweatshirt over his head. The conversation pauses and Theo turns, shirt in hand, to see both Liam and Mason staring at him. Well, parts of him, anyway. Theo rolls his eyes again and throws his old sweatshirt at Liam’s face, ignoring his muffled hey!, as he pulls on the new one.

“Good timing?” He prompts, when he’s got the sweatshirt on and Mason doesn’t continue.

Mason visibly shakes himself and then says, “Uh, yeah. Ms. McCall was just about to order pizza, everyone is still inside arguing over toppings and what kind of sodas to get.”

“Pepperoni and onions,” Liam says immediately, but Theo speaks over him.

“Great,” He says loudly, drowning out Mason’s don’t tell me, I’m not the one ordering, “Then I’m going to finish changing,” Here he pauses to glare pointedly at Mason, hands full of his new pair of sweatpants that he hasn’t yet moved to put on, “And then I’m going upstairs to shower while we wait for the food to get here.”

Liam looks immediately invested in this plan and Theo can see exactly where his mind goes, his gaze dropping to Theo’s lap with absolutely no regard for Mason grinning a half a foot away. But Theo interrupts whatever dirty plans he’s clearly in the middle of making and slaps a package of sweats against Liam’s chest, holding them there until Liam brings his hands up to grab them.

“You,” He says pointedly to Liam, “are going to go find my truck keys.”

Liam looks startled for a half a second while he seems to recall that yes, he did in fact throw Theo’s keys somewhere into the Jameson’s yard. Then he starts to cackle, and it takes another ten minutes of rough-housing that keeps taking turns for the dirty after Theo lunges at him, Mason disappearing with a hurried I’ll just leave you two to it, then, for them to finish getting changed.

Theo leaves Liam hunting around the Jameson’s yard muttering to himself and does, in fact, go up to shower, waving to the pack when they enthusiastically greet him when he steps through the front door. And when Liam joins him in the shower a few minutes later, coming through the conveniently-unlocked bathroom door and dropping Theo’s keys noisily on the floor, he doesn’t say a word, just pins Liam to the tile and kisses him.

Theo just wraps one hand around the back of Liam’s neck, feels Liam’s arms wrap tightly around his shoulders, and kisses him.

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Art by ArtZeppo

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Notes:

Edited to say: I have a tumblr now! If you liked, consider a reblog.