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In my body I have a master
I bow down when she comes around
In my body I'm a disaster
I break down when you shake the ground
—SYML, "Body"
Theo closes his eyes and dreams of his ribs cracking open to reveal he is nothing under his skin but the universe.
He floats, peach flesh split in two under the tines of a fork and shoved asunder to offer up the quivering stone. A sightless hand twists so it will enter his chest vertically aligned with his sternum. His own hands are no longer passive witnesses to this death penalty: moments later his fingers, smaller than he remembers them, peel back the muscle and gaping skin for the hand of the cosmos to take back what it planted there.
In his dream, behind the stone the hand seeks, he contains galaxies. He coughs up burgeoning stars and there are Milky Ways ribboning down his esophagus. Somewhere in the pit of his stomach he can taste the sun, acrid, spiteful, aflame and promising.
This is not a new dream.
He is thirteen when he first wakes from the dream with his cot weighed down by the icy cold of his sweat.
He is fifteen when he begins learning to forget what it is like to be vomiting balls of gas from the depths of you because of the wrongness inside.
He is eighteen when he hurtles into hell and lands on his back, as always, to meet the ghoul of his sins that will reignite the dream cycle all over again.
—
"You're so smooth," Stephen whispers against his collarbone.
"That something you like?" Theo croaks. He knows how to belie a shaky voice with a devious, virginal smile. His specialty.
"It's something I really like." Tongue circles his nipple, finger pads pet the swell and dip of his pecs. Hardness slides clothed in denim over the planes of Theo's flushed and naked abs. Hot lips brush fast and wet over every inch of exposed skin, all the way to the divot below the center of his throat and down the line of his breastbone.
Theo's heart hammers against his ribs the same instant he blinks, the same instant Stephen's rough long hands slide palm-to-palm against his and pin him to the bed, the same moment he realizes he's prone on his back again with no anchor in the mattress except the weight of a man on top of him and the monotonous view of the pool house ceiling above him.
Panic crawls, anthropod-like, up his vocal chords.
The point was to be smooth. The point was to be undetectable up to the moment of truth in bed, to masterfully spin control of the situation and keep the beta hungering for more. Promise him a peek below the waistline of his underwear in exchange for the name of the pack member with the ability to commune with the dead.
But this was not part of the plan: not Stephen rutting against him and his hands going, going, going, trails of fire down his chest and flank, circling to the waistline of his boxers. Theo mute and blinking terrified up at the ceiling.
Play the Delilah, never the fool.
But—
"Sixteen," Theo sobs.
Stillness, rough. Neither predator nor prey.
"Sixteen. I'm sixteen."
Then a silence like a gunshot. "...Fuck."
The weight lifts and sits back on its haunches. Pity, revulsion, consternation, betrayal, anxiety swirl between them.
"Get out."
"I—"
"Out."
"Yeah—yes. Yes."
The walk of shame starts with Theo rolling undignified off the bed and playing hide and seek with his clothes littered on the floor, and ends with him bowing his head before the Dread Doctors to accept his castigation for the first failed mission in years.
A necessary incision to carve the spirit of infraction out of him.
—
"I wish I didn't look like that in all our pictures."
"Like what?"
Theo waves his hand vaguely at the photo album balanced on Scott's knees. They're eight and they're burning their bare thighs something fierce against the scratch of the old carpet in Mrs. McCall's living room. It's ninety-something degrees outside and Scott's mom has left the boys with orders to stay inside and away from heat stroke and kidnappers.
"Oh." Scott peers at the birthday party picture again. Scott's in the center, Theo to his left, Stiles to his right. Theo's bangs are admittedly growing too long and the bluntness of his bob hits strangely against the bony definition of his jawline.
"Hey, you don't look that bad."
"You're lying."
Scott grins, the crooked thing that Theo has somehow come to associate with the pitter-patter of his heart that has nothing to do with his asthma or other conditions. "Me? Lying? Since when?"
"Since you told Stiles I have blue toes."
"You do. I saw them."
Theo shoves him. The photo album proves to be a valiant opponent with its sharp corners in the midst of their tousle.
"Stop! Stop, stop!" Scott shrieks with laughter. "Okay, I surrender! Maybe you do look that bad!"
And Theo, just because he can be petty like that, takes the photo album and whacks Scott's knee with it just for that.
"What do you want me to say?!" Scott is still laughing.
Theo flops down on his back next to Scott to join him. They're both going to smell like rug burn and nasty carpet polyester fiber after this. For years after today, it will be a smell Theo lies awake trying to recreate as sleep eludes him for a decade underground.
"Just admit that I don't look like a boy," Theo grumbles.
Scott shrugs. "Course you don't. You're not wearing a hat."
That remark is enough for Theo to roll his eyes. "You weren't wearing a hat, and you look like a boy."
"Look, if this is about the hair, I really don't see why Tara can't—"
Theo cuts that off with a bone-deep groan of frustration. They've been having this argument for ages.
Scott sinks further down into the carpet and mirrors Theo's position with his hands behind his head. "Okay. Sorry."
Theo hums and knocks their knees together. It's a little more painful than he'd estimated but worth it.
"You know, it's not hair that makes a boy," says Scott contemplatively.
Well, duh. Theo kind of knew that. He doesn't like the feeling of not being the first to point it out, though, so he tells Scott he calls bullshit.
"Honest. It's not the hair. It's gotta be you doing something that makes you feel like a boy."
Theo side-eyes him skeptically. "Like what?"
"Skateboarding?"
"I already do that."
"Yeah, and you're a boy. That's not the question," Scott says. "What's one thing you wish you could do, that you can't, because they won't let you, but you just know it would, like, feel right?"
Theo doesn't need a century to ponder this one. "Guitar."
Scott creaks upright on an elbow to lean over Theo, a shadow of cool in the humid heat around them. "Huh?"
Theo swallows. "Mom and Dad won't let me. Said it'll turn me into a tomboy devil and soon I'll be cutting my hair and kissing girls."
"Ew." Scott's nose wrinkles. He looks so pretty like that. Theo gets lost in the thought that he doesn't anticipate Scott's entire body, warm and shaking with mirth and spilling out kindness like pocket change, collapsing on top of him.
"You're heavy," Theo complains.
Scott looks at him and doesn't even dignify that. Instead he springs to his feet with his fingers already encircling Theo's bony wrist. C'mon, c'mon, he hisses, and they race up the stairs to his room and into his closet.
Scott has the kind of weirdly heavy plastic guitar they use for Guitar Hero. The strap broke in one place and Melissa had helped Scott knot it back together. The spot is lumpy and uncomfortable between Theo's shoulder blades. Still, he grins wide and half-toothlessly. Scott grins back up at him from his cross-legged contentment on the floor. He hands Theo a hair tie, and Theo brushes back his annoying overgrown bob from his face and then starts strumming downward across the strings.
It's dissonant and it sounds awful. Theo's face splits all over again with the widest grin imaginable and his chest swells inside like new planets are being born inside.
Scott runs to his mom's room to grab the disposable camera and snap shot after shot of Theo fake rocking it out in the middle of the bedroom. Once Theo tires his little fingers out, they flop down next to each other and pore over the instant prints. One of them is almost ruined by Scott's blurry finger eating up half of the frame and Theo looking positively idiotic with his fake growling face. His fingers are weird and claw-like on the strings. One of his eyes is completely red.
He loves it. He plucks that one from Scott's hand and tucks it into his shirt pocket, to be carried everywhere with him for the next six years until it gets lost in the mud near the Doctors' operating theater in Minnesota.
—
He's fourteen when he goes under the knife willingly for the first time.
"Theo Raeken. This operation is unnecessary. Subject still insists on consuming resources this way?"
Theo scoffs. He's learned the fine lines of when he can and cannot mock his makers. "A deal's a deal. And look, I'll be—I'll be so much more effective on missions with my body complete like this."
Rasping breaths. "Subject is far from complete."
That would sting on any other day, but not today. He pushes a little supernatural canine into his smile. "Closer to complete. I'll go straightaway to Pasadena as soon as the operation is done."
The Surgeon gives his approximation of a thoughtful hum. "We expect heightened success in your missions resulting from this operation."
"Cross my heart, hope to die," Theo says, and as he's finally pressed down onto his back on the now-friendly icy steel of the operating table, his smile turns feral and victorious.
—
His chest heals over flat. Smooth.
Not an inch of scar tissue in sight.
He doesn't know why that makes him fold onto his knees on his cot that night and dry heave without a single warning. It's like black holes are blooming now where stars used to scream inside his chest.
He dreams.
—
He's strung up from the steel beams of a warehouse roof and bleeding from crisscross gashes across his chest when he feels it again: the sluggish, inexorable sensation of a universe yawning awake inside him.
Their lucky daggers dipped in mistletoe had dug imperfect crescent shapes in the meat below his pecs. Almost—almost—a perfect match to the incisions where the Doctors had cut into him at his behest.
The hunters know nothing of the way Theo comes alive again at the tickle of blood spilling from long-lost wounds he'd never thought he'd see again. They fall like glass chess pawns for his silver tongue, goading them into twisting the knives deeper and deeper. Maybe lead them just deep enough into his internal organs, and he'll be damaged enough that these particular incisions will be so kind as to leave some scars behind.
Liam and Scott have to put an end to it all so soon, those brave and heroic imbeciles.
One of them incapacitates his kidnappers and the other leaps over the interrogation table to slice through the wolfsbane ropes pulling his arms over his head. He collapses into that warm body, that brave body. It smells like Liam. It smells like old-burning rage and the cloying sweetness of sad relief.
He sleeps. He tries to dream, but even his self-torture gets to be elusive.
—
Liam's body is bracketing his from behind in the pool of his bedsheets when he makes the call.
He dreamt again last night. It was not Tara and it was not Gabe; not the hunters or the Doctors or the usual suspects in his nocturnal lineup.
He dreamt he was an ocean of stars and the hand returned to plunge inside him through his ribs, but this time there was nothing left, not even the uncomfortable flare of stars so hot and new he might not contain them. He dreamt instead that the blackness of everything he'd ever seen and known but been made to forget was swallowing him from the inside: swallowing him whole.
Liam had held him through it, kissed the saltwater under his lashes, listened to his sobbing erasure-poetry narrative of what he sees every time he closes his eyes now.
Drawing shuttered breaths against the unbearable softness of Liam's fingers running over his chest, over smooth skin where his body once again betrayed him and healed unblemished, Theo reaches for his phone and turns it on. He's at twelve percent and the charger is right there within his reach. He scrolls through his contacts. He hovers over the name and hesitates twice.
Liam hums a tuneless little thing into the dip in his collarbone.
Theo clicks on Scott.
"Hey. So…you know how you said yesterday you didn't know how to thank me?" Theo steels himself with another breath. Nothing, not even the beautiful circles Liam is drawing with his finger pads over Theo's chest, will calm the gallop of his heart now. "Well, now you can, if you tell me…where do you get your tattoos?"
I want to love like a man
I'll build you a home if I can
Give my new body a chance
Patient love it's all that I have
—SYML, "Body"