Archive of Our Own

Liam is in the operating theater when Theo gets back from the high school, lounging idly back across one of the Doctors’ operating chairs and running a glossy black raven’s feather through his fingers.

“Shouldn’t you be with your alpha?” Theo asks curiously, glancing at the puddle of black blood lying in the middle of the floor. Belasko’s body may be gone, but the electrified stench of him isn’t; Theo wrinkles his nose as he passes it. “I’m sure he’s still pretty shaken up.”

“They all are,” Liam answers dismissively, and sits up when Theo gets close enough, drops the feather carelessly on the floor to hook his fingers into Theo’s belt loops and yank him closer, in between Liam’s spread knees. “Stiles doesn’t believe you, by the way," he warns, murmuring it against Theo’s lips as he snakes one hand up to grab a fistful of Theo’s hair, pull Theo’s mouth down to his own.

Theo hums into the kiss, then counters, “Yeah, but he believes you,” and shudders when Liam slips his other hand up underneath Theo’s shirt to scratch too-sharp nails over the base of Theo’s spine.

Liam smirks against Theo’s mouth and then, before Theo can react, suddenly executes an acrobatic move to get Theo pulled onto and then flipped over onto his back on the long, black chair. Sucking in a sharp breath, Theo stares up at Liam from his new position and his hands clutch helplessly at Liam’s thighs as Liam settles purposefully over Theo’s hips, his knees digging into the cushion on either side of Theo’s ribs. Liam studies him for a long few seconds, headless of the way that Theo’s fingers have started to clench around his thighs—of the way that Theo’s hips have started straining helplessly upwards against him—and then he smiles, slow and syrupy, and leans down so that his mouth is hovering just over Theo’s.

“Yeah,” Liam agrees, his lips brushing Theo’s on every word. “Yeah, he does,” and covers Theo’s sharp, satisfied smirk with his own.

---

“The flowers were a nice touch,” Liam calls as he wanders down the steps into the operating theater proper, back from the Preserve and his secret mission of spying on Theo with Stiles.

Theo smirks slightly but doesn’t look away from where he’s leaning back against one of the room’s stainless steel tables, arms and ankles crossed loosely as he watches the Doctors operate on Tracy. Liam keeps coming until he’s stood next to Theo, and then he glances idly sideways to see what Theo’s looking at and makes a considering face, cocks a hip against the edge of the table a few inches away from Theo’s so that he can watch, too. He smells like the brisk air of the Preserve and the mud of Tracy’s grave that he’d deliberately walked himself into, and Theo takes a deep breath, holds the scent of him in his lungs for as long as he can before exhaling it back out.

“You’re going to have to do something about Stiles,” Liam tells him eventually, and looks away from the gruesomely clinical sight of the Doctors’ procedure to look at Theo instead.

“I’m already doing it,” Theo answers absently, and tilts his head so he can see around the imposing bulk of the Surgeon as the Geneticist hands over a syringe full of a viscous, dully glimmering liquid. Kanima venom, Theo realizes, leaning back. Huh.

Liam hums thoughtfully and turns back forward, though he lets his hip slip along the slick edge of the table so that it ends up resting against Theo’s own as he does. Theo freezes and darts a sharp glance up at each of the Doctors’ faces, but they’re absorbed in their work. Still, Theo straightens up some so that he and Liam aren’t touching anymore, shoots Liam a warning glare when he makes a dissatisfied noise.

Huffing but relenting, Liam slumps back and glowers mutinously out into the room, his eyes flaring gold and his fingers curling sharp-clawed around the edge of the table. Chest twisting, Theo darts another glance at the Doctors and pulls his lip between his teeth, and then he slowly, casually relaxes back down so that the edge of his hip is just brushing the outside of Liam’s hand. Some of the tension leaves Liam’s shoulders, and when he looks up and over at Theo, his eyes are back to their usual blue.

“How’d it go with Mason?” Theo asks, and pretends he isn’t now hyper-aware of the heat of Liam’s skin warming the outside of his thigh; he tries to refocus on the procedure in front of him but can’t, his thoughts now too jumpy and his throat now too dry.

“Good,” Liam answers. “Really good, actually. Unusually behaving wildlife aside," he says, and turns to grin cheekily up at Theo once more; Theo doesn’t turn to meet his eyes but he does let his lips curl in a satisfied smirk, “he is one-hundred percent in his best friend’s corner.”

“Isn’t that sweet,” Theo murmurs, and this time does turn to look at Liam.

Liam looks back, and then his eyes drop to Theo’s lips and flare gold once more; Theo’s fingers curl a little harder against his arms. But Liam just lets his gaze slide slowly over to the Doctors still hunched over Tracy, and steps back; this time it’s Theo who has to swallow back a disappointed sound.

“This is him now,” Liam says, fishing his phone out of his pocket and looking at the screen. He wiggles it at Theo demonstrably and adds, “I should probably go meet back up with him, considering.” His gaze slides back to Tracy still prone on the operating table, and Theo follows it.

“Yeah, you should,” Theo agrees, turning back to him, and watches him closely as Liam hesitates a moment longer and then gives him a brisk, sharp nod and turns back for the stairs. He pauses when he reaches the top and looks back at Theo, licks his bottom lip and then bites it for the way that he knows the sudden scent of his blood will make Theo’s nostrils flare. Now finally satisfied, Liam flashes him a grin and finishes disappearing back out into the sewers, and Theo forces down the surge of arousal that had spiked through him at Liam’s tease, turns back to the ongoing surgery; to the Doctors; to Tracy.

“Yeah, you should.” Theo repeats under his breath, and lets a slow, slow smirk curl his lips. “After all, the McCall pack is going to have a very busy day tomorrow.”

---

“Why are you not more freaked out about this?” Liam demands, pacing frenetically back and forth in front of the bed in Theo’s perfectly staged set piece of a suburban bedroom. “Tracy nearly killed Lydia and Scott and the others! We still need them!”

Theo watches him from his place on the bed, and then—timing it just right—he reaches out and snags Liam’s arm as he goes to pass Theo on another round, drags him to a stop. Liam snarls at him, fang-mouthed and flare-eyed, but Theo just stares calmly up at him, presses the inside of his knees against Liam’s hips and waits. It takes a few harsh, half-growled breaths, but eventually Liam scoffs and shakes himself loose of the shift.

But Theo doesn’t let him go when he tries to shake himself loose of Theo’s hold, just tightens his grip on Liam’s arm and his knees against Liam’s waist. “She nearly did, but she didn’t.” Theo reminds him, and flows with him when Liam snaps his teeth together in frustration and tries to pull away again. Encouraging him closer instead, Theo slips his fingers underneath Liam’s shirt to run them back across the skin just above the waistband of his jeans, encourages him closer still when Liam shivers. Nosing at the quick, staccato beat of Liam’s heart below his shirt, Theo murmurs, “You’ll get your pack.”

When he glances up at Liam, Liam is staring narrow-eyed down at him. “Why?” He demands sharply, “Because the Doctors promised I would?”

Theo jerks back to stare at him in shock, and then he darts his gaze hurriedly around the room, the shadows suddenly seeming ominously deep as he hisses, “Liam!”

Liam rolls his eyes and bites off a quick, irritated sound, but he also doesn’t continue. Instead he stays practically vibrating with tension between Theo’s knees, his head turned to the side and his eyes staring somewhere into the middle distance, Liam’s restless mind clearly anywhere but in the room with them. Theo knows better than to keep pushing him, so he sighs, quietly, closing his eyes and concentrating instead on the slow stroke of his fingers along the divots of the muscles of Liam’s back.

It works, after a while; Liam comes back to himself with a quiet huff followed by a low humming noise as he looks back down at Theo, and then he brings a hand up to run his thumb lightly over Theo’s lips before leaning down to kiss him. The angle is awful but Theo doesn’t care, straining up against Liam and opening his mouth to Liam’s tongue. Liam laughs a little and seems to take pity on him, pressing himself forward and Theo back until he can get his knees up on the bed on either side of Theo’s hips, settle into his lap.

But they both have jobs to do, so Theo reluctantly pulls away after a long few minutes and looks up at Liam when Liam looks down at him. “How’s Hayden?” He asks, voice raspier than he’d intended it to be.

Liam smirks, pleased, and leans in to kiss him slow and deep before pulling back and answering, “Healing. Trying to hide it.” He studies Theo for a moment and then asks, “Donovan?”

“Strapped down in the operating theater, waiting for the Doctors,” Theo replies, and answers Liam’s smirk with his own. “I was thinking of swinging by to see how he’s doing later, what do you think?”

Liam laughs, low and throaty. “Wish I could be there to see it. But I need to go tell Scott all about the mysterious holes Brett and Mason and I found out in the woods. Theo, did you know—” He asks, widening his eyes guilelessly and letting his voice go breathy, confused, “—that they weren’t sinkholes, but graves? Somebody buried Tracy and the others alive!”

“Speaking of,” Theo comments as Liam lets the innocent expression melt off his face into a vicious smirk, “Lucas is going to be a problem.”

“One I already have a plan for,” Liam answers dismissively, and slides off of Theo’s lap and onto his feet. He grins and explains, “Mason needs a wingman tonight.”

“Heaven help him,” Theo murmurs, and falls back onto his elbows as Liam gathers up his coat, his shoes. Liam swings back by the bed to kiss him and then disappears, off to go play the baffled beta for Scott. Sighing lightly, Theo lets himself fall the rest of the way flat and then slides his phone out of his pocket, checks the time. Doing a quick set of calculations in his head, he locks his phone and tosses it to the side, closes his eyes and settles in.

Donovan could stew for a few more hours.

---

“You’re checking up on me,” Liam sing-songs later that night, half-buried in his closet as he roots through it looking for this or that shirt.

Theo doesn’t dignify that with a response, just continues flipping the coin in his hand up in the air, catching it in a flat palm when it comes down and slapping it over onto his opposite wrist. Heads, he thinks, when he takes away his hand and sees the face of the coin: Donovan kills Stiles.

Liam makes an amused noise and re-emerges from his closet with a pale gray shirt in hand. Theo squints at it for a moment from his place sprawled out on Liam’s bed and then shakes his head. “I like that shirt," he says, and flips and catches the coin again. Tails, he thinks, looking at it: Stiles kills Donovan.

Liam blows an irritated raspberry but obediently dives back into his closet. When he climbs his way back out of it he’s holding a dark green shirt that Theo has always secretly hated. Holding it up, Liam raises his eyebrows in clear challenge and Theo rolls his eyes, flips him off. Liam laughs, loud and delighted, and takes the shirt off the hanger, tosses it onto the bed next to Theo. Ignoring it—but watching Liam as he strips his current shirt off over his head—Theo flips the coin again. Tails. Stiles kills Donovan.

“You’re really going to let Donovan kill Stiles?” Liam asks, unbuttoning and unzipping his jeans so that he can shuck them for a different, tighter pair.

Theo watches the flex and ripple of the muscles of his back and thighs as he bends over to snag the other pair of jeans, start tugging them on. Heads, he sees, when he checks the coin he’s just flipped again: Donovan kills Stiles.

“I’m going to let fate take its course,” Theo disagrees, and flips the coin again.

He doesn’t get a chance to check it; Liam catches it mid-air, one knee now up on the bed by Theo’s hip. His new pair of jeans is still unbuttoned, and Theo looks down at the split ‘V’ of them, feels his eyes start to flare and his breathing start to speed. Flicking his eyes up to Liam’s face, he watches as Liam smirks and then slowly, deliberately, slaps the captured coin onto his own bare forearm.

“Tails," he announces, and looks at Theo expectantly.

“Stiles kills Donovan,” Theo answers, and smirks as he watches understanding dawn over Liam’s face.

“Either way, the McCall pack loses,” Liam realizes as he stares down at Theo, studying him thoughtfully as he flicks the coin idly between his fingers. Then he tosses it carelessly to the side and finishes covering Theo’s body with his own, tangles his hands in Theo’s hair as he says wickedly, “And we win.”

“And we win,” Theo agrees, and darts up to take Liam’s mouth.

---

Lucas ruins Liam’s shirt in the fight as Sinema as expected, Malia finds the book that Theo planted in Tracy’s bedroom, and Stiles kills Donovan.

Theo watches from the school’s second floor balcony as Stiles bangs his unsteady way out of the library after the girders come down, one of them doing so directly through Donovan’s chest, and continues sending the coin in his hand bumping over his knuckles. Tails, he thinks, stopping the coin and looking at the burnished silver back of it held up between two of his fingers: Stiles kills Donovan. He tucks the coin back into his pocket and turns away as Stiles takes terrified refuge in his Jeep, heads down so that he can check on Donovan’s pinioned body before heading home to get a good’s night sleep before the next day’s work.

“What about this guy?” Theo asks Scott later in the locker room, holding up the dedication page and tapping at Valack’s name. Elsewhere in the school Lydia is making the same comment to Malia, and Theo smirks internally, even as his outward expression stays perfectly innocuous.

Thankfully Scott doesn’t ask him along for the break-in to Eichen House, so Theo doesn’t have to talk his way out of it. Instead he meets Malia in the library—passing Liam leaned up against Mason’s locker as he does, Liam’s eyes following him briefly as he goes—to watch her work her way through Valack’s novel. He can see the disconnect between her conscious mind and her subconscious senses all over her face, the coyote in her responding to the coyote in him, even as she mentally turns over Stiles’ words, his suspicions. But Malia is a creature of instinct, has been since the day of her family’s death and will be until the day she herself dies, and in the end they win out: she smiles, slightly, when she thinks he isn’t paying attention, and looks back down at her work.

He overplays his hand with the driving lessons, though: Malia nearly gets herself killed, frozen in the middle of the road as the memory of her mother’s attack—her real mother’s attack—triggers. Calling himself every vicious name in the book, Theo pulls her out of the way of the oncoming car, and just barely manages to translate his inwardly-directed fury into compassionate confusion as he and Malia lay panting on their backs on the asphalt.

Back home, Theo snarls at the field mice pretending to be his parents and storms upstairs to his room, slamming the door shut hard enough after himself that the wood splinters down the middle. Theo stares at it, mute and panting, for a few seconds, and then he finally clocks the second presence in the room and whirls around.

“You really are out of sorts,” Liam comments, smirking sharply from his place laid out on Theo’s bed.

“Malia nearly turned herself into roadkill,” Theo snaps at him, Liam’s amusement sawing at the already raw, twisted-up feeling in his chest.

Liam just rolls over onto his back and stretches serenely, the edge of his shirt riding up to reveal the dark trail of hair leading down into his jeans. He drops his arms back to his sides when he’s done and looks back at Theo, says innocently, “She almost did, but she didn’t.” Theo recognizes his own words, said to Liam not two days ago when he’d been just as fiercely furious about Tracy, and glares at him. Liam just grins, unaffected. “I’d be more worried about Kira, anyway.”

Theo realizes what he means, his self-blame shunted to the side to focus on the immediate issue. “It worked, then?” He demands. “They got in?”

“And out,” Liam agrees cheekily, and grins wider at Theo’s eye-roll. “Getting Kira out nearly killed Scott," he continues, his eyes on Theo’s face as he studies his reaction to this news.

“I can work with that,” Theo replies slowly, mind already turning the problem over. He’s caught up enough in his thoughts that he doesn’t immediately notice Liam sitting up and sliding to the edge of the bed. He sure as hell notices when Liam hooks his fingers in the waistband of Theo’s jeans and pulls him forward, though, and he looks down at him thoughtfully. “You need to work on Hayden.”

“Already am,” Liam tells him, resting his chin on Theo’s stomach as he looks back up at him. Theo doesn’t know what he means until he feels one of Liam’s hands slide into his back pocket and then back out. Liam holds up the small square of folded-up bills he’d retrieved and grins.

“And what do I get in this exchange, if you’re giving her all my money?” Theo asks as Liam tucks the cash into his own pocket.

Liam just looks back up at him, two of his fingers still hooked in the waistband of Theo’s jeans, and says, “I’m sure I can think of something.”

---

Theo knows the instant that Liam comes strolling into the animal clinic while Theo is there ostensibly guarding Josh’s body, a cat-who-got-the-canary grin all over his face, that Liam is responsible for Josh’s rampage.

“No way,” Theo breathes, admiration rounding his vowels; Liam’s grin widens further, “How?”

Liam comes to a stop in front of Theo but leans over to lift the edge of the blanket covering Josh’s face and the wreck of his shredded neck. He looks from the claw marks back over at Theo and raises his eyebrows, laughs low under his breath when Theo’s only response is to raise his own eyebrows right back. Letting the blanket fall back down, he turns to fully face Theo and beam up at him, still so obviously pleased with himself.

“I maybe made sure he overheard me and Mason talking about the most vulnerable sources of electricity in the city,” Liam explains, and continues over Theo’s impressed laughter in an innocent, insistent tone of voice, “I was just worried about Kira, you know.” He says earnestly, pressing forward as he does so that he backs Theo up against the clinic’s exam table behind him. “Her powers have been so out of control, hadn’t everyone seen the flickering lights?”

He lasts a little longer and then his composure cracks, and he covers Theo’s still-laughing mouth with his own. Theo hums and brings his hands up to cradle Liam’s face, tilting his head to a better angle so that Theo can lick deeper into his mouth; Liam’s hands tighten around his hips as he does it and Theo groans, pulls Liam a little harder in against himself.

But after a few seconds Liam breaks the kiss and leans back, a pensive expression on his face. He keeps his hips pressed up against Theo’s but turns his head to look back at the blanket-covered lump of Josh’s body still on the exam table, and then he rests his chin on the swell of Theo’s bicep when Theo drops his hands down from Liam’s head to his back.

“He’s like a wind-up toy,” Liam finally murmurs, and then flicks his eyes up and clarifies when he apparently senses Theo’s confusion, “Mason, I mean.” Theo tilts his head slightly, still lost, and Liam sighs, straightens up and turns some in Theo’s arms so that his shoulder is braced against Theo’s chest and he can look out at Josh’s body, though Theo doubts he’s even seeing it. “He’s so excited to help, to be part of the team.” He pauses, almost imperceptibly, then concludes, “It’s a little charming, actually.”

Theo studies the side of Liam’s face that he can see with Liam half-turned away from him, brings up his hand to run his fingers lightly over the opposite ridge of Liam’s brow, the curve of his cheek. Liam leans into the touch, some, and then flicks his eyes over to Theo’s.

“You like him,” Theo interprets softly. Liam’s mouth tightens and he looks away. Making a small noise, Theo uses the hand he has on his jaw to turn Liam’s face back towards his own. “You can have him,” Theo reminds him, murmuring it low and smooth and hypnotic. “When you’re the alpha, you can make him part of your pack.”

Something flashes across Liam’s face, something too fast for even Theo to catch, but before Theo can do more than frown, Liam surges back up and into him, kissing him hard. The sudden move drives Theo back hard against the exam table, Theo dropping one hand to it to steady himself—to steady both of them—as the metal edge of it smacks against the brick wall of the clinic. Moaning breathlessly in both confusion and arousal, Theo makes room for Liam pressing insistently between his knees, his other hand fisting tightly in the back of Liam’s shirt.

And then all at once Liam stiffens and shoves away from him.

Theo experiences a split-second of confusion and then it’s entirely replaced by ice-cold fear as he clocks what Liam must have. By the time the Surgeon’s heavy footsteps appear in the doorway, Liam and Theo are on opposite sides of the clinic, their clothes in order and their breathing calm and easy and unbothered.

“Checking up on us?” Liam drawls, absently playing with a plastic-capped scalpel he’d picked up off one of the other tables.

The Surgeon doesn’t answer, just continues to stare implacably out at both of them. Liam huffs and tosses the scalpel to the side, where it clatters loudly against the metal top of the table; Theo has to fight the urge not to flinch.

“They’re taking Hayden to the school,” Liam tells the Surgeon, his tone riding just the edge of insubordinate. Theo’s breath catches and he has to concentrate on smoothing it back out, though it’s a mostly wasted effort when Liam smirks just as sharply and adds, “Along with three modified cell phone jammers.”

The Surgeon doesn’t say anything to that, either, but when they turn to start walking away, Liam’s shoulders slump, and he follows. Theo stays rooted where he is as Liam passes him, Liam’s jaw clenched tightly and his eyes flicking quickly there-and-away from Theo’s. They disappear from sight and while there’s no sound of the door opening—no incongruously cheerful jingle of the bell to announce their departure—Theo knows they’re gone.

Slumping back against the table behind himself, Theo exhales out roughly and brings shaking hands up to cover his mouth, his eyes closing as he orders himself to breathe; to just breathe.

---

Later, after Scott has tried and failed to rescue Liam and Hayden, and Theo has tried and succeeded in rescuing them, Theo lounges back on the couch in the living room of the house he’d picked out for the Stepford charade of the Raeken family and comments to Liam, “The McCall pack thinks you’re in love with Hayden.”

Liam makes an amused noise and desists in whatever he’d been doing to lean over the back of the couch, his hands braced on the cushions on either side of Theo’s shoulders and his head hanging over Theo’s.

“Jealous?” He asks.

Theo looks away from the grainy surveillance footage photographs he’d been studying on his phone—Parrish blank-eyed and taking the latest chimera’s body from the hospital—and drops his head back against the back of the couch to meet Liam’s upside-down smirk and sharp gaze. He lets his eyes run over Liam’s face, pulling up the memory of him and Hayden passed out on opposite ends of the McCall couch, but with Hayden’s shoulders tilted inexorably toward Liam, her throat exposed. Looking at the picture they’d made, Theo supposes he can see how attraction could have been an obvious conclusion to draw, but Theo had seen something else: he’d seen the same devotion that turns Stiles, and Lydia, and Malia, and the rest of the McCall pack towards Scott.

“You going to be able to keep up the charade?” Theo replies instead, and smirks when Liam’s only response is to scoff and shove off the back of the couch.

“I don’t have to keep up anything," he counters, starting to circle around the living room towards Theo as he speaks. “I just have to create the blanks, and the McCall pack falls all over themselves to fill them in themselves.”

Theo laughs, low and amused as he watches Liam’s progress. “And Hayden?”

“Too smart to fall in love with this pretty face,” Liam answers, and flutters his eyelashes ridiculously.

He’s close enough now that Theo can reach out and snag him, dropping his legs down from where he’d had them stretched out on the coffee table and dragging Liam over to himself. “That almost sounded like a dig," he observes thoughtfully, the inside of his knees pressing against the outside of Liam’s thighs.

Liam just grins and cups Theo’s face in his hands, tilting it up so that Theo is looking up at him. He studies Theo carefully, his eyes running over the slope of Theo’s brow and the curve of his cheek, his fingers following in gentle, skimming touches. Theo closes his eyes briefly as Liam runs a light finger down over one of his eyelids, but opens them right back up to look up at Liam when it passes.

“You don’t love me for my pretty face,” Liam murmurs, and it’d almost be another tease if it weren’t for the way that his fingers tighten hard around Theo’s jaw.

Theo sucks in a sharp breath at the pressure and then hums, bringing his own hands up to slide them in-between his own skin and Liam’s hands. He holds Liam’s eyes, Liam watching him curiously as Theo threads his fingers through Liam’s own; through the same fingers that had been tugging and plucking at all the McCall pack’s strings since long before Theo got to town.

“No,” Theo agrees, his fingers tightening hard and then harder around Liam’s. “No, I don’t.”

---

Theo genuinely has no idea what Liam’s 911 text is about until he gets to the bus yard and finds him and Hayden huddled back between two of the innocuously cheerful yellow vehicles, Liam’s hands on Hayden’s shoulders as he tries to talk her down and silver blood all over Hayden’s chin and fingers.

“Oh,” Theo breathes, catching on immediately. He lets his expression go scared and sympathetic and shakily determined as he meets Liam’s eyes—both Liam and Hayden looking up at him—and says, “Liam, you’ve got to tell Scott.”

“No!” Hayden and Liam shout, near-simultaneously, and Theo has to swallow down a smirk. “No,” Liam repeats, more quietly but just as firm. But it’s Hayden who catches Theo’s eyes and pleads, “He tried to use me as bait.”

“He did use you as bait,” Liam corrects acidically. He makes a noise when he sees more silver blood start dripping from Hayden’s nose, but he meets Theo’s eyes over the top of her head when she ducks it with a frightened gasp, and the curl to his lips is sharp.

Theo takes them back to the Raeken house. Once there Hayden immediately asks to shower, and from the strained tension to the muscles of her neck, she’s caught up in a constant—and losing—battle of trying not to look down at the silver streaks on her hands and arms. Grimacing sympathetically at her, Theo takes her upstairs and finds her a towel—still smelling store-bought and new, but Theo’s willing to take the chance that Hayden’s too distracted to notice—and points her towards the hallway bathroom.

His phone explodes with a veritable landslide of notifications as he’s on his way back downstairs, the McCall pack panicking as first Corey and then Beth begin deteriorating. It doesn’t take long after that for Scott to realize that Liam and Hayden are missing, and there’s another miniature explosion of messages as everyone debates what to do. Theo feigns ignorance but promises to meet Scott at the hospital to try and protect Corey, and then he finishes jogging back down the stairs and back into the kitchen.

Liam is there, leaned up against one of the counters and with his phone vibrating facedown and incessantly on the counter by his hip, his eyes focused up and out, towards the sound of water running on the second floor. He flicks his gaze down to look at Theo as Theo comes towards him, but then almost immediately flicks it back up.

“What is it?” Theo asks, studying his face and the tense line of his shoulders.

Liam’s jaw clenches and his crossed arms tighten, briefly. “Where are they?” He demands. “They should have been here by now.”

Theo looks at him strangely. “Why does it matter?”

Liam just shrugs his shoulders roughly, nostrils flaring and his head tossing some, like he was physically trying to resettle his skin on his bones. Full moon, Theo realizes. Super moon. Liam looks at him sharply and Theo swallows down the comment he’d been about to make.

“I don’t like not knowing what they’re up to instead,” Liam finally huffs, his voice low and burring with frustration.

Theo takes a chance and reaches forward to run the backs of the fingers of one of his hands across the stretched-taut muscles of one of Liam’s forearms. When Liam doesn’t immediately shake him off he steps closer, one thread of his senses arrowing up and out to keep an ear on the sound of the shower still going strong upstairs.

“This is how it works, Liam,” Theo reminds him quietly, the fingers of both his hands now trailing lightly over Liam’s ribs, his sides. “First the Doctors get what they want, and then we get what we want.” He pauses, then emphasizes lowly, “You get what you want.”

But Liam doesn’t unwind. He doesn’t uncross his arms to let Theo any closer, and he doesn’t take the invitation of the still-slight touches of Theo’s hands on his waist. Instead he sets his jaw and looks up at Theo, his expression hard.

“And what is it you think I want?” Liam challenges levelly, deceptively calm, and Theo stares at him, taken aback.

To have a pack. To be an alpha, Theo thinks, but doesn’t get a chance to say. He takes a quick step back to put a reasonable amount of space between himself and Liam as Hayden appears in the doorway, freshly showered and with her hair dripping onto the clean shirt that Theo had found her to wear. Theo glances at her and then away, his throat going tight enough that he has to swallow back a sudden, unexpected sting of regret. Even for Theo, she’s hard to look at: a walking corpse that didn’t know it was dead yet. But he can still feel Liam’s attention on the side of his face, and he looks over at him.

“You’re right,” Liam says, decisive and sure like he was picking up on a conversation that he and Theo had been having. He even nods, once, sharp and firm like he was sealing some kind of deal with himself. “We should run.”

Theo swallows again, and forces himself to say his lines, ad-libbed as they may be. “Wherever you go, you’re going to need money.”

“I can get us some," Hayden cuts in, and smiles shakily when both Liam and Theo glance over at her. “Phil keeps all our paychecks in cash in the safe at Sinema, I can get to mine.”

So Theo doesn’t get a chance to answer Liam’s question. He drops him and Hayden off at Hayden’s car, and then he drives to the hospital to meet up with Scott for Scott’s doomed attempt to keep Corey alive. He gets out of his truck, and almost immediately freezes. Keeping his gaze straight ahead, he pushes his door slowly back shut, and closes his eyes, and exhales out slowly.

“Sinema," he says to the Doctors hovering just at the edges of his perception. “She’s at Sinema.”

---

Theo’s hands are still covered in Scott’s blood when he makes it back to the operating theater and sees Liam pacing around, his also-bloody hands pressed tightly against his mouth.

“What the hell happened?” Theo demands, practically lunging down the steps and then using the railing to swing himself around, in front of Liam.

Liam hisses out a frustrated noise and drops his hands. “It was Mason, he—”

“I don’t mean Mason,” Theo interrupts him, practically snarling it. He reaches forward and grabs one of Liam’s hands, holds it up between them. “Why didn’t you use Belasko’s talons? What were you thinking?”

Something spasms across Liam’s face, something caught, but it disappears too fast and Liam responds too quickly for Theo to fully decipher it.

“I ran out of time. Everything happened too fast,” Liam snaps back, ripping his arm out of Theo’s grip.

Theo lets him go, watching as he wheels away with a bitten-off, rough sound. Covering his face with his hands, Theo takes a few deep, shaky breaths, and then he rakes them back through his hair. “Okay. Okay," he says, thinking it through. “We find another alpha. We find another alpha, and—”

Liam just barks a high, harsh laugh. “No need.” He explains, when Theo looks at him sharply. “Scott’s still alive.”

Theo feels all the color drain out of his face. “No," he denies, horrified. “No, that’s not possible. He was dead when I left the library.”

“Melissa brought him back,” Liam says, shrugging roughly. “I guess he was just too much of a true alpha to stay down," he adds, sneering.

Fear like ice goes slip-sliding down Theo’s spine; sensation like the Surgeon breathing down the back of his neck. Liam looks over at him and makes a hurt noise, his body losing its restless momentum as he instead surges forward to practically barrel into Theo, his bloody hands coming up to cradle Theo’s face as they go stumbling back a step. “Hey, hey, hey," he orders quickly and firmly, jerking Theo’s head down so that Theo is forced to meet Liam’s eyes. “Breathe, okay? You’ve got to breathe.”

Theo closes his eyes and tries, though he can still feel his short, shallow breaths panting out against the thumbs Liam has stroking across his cheeks, his bottom lip. “We have to fix this. We have to fix this before they—” He cuts himself off, superstition like a lance spiking through him as he attempts—and fails, Liam refusing to let him turn his face away from Liam’s own—to look wildly around the room, to check the shadows; their ominous depths. “Liam, we have to fix this.”

“We will. We will,” Liam insists, dropping his voice to a low, soothing murmur, his hands still anchored hard around Theo’s face. “I can make the McCall pack think it was the moon,” Liam says, nodding a little when Theo looks back at him. “The moon and failing to protect Hayden, they already think that’s the reason I went after Scott.”

Theo nods back, just slightly, but can’t slow his panicked breathing. Liam hisses out another low sound and then drops his forehead against Theo’s, letting his own breathing fall even slower and more even to give Theo something to match. Biting back a helpless sound, Theo does; breathing in, and out, when Liam does. After a while of that—after Liam is apparently satisfied with Theo’s calming heartbeat and the steadied rhythm of his breathing—Liam pulls back, and cards one hand back through Theo’s hair so that he can anchor it around the back of Theo’s neck, hold him firm as Liam searches his face.

“We still have to do something about you,” Laim says, and Theo looks at him quizzically, not understanding. Liam makes a small noise and digs his fingers in harder to the back of Theo’s neck; Theo closes his eyes and shudders, briefly, but then he opens them back up and focuses. “They’ll be coming for you, with what you did to Scott.” Liam explains, low and quick. “You’ll need protection. Help.”

His eyes flick over Theo’s shoulder, and Theo glances back to see what he’s looking at. The liquid inside the tank containing the masked and naked alpha werewolf shimmers subtly in the sickly lights of the operating theater, and Theo frowns and turns back to Liam.

“Interesting idea,” Theo tells him, eyes running over the determined set to Liam’s jaw. “But we have no idea where to find the Nemeton.”

“No,” Liam agrees, and then he turns to look at—at where Lydia is just waking up, her eyes going wide and then wider as she catches sight of Liam and Theo stood nearly chest-to-chest, Liam’s hand still cupped firmly over the back of Theo’s neck.

“But she does.”

---

The McCall pack blames the moon.

“I told you,” Liam crows as he blows into the operating theater and half-leaps on Theo’s back, high on adrenaline and flush with success.

Theo staggers a little but recovers his footing, laughing and not resisting in the slightest when Liam clenches a hand in his hair and yanks his head back to kiss him, entirely ignoring Corey and Tracy and Josh and Hayden scattered around the room eyeing them—and each other—warily. Their heartbeats skip with surprise as Liam tightens his grips around Theo’s hair and arm and deepens the kiss, and Theo’s lips curl in a sharp smirk against Liam’s, whose grin twists even sharper.

“Eight hundred extenuating circumstances,” Liam finally murmurs triumphantly against his mouth, clearly quoting, and Theo pulls back to look at him.

“And where is Mason?” Theo wonders, and then finds his attention snapping to Corey when Corey’s breath stutters in his chest.

He’s still studying Corey’s wide eyes and frozen expression when Liam answers, “We split up after finding the Nemeton, to contact the police and look for Hayden.” He drops his chin onto Theo’s shoulder and smirks at Hayden now stood staring, stunned, back at him. “I have to go meet back up with him.”

Theo hums and lets his gaze drift away from Corey, turning his head back towards Liam, his nose brushing the edge of Liam’s cheek as he says, “And I have to go meet Stiles.”

Liam looks at him strangely for a second and then his expression smooths out. “Ah, right. So he and Scott can interrogate you about the Sheriff. Or, well—” He corrects, smiling sharply, “—so that Stiles can interrogate you while Scott pretends to still be dead.”

Theo is about to respond when Hayden suddenly speaks up instead, an expression on her face like the words had broken loose of whatever hold she’d tried to keep on them: “So you’ve…been with the Dread Doctors the whole time. With him.” She adds, her eyes flicking to Theo.

Liam studies her for a moment. Theo can’t see whatever’s on his face with his curious gaze on Hayden, but Hayden recoils, slightly, whatever bravado had worked her tongue earlier apparently evaporating. But then Liam just tips his head so that he can stare thoughtfully up at Theo, his chin digging harder into Theo’s shoulder. “I like to think he’s been with me.” Then he grins, head cocking further as he adds slyly, “Or maybe it’s a chicken-and-egg thing.”

“Either way,” Theo murmurs, looking away from Hayden and tipping his own head so that he can meet Liam’s sharp, dancing gaze, “I need to get going.”

Liam gives an overly-dramatic, gusty sigh, but he steps back. Almost immediately the false drama falls away, his demeanor sharpening as he looks at Hayden. “We should get going, too. Your missing-persons case remains unsolved, after all.”

Hayden’s uncertainty is still all over her face, but she steps forward regardless. Josh and Tracy and Corey all watch her, their expressions all equally unsure, but none of them move, their eyes flicking back and forth between Theo and Liam still stood close enough that Liam’s chest is brushing Theo’s back.

Ignoring them for the moment, Theo bumps his shoulder against Liam’s to get his attention. “I need her after.” He tells him, and when Liam’s brow furrows curiously, he clarifies, “Noah.”

“Ah,” Liam says simply, and turns back to Hayden.

Her shoulders snap straight the instant his eyes meet hers, her breath catching and her pulse jumping. From the confusion blanking her face she has no idea why, and she isn’t the only one; around the room, Josh’s and Tracy’s and Corey’s spines have all stiffened, too. Theo’s lips curl in a slow, syrupy grin as he watches them, satisfaction unfurling in his chest like a living, breathing thing.

Liam holds Hayden’s eyes for a few more long, taut moments, and then he says, low and smooth and with an understated, raw something coating the words, “You heard him.”

Hayden hesitates for another half-second, and then she nods.

---

“You’re staring,” Theo tells Hayden the next day, back in the Raeken house and sat against one corner of the couch, his legs stretched out and crossed on the coffee table and his attention on the tablet in his lap.

Beside him, her head on a throw pillow by his hip and her body curled into a loose ball, Tracy frowns in her sleep and stirs, some, the fingers she’d used to puncture the IV bag keeping the sheriff’s deputy alive at the hospital twitching. Theo takes one hand off his tablet to trail it absently along her bent arm and she settles, the huff of her breath briefly skating across the outside of his thigh. Across the room and sprawled messily out in the room’s loveseat, his body still buzzing with electricity siphoned from Theo’s truck battery and clearly still half-drunk with it, Josh grunts a small sound and shifts restlessly before slumping back down, one arm falling to hang bonelessly over the edge of the cushion.

But leaned up against the wall opposite Theo, Hayden just shrugs her shoulders to resettle her crossed arms, and doesn’t look away from him. “All that time that Scott and the others thought Liam was in love with me—”

That gets Theo’s attention, and he looks up from the photos he’d secretly taken of all the evidence that Scott and Stiles and the Sheriff had gathered on all the chimeras, red Xs through the dead and none of them, as far as Theo could tell, the last.

“—he was really in love with you.” Hayden concludes, the angle of her chin half a challenge. Theo considers it for a few seconds, but he doesn’t want—or particularly need—to take her up on it.

“Picked up on that, did you?” He comments idly instead, and looks back down at his tablet to swipe to the next screenshot.

“I never understood why he let them think it, but I guess it all makes sense now.” Hayden says, and Theo doesn’t know where she’s going with the whole conversation, not until she suddenly demands, “How long?”

Theo looks back up at her, and then he leans a little farther, a little more firmly back against the couch back. Hayden’s eyes are hard and the line of her mouth is tight, and for a moment Theo considers not answering; considers brushing her off. But beside Theo, tension has started to flow into Tracy’s previously lax limbs, and across the room Josh’s chaotic sprawl has gotten a little less careless; listening, even if they were both doing an immensely poor job of trying to pretend they weren’t.

So finally he replies, holding her eyes steadily as he does, “Almost as long as we’ve both been with the Doctors.”

Hayden’s jaw just tightens. “Which is how long?” She insists, and Theo wonders if she realizes that her claws are in danger of popping out; he can see the white-knuckled tips of her fingers pressed tight to her biceps.

Theo tilts his head thoughtfully and doesn’t look away from her. Out somewhere at the high school with Corey, Liam is playing both sides against the middle, Mason’s good-natured, rock-solid, naive loyalty in one hand and Corey’s soft shy smile in the other; Liam pressing his naked chest up against Theo’s back early this morning and murmuring think I can kill two birds with one stone in his ear as he’d skated light fingertips down across Theo’s bare ribs, the outside of his bare thigh. Even in his absence, though, the curiosity that had tightened Tracy’s and Josh’s muscles starts transmuting into something else, Josh’s eyes slitting open to reveal their ghostly-purple glow and Tracy’s exhales starting to burr into a rough-edged hiss.

So Theo checks the crackling swirl of displeasure rising in his chest as he holds Hayden’s eyes and drops a hand onto Tracy’s shoulder, shakes his head mutely, once, at Josh. Hayden only then seems to realize that danger she’d unintentionally stumbled into, and recoils back some against the wall as she glances, startled, between Tracy and Josh, her eyes starting to flare.

“Is there a point to this interrogation?” Theo asks calmly, reclaiming her attention before the potential confrontation could develop further.

When Hayden looks back at him her eyes are human brown but still a little wild, her breathing a little fast. Theo can visibly see her debating whether to continue questioning him, but eventually she swallows, and straightens her shoulders back up, and looks him dead in the eye; Theo can’t help the swell of approval he feels, watching her.

“Maybe I’m just trying to figure out what it is you two want," she finally says, only the slightest shake to her voice.

Under Theo’s hand Tracy shifts, some, her eyes now on his face. Across the room Josh sits up too, the glow gone from his gaze but the curiosity returned. So Theo just lets a slow, sharp smirk take his lips and tells her—tells each of them: “You’re still thinking about this all wrong.” Hayden’s brow furrows with confusion and so Theo laughs a little, leans a little further back against the couch as he clarifies, “You’re still thinking about this like it’s about right and wrong, or good and evil.”

Hayden’s expression spasms with frustration and irritation and not a little contempt. “Then what’s it really about?”

Theo lets the silence drag for a few seconds as he studies her, as she and Josh and Tracy study him; as they study each other. Less than a week ago the three of them and Corey had been corpses, failed science experiments pumped full of mercury and left to rot around the boughs of an ancient, sacred tree, and today they’re alive, and well, and powerful.

“Survival,” Theo finally answers. “It’s about survival.”

---

Tracy’s the one who tells Theo about Liam leading Scott to the secondary operating theater in the tunnels.

“He did what?” Theo asks, shock and disbelief turning the edges of his question into a snarl.

Tracy recoils from him, her eyes going wide, but she doesn’t get a chance to answer; Liam appears in the main operating tunnel doorway, Hayden and Corey on his heels, and Theo’s narrow-eyed gaze flicks up to him instead. Liam meets his eyes for a second and then glances at Tracy, who quails back some under the attention. After a moment Liam smiles, wide and easy, and jerks his chin to the side; dismissing her. Tracy immediately goes, and Hayden and Corey follow her; Corey back to his house to get ready for his date with Mason and Hayden to wherever the hell she’s been disappearing off to for the last few days.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Theo demands once he and Liam are alone, Liam making slow, lingering progress in coming into the rest of the room, towards Theo.

“I was thinking,” Liam answers, his tone deliberately over-precise, and entirely meant to grate, “that the Argents were going to tell Scott about it anyway, so I might as well score some points by helping him find it first.”

He stops a few feet away from Theo, posture casual as he slumps back against a nearby table and his expression one big dare. Theo has to consciously stop his teeth from grinding. Instead he focuses on the more immediately relevant part of Liam’s little speech: “Argents?” He clarifies. “Plural?”

Liam gives a brisk nod. “Argent the Younger healed Argent the Senior for help with the Beast. Seems Grandpa Gerard remembers the legends around the Maid of Gévaudan.” He smirks, apparently entertained.

“I’m glad you find that funny,” Theo hisses at him, “because I’m guessing the Doctors aren’t going to be nearly as amused when they find out.”

Liam’s expression goes hard, and spasms with something twisted before he manages to smooth it back out. “I don’t think they’re going to be finding out much of anything," he drawls, and his gaze when he meets Theo’s eyes is laconic as he explains, “Not with how focused they are on their pet.”

Theo stares at him, caught by the absolute vitriol dripping from Liam’s words. The look on Liam’s face is still deceptively easy, but Theo can hear his pulse beating out a steady, staccato challenge against his ribs—the dare from before back and morphed into something sharper; something barbed. Theo runs his eyes over Liam’s tipped up chin, the subtle press of his fingertips gone white-knuckled against the edge of the table, and thinks that he couldn’t take Liam up on his challenge even if he wanted to; it’s clearly not meant for him.

But he doesn’t get a chance to address it: his phone buzzes, even the vibration thunderously loud in the echoing, cavernous sprawl of the operating theater. Liam smirks as Theo closes his eyes, briefly, expression twisting with frustration.

“And how is the Desert Wolf?” Liam asks, tilting his head as Theo takes his phone out of his pocket and glances at it.

“Impatient,” Theo answers, and slides his phone back into his pocket without replying. He refocuses on Liam to find Liam already looking back, his lips still curled in that same sharp smile.

“You should just spit out whatever it is,” Liam tells him; Theo’s jaw clenches.

“You told me we’d fix this, Liam,” Theo reminds him, and this time Liam does lose control of his expression as it spasms out of its carefully carefree hold. “We have to fix this.”

Liam doesn’t answer right away, just jerks his gaze sideways, his jaw working. His fingertips curl a little harder against the table, but there’s no telltale screech of claws-on-metal. It takes a few seconds but finally he smirks, and gives himself a small, visible little shake.

“Yes, sir," he says, and turns back to Theo with his tongue firmly in his cheek. He darts in before Theo can open his mouth to respond, and presses a quick, hard kiss to Theo’s lips, one hand coming up to hold Theo’s chin steady for it.

Then he pulls back, and starts walking backwards away from Theo, towards the exit. He throws Theo a sloppy salute as he goes and flashes him another grin, and then he turns to disappear back out of the operating theater. Theo watches him go, stomach an uneasy, churning mess, the picture of Liam’s last smile sitting heavily at the forefront of his mind.

His last smile, and the way that it hadn’t gone anywhere near his eyes.

---

Malia alive, Beast interrupted, Josh sends Theo later that night, and Theo swears forcefully and ends up snapping the front legs of the Raeken house’s kitchen table like toothpicks when he slams his hands down on it.

He’s braced over the sink, his fingertips pressed hard to the metal and his claws threatening to punch holes through the edge, when he hears the floorboards leading into the room creak. Liam’s eyes are sleep-heavy and his hair’s a mess, his arms crossing over his chest and his bare feet curling against the floor as he leans against the door jamb. He’s not looking at Theo when Theo first looks back at him, but at the ruined table. After a few long seconds he looks back up and raises his eyebrows, tilts his head against the wall.

“Malia escaped her mother. Got Deaton out, too.” Theo tells him, nearly snarling it out around a mouthful of almost-fangs, the pressure at his gums making his jaw ache.

“Can’t say I’m surprised,” Liam comments, reaching forward with a foot to absently toe at one of the snapped table legs.

And Theo can’t help it; he whips around to glare at Liam head-on as he snaps, “How are you not more worried about this?”

Liam frowns at him. “It’s one setback, Theo, we’ll—”

But Theo doesn’t let him finish. “One setback?” He repeats incredulously. “What about Scott being alive? Or him and Stiles back to being best irritating friends?” The line of Liam’s mouth gets more and more mulish as Theo talks, but Theo isn’t done. “They got Kira back, Liam. And now Malia, and Deaton, too. That’s not one setback, that’s complete and total—”

He cuts himself off, abruptly, unable to say failure; his throat closes up around the word and he turns back to the sink, drops his head into his hands. He nearly drops one down to his neck—to the veins pumping just below the surface—but stops, digs his fingers hard into the flesh of his face instead; his skin already prickling with the phantom prick of a needle.

“We had one job,” Theo continues, his voice muffled by his palms. “One job: to dismantle the McCall pack, and we—” He stops, a swell of hysterical amusement rising in his throat as he concludes, “Well. At least you’ll know where to find my body, now.”

He’s caught up enough in his half-panicked thoughts that he doesn’t hear Liam move, but he sure as hell feels it when Liam gets ahold of his arm and yanks him around. Liam’s eyes are wild and the curve of his mouth furious as he shoves Theo back hard against the sink, half-bending him over it as Liam crowds in close, his hand—his clawed hand—wrapped tight around Theo’s bicep.

“Do not joke about that," he hisses through a mouthful of fangs, his eyes flaring.

Theo tries to shove him back and fails, his own eyes flaring and his fangs dropping, finally, the pressure at his gums giving way as he snarls at Liam. Liam just snarls back and presses in closer, bending Theo further over the sink, his lower back aching as the edge digs into his spine.

So Theo gives up on trying to get away and just meets Liam’s eyes as he hisses, “Who’s joking? You and I both know what happens to failed chimeras.”

Liam just snarls at him again, loud and furious enough that even Theo struggles not to immediately drop his head; to bare his throat. “You think I’d let them do that to you?” Liam demands, his clawed hand around Theo’s bicep now tight enough to draw blood; Theo can feel it sliding down his arm. “You think I’d let them kill you?”

Theo just laughs, sharp-edged and incredulously. “Jesus, Liam. How exactly are you planning on stopping them?”

Liam stares at him for a second longer, his gold-bright eyes running over Theo’s face, searching for something, but whatever he’s looking for, he apparently doesn’t find it: all at once he gives another half-swallowed snarl and surges backwards, pulling Theo with him and off the sink as he goes. Before Theo can do more than suck in a sharp, surprised breath, Liam has twisted him sideways and down, slamming him down onto the floor and pinning him there with his clawed hands clenched tight in Theo’s hair, his knees digging hard into the tile on either side of Theo’s ribs.

“Listen to me," he orders, yanking Theo’s head up so that Theo has no choice but to meet his burning, furious gaze. “I am not going to let them touch you, do you understand me?”

“Liam…” Theo breathes, staring at him, his earlier, sharp-edged panic starting to drain away to be replaced by something else; by the wild look in Liam’s eyes.

But Liam just jerks his captured head once, cutting him off, “Listen to me.”

He runs his eyes over Theo’s face once Theo stills, shocked, searching it. His fingers gentle in Theo’s hair, some, and he slides his hands down until he’s cradling Theo’s face, though his grip is still tight enough that Theo can feel bruises forming and healing and forming again under his fingertips.

“Do you trust me?” He asks, suddenly, tone less wild but just as forceful.

“What?” Theo replies immediately, blankly, his brow furrowing, and then his own ire starts to rise. “How can you even ask me—”

Liam’s fingers tighten and he shakes Theo’s head again, once, and sharply. “Do you trust me?” He insists.

“Jesus christ, yes,” Theo snaps at him, trying and failing to rip Liam’s hands away from his face. “Of course.”

Liam just shakes him off, the press of his fingers getting even harder as he fights off Theo’s attempted escape. “Then trust me," he orders, his eyes still gold but his mouth back to human as Theo stops struggling and looks up at him.

Theo can feel the press of Liam’s thighs against his ribs every time he sucks in a harsh breath, every time he exhales back out, can feel the ten points of grounding pressure around his jaw, against his cheeks, the back of his skull, as Liam holds his head steady. Staring at Liam staring back at him he can’t help but shudder out a sudden shaky sound, the last of his earlier fear draining out of him as he slumps in Liam’s grip, which only tightens, holding him up; holding him firm.

“You told Hayden and Josh and Tracy that what we’re doing, it’s about survival,” Liam murmurs to him, quick and resolute; a recitation of facts. “But you and me—” He continues, curling further over Theo so that their mouths are just inches apart, so that Theo couldn’t look anywhere else if he wanted to, “—we’re going to do more than just survive. We’re going to do more than just succeed.” He promises, putting a particularly harsh emphasis on the word. “We’re going to get what we want, okay? We’re going to get everything that we want.”

Theo just stares at him, stunned.

But his silence doesn’t seem to satisfy Liam, whose jaw clenches—Theo can see the muscle in the corner of it jump—and he tightens his grip around Theo’s head, repeats, “Okay?”

“Okay,” Theo says immediately, rotely.

But feeling Liam’s hands around his face, feeling Liam’s knees, Liam’s thighs, caging in his ribs, his stunned confusion starts to bleed away, starts to become something else. And so he leans up, and presses his lips to Liam’s best he can still half-pinned, and waits until Liam makes a small, quiet noise and presses back, to pull back and meet Liam’s eyes again.

“Okay," he repeats, firmly; decisively; faithfully.

---

It’s Hayden who tells him, weirdly; Theo’s almost more confused by that initially than the content of her text, and then he feels all of the color drain out of his face.

“Get up," he snarls at Josh, at Tracy, at Corey, kicking the chair Josh is sprawled out in. Josh flails and opens his mouth, expression pissed, and then he gets a look at whatever must be on Theo’s face and closes it again.

“What is it?” Tracy asks, hurrying over to stand next to Corey, who’s watching Theo warily.

“The McCall pack is trying to break into Eichen House to get Lydia, we have to get to her first,” Theo answers, reaching for his jacket with one hand as he tries, and fails, to get ahold of Liam with his phone held in the other.

“What?” Josh replies, baffled and still sitting. “Why?”

“Because she knows the truth about Liam,” Corey realizes, quietly and with his wide eyes on Theo’s face; Theo looks back at him, teeth gritting.

They beat the McCall pack to Lydia but don’t count on Parrish, an oversight which Theo shoves to the back of his mind to deal with later. His only saving grace is that even being ridden hard by his hellhound alter-ego, Parrish is apparently too much of a Boy Scout to kill anyone; even Corey he leaves alive, if badly wounded. But Theo doesn’t have time to deal with Corey’s agonized gasps or Tracy’s and Josh’s defeated sprawls or with anyone, really, except Valack escaping with Lydia; he ignores the throbbing pain in his leg from Valack’s attack and takes Parrish out of contention, at least for the moment, with the section of pipe that Josh had ripped off the wall.

And then he looks Stiles dead in the eye and promises, “You won’t find her without me,” and means it as more of a threat than Stiles likely realizes, Theo’s claws pressing at the flesh of his fingertips; waiting.

But he miscalculates—again—desperation making him stupid, making him hasty; making him blind.

Theo gets the door to Valack’s secret lab open and doesn’t even think about the fact that his back is to Stiles, his focus immediately narrowing in on Lydia; on the way that she looks at him and memory widens her eyes. Theo’s claws have already shifted and his mouth has already filled with fangs when Stiles suddenly says, “Sorry, Theo,” from behind him, not sounding particularly sorry at all, and Theo barely has time to snarl as he whirls around to face Stiles before Stiles is slamming something solid against the side of his skull.

Theo goes down hard, and is out before he hits the ground.

---

He wakes up on the couch in the Geyer living room, his head in Liam’s lap. Eyes widening, Theo tries to surge upright only to be held down by Liam’s hand on his shoulder; Theo jerks to look at him and warns him, low and frantic, “Liam, they know.”

“I know,” Liam replies, smirking, and it’s only then, turning his head to follow Liam’s line of sight, that Theo sees Scott and Malia and Stiles and Kira and Argent, all fanned out throughout the rest of the room, all of them tense and Scott’s eyes a furious, blazing red.

Theo tries to sit up again and this time Liam lets him go. Scrambling to his feet, Theo snarls when Argent’s response is to snap the gun in his hands up and point it directly at Theo’s heart; movement out of the corner of Theo’s eye reveals Josh, Tracy, Corey, and Hayden all spread out behind the couch, Tracy hissing at Argent in turn. But Liam doesn’t stand or speak, just leans back a little more firmly against the cushions and smirks even more widely at Scott, bringing his legs up to stretch them out across the coffee table and one arm rising to drape languidly over the back of the couch.

“So you’re one of them,” Scott says, voice more animal growl than human; Theo can see his shoulders heaving with his harsh, heavy breathing.

“One of…?” Liam repeats curiously, his brow furrowing innocently, and then he tips his head back to look at the chimeras behind him and then at Theo, and he lets his expression smooth back out as he smiles and looks back at Scott. “Ah. I could see how that would be the natural conclusion to draw. But no, I’m not a chimera.”

“Then what…?” Scott starts to ask, obviously thrown; from the visible confusion on the rest of the McCall pack members’ faces, they hadn’t expected that answer either.

“Oh, I’m a wolf,” Liam interrupts easily. And then he blinks his eyes to reveal a bright, icy blue as he concludes, “I’m just not your wolf.”

Scott, Stiles, and Kira recoil; Malia’s silent snarl just deepens and Argent’s perfect posture doesn’t so much as twitch.

“But…you…how?” Scott finally manages, the red of his eyes dimming some as he stares at Liam in shock.

Liam blinks again to reveal gold-flared eyes, and then blinks one last time to drop the shift altogether. “Everything you’ve seen the Doctors do, you think eye color was going to be the thing to stump them?” He asks derisively.

The low burr of Malia’s growl kicks up, her weight shifting onto the balls of her feet as she glares at Liam, her own eyes burning blue and her mouth full of fangs; Theo pulls his own lips farther back from his own sharp teeth in silent warning. Scott puts out a hand in front of her, his eyes flicking briefly to Theo before immediately returning to Liam.

“I bit you,” Scott says, trying to sound firm, but the question comes through; it saturates his words, right along with the betrayal that Theo can feel practically emanating from each of the McCall pack members.

“Yeah, you did,” Liam agrees, tone deliberately overly-congratulatory and saccharine; a schoolteacher handing out a gold star. “And tell me that the last year wasn’t the most impressive piece of performance art you’ve ever seen.”

Malia loses it, at that point; she lunges forward even as Scott and Argent yell at her to stop. Liam doesn’t bother to move, though, and neither does Theo; Josh and Tracy are there in an instant, Josh darting in front of Liam with his ghostly purple eyes and his predator’s cry and Tracy catching and spinning Malia to the side, throwing her hard into a wall across the room. Malia slams into it with a choked sound and then hits the ground, half-curling onto her stomach as she coughs up a mouthful of blood.

Liam leans forward to look at the damage to the wall and frowns as he says, earnestly and perfectly acted, “Aw man, my mom’s going to be so pissed.” He leans back and must catch the scandalized looks on Scott’s and the other’s faces because he says, “Oh, stop looking at me like that. Dr. and Mrs. Geyer are perfectly fine. The Doctors can give memories as easily as they can take them away.”

Scott still looks horrified. “So the Dread Doctors just…convinced them that they have a son?”

“Or gave them back a son that they’d lost,” Liam posits instead, and then smiles, shark-like, when he sees his theory clearly take root in the McCall pack’s members’ minds. “Oh, that possibility is going to keep you up at night, isn’t it?”

Malia—now climbing painfully to her feet—growls weakly. Liam tosses her an amused, dismissive smirk, but then he looks quickly back at Scott when Scott sucks in a sharp breath, his eyes flicking from Malia to Tracy to Liam as he apparently realizes something, his expression slackening in surprise.

“You…” He starts slowly, and then jerks his gaze to Theo instead. “The chimeras aren’t following you," he breathes, and his head snaps back to Liam. “They’re following you!”

Liam snorts. “Of course they are. Who do you think provided their donor werewolf DNA? Well," he stops, and tips his head back to smile at Theo; a real smile, not that anyone else would recognize it as such. “All except Theo, anyway. He’s an original model.”

Scott’s and the others’ faces blank, and Liam laughs, loud and mean. Underneath the sound Theo can hear his heartbeat, the electrified-staccato beat of it; can smell his scent, the stalking-predator bite of it. It pulses against his ears, fills his nose, his lungs, and Theo feels the shift surging under his skin in answer, the burn of it tightening his muscles and stiffening his spine. Argent must notice because he refocuses on Theo, his gun—which had slowly started to drift towards Liam—snapping back. The movement sets off a domino effect, Tracy and Josh snarling and Malia’s and Kira’s eyes flaring.

“Oh christ, Scott,” Liam moans, dropping his head back dramatically before bringing it back up. “Can we just skip to the end?”

“What?” Scott asks, echoed almost immediately by Stiles, though without the additional peanut gallery editorialization; Liam smiles sharply at Stiles’ vitriolic commentary and doesn’t respond. Theo for his part just barely manages to swallow down his own question; just barely manages to keep his own expression smooth and his eyes on Argent as suspicion sparks down his spine.

Liam turns back to Scott, effortlessly holding Scott’s still-red gaze. “You’re Scott McCall,” Liam reminds him dismissively. “You’re not going to kill me, and you’re not going to let any of your lackeys kill me.” He smiles winsomely first at Argent, then at Malia, but makes sure to say lackeys while looking at Stiles; Stiles flinches, clearly thinking of Donovan. “So let’s skip all the posturing and get to negotiating the part that really matters.”

“What are you talking about?” Scott demands, a half-hysterical edge riding his words.

“Our alliance, of course.” Liam tells him, and smiles.

---

Theo corners Hayden at the high school the next day, pinning her back against one of the lab tables after the rest of the class leaves, his hands gripping the edge of the chipped black laminate counter on either side of her hips.

“What do you know that I don’t know?” Theo demands, low and steady but lined in steel.

Hayden snarls at him, her eyes flaring and her mouth filling with fangs. “I don’t know what you’re talking about," she snaps at him, and tries to shove out of his hold.

Theo doesn’t need to hear her heart jump to know she’s lying. “Yeah, you do.” He disagrees, shoving her back in place between his caging arms. He searches her furious expression for a few seconds, his upper lip starting to curl up as he tells her, nearly sing-songing it out softly: “Hayden Romero, always in the right place at the right time.” Then his gaze and voice both harden as he adds, “To help the McCall pack, anyway.”

Hayden’s eyes widen in surprise and her scent sours some with fear, but both smooth right back out the next second as she counters, practically hissing it out, “Isn’t that the deal Liam made? We help the McCall pack protect the town, and they help Liam take the Beast’s power?”

Theo just presses in closer. “One problem with that argument, Hayden. You were helping them before Liam made that deal.”

This time Hayden’s jaw clenches, and her scent stays free of fear. It does spike with anger, though, Hayden leaning forward in turn as she snarls, “I’m just doing what I’m told. You have a problem with that, take it up with the alpha.”

She shoves him again, and this time Theo is too distracted—too surprised—to keep her pinned. She stalks away from him, towards the door, and slams out of the classroom before he can pull his mind out of the stunned spiral it’d fallen into, Hayden’s words—her accusation, her insinuation—replaying over and over in his head. He’s still standing there a few minutes later when Tracy and Josh slip into the room, their hesitant expressions clearly communicating that they’d overheard the entire confrontation. Theo ignores them for a moment, jaw working as he stares at nothing, and then he turns his head to look at them; they both stiffen.

“Follow her,” Theo orders them shortly. “Don’t let her see you.”

---

“Your lackeys’ stealth skills could use some work,” Liam tells him later that night, perched on the counter in the Raeken kitchen when Theo comes into the room.

Theo feels a spike of something jolt down his spine but ruthlessly smothers it, continuing past Liam towards the sink as he replies, “My lackeys? Since when are they mine?”

Liam just smirks—though it doesn’t touch his eyes—his head turning to follow Theo’s progress as he walks across the room. “Since you sent them to ineffectually spy on Hayden.”

Theo sets his plate down into the sink with a louder clatter than he’d originally intended. Liam’s eyebrows rise in response to the noise, Theo can see it out of the corner of his eye, and Theo can’t help it; he grits his teeth and braces his arms wide on the counter, looking up to stare out the window over the sink for a long, tense moment before shaking his head and straightening to look back at Liam. “Maybe you can help me skip the subterfuge, then, and just tell me directly what she’s up to.”

Liam studies him for a moment. “Who says she’s up to anything?” He wonders, but the attempted deflection doesn’t land, and from the way he immediately looks away from Theo, his jaw clenching, he’d known it wasn’t going to. “Last I checked we’re all on the same side," he tries instead, tilting his head some so that he can meet Theo’s eyes.

“Are we?” Theo replies, calm but with a sharp undercurrent to it that Liam catches and doesn’t appreciate, given the way his eyes brighten in the washed-out glow of the overhead lights and the way his fingers tighten around the edge of the counter.

“The hell is that supposed to mean?” Liam demands, watching him head-on, now.

“You didn’t talk to me about making an alliance with Scott,” Theo says, turning so that he’s facing Liam directly, arms crossing.

“You were unconscious,” Liam reminds him, his tone very nearly flippant, even if his eyes are still hard; still fixed on Theo’s.

Theo’s jaw clenches, his nostrils flaring. “You aren’t telling me about whatever you’re having Hayden do.”

“Compartmentalization,” Liam answers, voice still too easy.

Theo gives a muted snarl and then gives up, shoves off the sink to start walking away. He doesn’t make it far: Liam grabs his arm, now on his feet, and pulls him to a stop; pulls him around so that Liam can look at him, search his face.

“You said you trusted me,” Liam reminds him quietly, his fingers spasming around Theo’s arm.

“I do trust you,” Theo snaps, yanking his arm out of Liam’s grip and turning back to continue walking away. “Apparently it’s you who doesn’t trust me.”

“Hey!” Liam snarls, and catches his arm to drag him to a stop again. This time when he jerks him around it’s forcefully enough that Theo stumbles before regaining his balance, his own lips starting to twist in a snarl. But Liam beats him to it, dropping his grip on Theo’s arm to bring both hands up to Theo’s face, holding it firm as he says hotly, “Don’t say that. You know that’s bullshit.”

“I’m not sure what I know anymore,” Theo disagrees, attempting to pull Liam’s hands away with his fingers clamped around Liam’s wrists. “I don’t know what the hell you’re doing lately.”

Liam won’t budge, taking a step forward when Theo takes a step backward in a futile effort to escape his grip. “I’m doing exactly what I told you I would.” Liam counters, “I’m making sure we get what we want.”

“Which is what, exactly?” Theo explodes, frustration and confusion and not a little resentment bubbling up and out of his throat; resentment from finding himself on the other side of Liam’s sly, meaningless, impenetrable smiles, for the first time since the Doctors had dumped a small, shaken, and newly-bitten werewolf at Theo’s feet all those years ago. “What is it that you want, Liam? What is it that you actually want?”

“You,” Liam responds immediately, his brow furrowing and his tone roughening with—with hurt, of all things. Theo stares at him. “It’s always been you.”

“You have me,” Theo protests, his voice a harsh whisper and his hands still holding Liam’s wrists.

Liam’s jaw just clenches. “Yeah, well. So do they.”

“They…?” Theo repeats blankly, then realizes, “You mean the Doctors?”

Liam holds his eyes but doesn’t respond, his expression going mulish. Theo’s about to open his mouth to say something, say anything, when the floorboards outside of the kitchen creak and both his and Liam’s heads whip to the side. Corey freezes, Hayden behind him with her eyes wide and dropping like magnets to Liam’s hands still wrapped tight around Theo’s face.

“What?” Liam snarls, his fingers spasming around Theo’s jaw, though he doesn’t drop them away.

“Scott,” Corey stammers, shrinking back. “He wants to meet.”

Liam’s jaw works as he glowers at Corey, but finally he exhales out harshly and looks back at Theo. He tightens his grip around Theo’s skin, just briefly, and then drops his hands, leaving Theo standing there, speechless and with Liam’s phantom warmth seeping slowly out of his skin, a barbed mass of something roiling in his chest and compressing his lungs.

“Fine,” Liam says, his eyes still on Theo’s. “Let’s go.”

---

Mason can’t seem to figure out how to take the revelation of Liam’s true loyalties, and then Mason turns out to be the Beast.

“It doesn’t change anything,” Liam states flatly, stood in the parking lot bloody and bruised with Scott and Theo and the rest of their combined packs, staring after where Corey—fucking Corey—had disappeared with Mason after the disaster that had been the charity lacrosse game, the Beast’s attack on the library.

Theo doesn’t believe him and clearly neither does Scott, Scott’s eyes flicking up and out to look at Stiles framed half-in and half-out of the door into the school, Tracy and Kira panting and shellshocked on either side of him. That’s the instant that Theo would have known—if he hadn’t already—that the McCall pack is planning some kind of double-cross, but he doesn’t have time to worry about it; not with Mason in the wind and a giant question mark over the Doctors’ whereabouts, their next moves.

“Go," he snarls at Josh, at Tracy. At Hayden, who hesitates for a second—looking back and forth between Theo, Liam, and Scott—before she finally takes off; off to search for Mason and Corey hidden somewhere in Beacon Hills.

Scott tries to demand that Liam and Theo come back to the McCall house as everyone tries to regroup, but Liam refuses, and snarls at Scott in a fang-mouthed dare when Scott tries to insist. Instead he leads Theo back down to the main operating theater, still in his torn and grime-caked uniform and with blood dried tacky down one side of his face. Theo grits his teeth and resists the urge to reach out, to press his fingers to Liam’s red-streaked temple; too aware of the pulse pounding underneath it and the way that tension is vibrating each and every one of Liam’s muscles.

“They’re going to find him,” Liam murmurs lowly, staring up at the empty tank that had, until recently, contained the naked-and-bound alpha werewolf. “They know his frequency.”

“Good,” Theo replies, and watches not Liam’s expression, but the way his shoulders tighten; surprise and confusion and something else, something that he manages to wipe off his face before he turns to look at Theo quizzically. “You can’t take the power from Mason. It has to be the Beast.” Theo reminds him, and the line of Liam’s mouth hardens.

“We need the map,” Liam says instead of responding to Theo’s point as he turns back to face the empty tank. “The map with the telluric currents.”

“Guess we’re going to Scott’s after all,” Theo murmurs, and doesn’t flinch when Liam snaps his teeth on a harsh, frustrated growl.

Finding Mason turns out to be the easy part. Getting him out becomes infinitely more complicated, even Theo and Liam staring in horror at the macabre device attached the back of Mason’s neck, Theo slowly circling around Mason’s slumped and shaking form with his eyes on the slow trickle of blood leaking down Mason’s back.

“What the hell is that?” Scott breathes.

“I don’t know,” Liam answers, just as low and stunned.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? You’re the Dread Doctors’ pet assistant!” Scott snarls, eyes flaring red as he glares at Liam.

Liam’s eyes flash—and flash blue, Liam apparently done with the charade—but he doesn’t get the chance to respond, his and Theo’s heads both snapping up and around. Scott doesn’t hear anything, not at first, but Liam is already backing away by the time the Geneticist and the Pathologist appear in the upper reaches of the Doctors’ forest lab. Scott sucks in a sharp breath and turns to face them instead, and just in time for the Surgeon to stalk into the room, the deceptively delicate click of their cane echoing in the small space.

“Theo,” Liam orders, Theo’s name half a growl around Liam’s shifted teeth, “Get Mason out of that thing.”

Theo swears, and whirls to crouch down next to Mason, desperately trying to focus and ignore the sounds of the fighting that immediately breaks out; the sounds of Scott and Liam losing, the Doctors batting them around like toys, like distractions; like nothing. Mason cries out the instant that Theo gets his hand around the device attached to his neck and Theo grits his teeth, then startles backwards some when Corey suddenly appears on Mason’s other side.

“You,” Theo hisses, and then his head jerks up when he hears Liam give a harsh cry as he collides with a wall.

Theo nearly goes to him but stops himself at the last second, cursing and turning back to Mason. “Hold him," he orders Corey, and reaches for the device again.

But the Surgeon appears behind him, and Theo has only a moment for his eyes to widen before he’s being thrown backwards, across the room. He can feel it as his ribs break, as they drive into his lungs, and he’s already choking up blood by the time he hits the ground; by the time he can raise his head weakly, look up and out towards the Surgeon now holding Corey off the ground by his neck.

Theo can see Scott rushing towards him, can see Liam struggling to his feet, but he clocks them only absently, only dimly, his wide—and getting wider—eyes on Mason as Mason says Corey’s name, as he puts a hand to the device attached to the back of his own neck and starts to pull it up, starts to pull it off. Scott stumbles to a halt and Liam freezes on his hands and knees, their stunned-startled expressions on Mason, because black smoke starts to swirl around Mason’s feet; because ghost-blue light starts to fill Mason’s eyes.

“Transformation without frequency,” The Surgeon announces, triumph clear even through their modulated voice, and then all hell promptly breaks loose.

---

“Liam,” Theo coughs wetly as Liam curses lowly and gets him set down on one of the exam tables in the operating theater, Liam’s face and torso still bloodied and his eyes still blue; the shift slipping loose of his control. “Jesus christ, Liam—”

He closes his eyes, pain lancing up his spine as his ribs knit themselves back together; as they pull themselves free of his lungs. Between them and the Beast’s clawmarks down Theo’s torso Theo can barely move, even with Liam’s hand on the side of his neck draining what pain he can. But even through the haze of agony Theo can’t help but see it again, his mind a half-hysterical loop of the Beast taking off the Pathologist’s head, of the Beast ripping the Geneticist’s chest to shreds; of the Beast burying its claws deep in the Surgeon’s guts.

They’re dead, his mind keeps repeating. Jesus christ, they’re dead.

“Josh! Tracy!” Theo hears Liam suddenly snarl, and forces his eyes open in time to see Josh and Tracy appear over him and on his other side from Liam. Liam studies them both for a few seconds, and then demands, “You know what you have to do?”

“Yes,” Josh replies, immediately and with his hands clenching around the table by Theo’s hip and shoulder; Tracy nods.

“Good,” Liam orders, and starts to turn away.

Theo manages to reach out and grab his arm with a gasped, protesting, “Liam!”

Liam turns back instantly, and doesn’t just stop, but abruptly reverses momentum to surge back into Theo, cupping a bloody hand around his face. “The Argents are leading Sebastien into the sewers, I’ve got to go.” He explains quickly, his fingers gripping Theo’s skin tightly, digging in.

Theo starts to struggle to his side. “I’ll go, go wi—” He starts to say, then almost immediately collapses back down with an agonized cry.

Liam follows him down, his hand dropping to Theo’s neck to pull his pain away. “No, you won’t. You will stay here, and heal.” He looks back up at Josh, and his eyes are hard. “If anything happens to him…” He threatens, and doesn’t need to finish; Josh pales and nods.

“Liam, god damn it,” Theo swears hoarsely, trying to struggle upwards again, but Liam just pins him down and then kisses him hard, before suddenly whirling around and making for the exit, Tracy on his heels.

Theo rolls over, panting, to stare after him, and then he snarls and forces himself the rest of the way off the table, onto his feet. He half-collapses almost instantly, catching himself on the table and with his shredded torso, his still-healing ribs, screaming. Josh makes a high, panicked noise and circles around to get his hands on Theo’s arms, try and haul him back onto the table’s surface. Snarling, Theo extends his claws so that they’re digging into the flesh of Josh’s grasping forearms and meets Josh’s wild gaze.

“I’m not staying here,” Theo warns him, and digs his claws in harder, Josh’s blood starting to flow in between his own knuckles.

Josh winces, but doesn’t let him go. “You have to. You have—Liam said…”

But then he cuts off, and looks up, Theo doing the same, as Sebastien Valet appears out of the shadows of the operating theater doorway, his clawed hand around Hayden’s arm.

---

“You…” Sebastien says thoughtfully, closing his eyes with a strange twitch of his head as Theo releases Josh and they both go stumbling backwards. After another half-second and another small twitch, he opens his eyes back up and murmurs, “Theo. The spy.”

Theo bares his teeth but knows they’re already covered in his own blood, his body still on the verge of collapse and the clawmarks down his torso still throbbing sharply. Sebastien smirks and throws Hayden further into the room, towards Josh and Theo. Josh catches her with a small noise and gets her back on her feet, his eyes never leaving Sebastien as Sebastien starts to slowly circle the room.

“Your former masters took something of mine,” Sebastien tells Theo, tap-tap-tapping his deadly claws across the metal exam tables and shelves he passes; Theo and Josh and Hayden beside him can’t help but flinching at the ringing, echoing strikes. “I want it back.”

Theo nearly jerks—your former masters—but manages to smother it, keeping his posture as easy as it can be under Sebastien’s watchful eye. Baring his bloody teeth again in a sneer and moving back another half-step—Josh and Hayden doing the same behind him—Theo replies, “Maybe you shouldn’t have killed them, then.”

Sebastien just smiles, and stops moving. “Where are the Argents?” He demands, the rasp of his accent making the request seem almost deceptively soft.

This time Theo does jerk, unable to stop himself. The Argents are leading Sebastien into the sewers, Liam had said, and had disappeared with Tracy on his heels. Sebastien’s smile widens and his weight shifts to the balls of his feet, and Theo’s eyes flick to the side; towards the abandoned syringe filled with Tracy’s kanima venom. Behind him he can feel Josh and Hayden sinking down into fighting stances, too, can feel the sudden electrified thrum to the air as Josh shifts, but even as he lunges for the syringe, he knows—he knows—he isn’t going to make it.

And he doesn’t.

---

Sebastien drags Theo into the sewers with him.

Literally: he digs his claws in deep between Theo’s shoulder-blades and hauls Theo upright after he’s easily disposed of both Josh and Hayden, the both of them left gasping and half-dead on the operating theater floor, and forces Theo stumbling beside him as he hunts down the Argents, as he follows the trail of their shrieking lures. Theo can barely keep his legs underneath him as they go, half-collapsing every alternate step, but Sebastien continues hauling him upright and forward, headless of Theo’s uneven, patchy breathing and his nearly blood-soaked clothes.

Time keeps telescoping oddly but Theo keeps trying to focus his senses; keeps trying to find Liam through the overwhelming stink of the sewers and the metallic bite of his own blood. But there’s nothing—nothing—until suddenly there is: until suddenly there’s a rolling wave of smoke-and-ash scent and Parrish appears at the other end of the tunnel from Sebastien and Theo, wreathed in flame and with his fanged mouth open in a snarl. Sebastien stops, Theo stumbling to a halt beside him and collapsing half down on his knees, and then all at once Sebastien rips his claws out of Theo’s back as a miasma of black smoke starts to swirl around his feet.

Theo just manages to throw himself to the side as Parrish and Sebastien—now shifted into the hulking black form of the Beast—collide. They go tearing past him and down the tunnel until they disappear from sight down a sharp turn, nothing but scorched wall and patches of flame left behind. Panting and staring after them, Theo stays slumped back against the wall for a moment, the still-weeping clawmarks on his chest and the deeper puncture wounds on his back throbbing, and then he groans and forces himself over onto his hands and knees, starts to force himself up.

And then he hears a clatter of footsteps coming from the opposite end of the tunnel, where Parrish had originally appeared from, and he looks up, and finds himself looking directly at Lydia.

She’s flanked by Tracy, and Theo feels his eyes widen first in surprise and then narrow in suspicion. Tracy stares back at him, her expression a mix of horrified and caught, her eyes flicking guiltily to Lydia as Lydia stands and stares, equally surprised, down at Theo. Mind whirring, Theo shifts his focus to look where Tracy is, to look at Lydia, and then he feels the bottom drop out of his stomach as he spots the white bandage across her neck—the white bandage over her voice box, the place that powers her banshee screams—as he realizes what her presence must mean.

“No!” He snarls, and somehow manages to lunge for her, fully intending to finish shredding her throat before she could call Mason’s name—before she could call Mason back—but he’s intercepted.

He’s intercepted by Tracy, who darts in front of Lydia, who’d already started stumbling back, and catches Theo around the waist, spinning him to the side and into the tunnel wall beside them.

“What the hell are you doing?” Theo hisses at her, one of Tracy’s hands pressing the back of his head into the wall and her other hand braced over his back, between his shoulder-blades; between Sebastien’s still-sluggishly healing puncture wounds.

“Sorry, Theo,” Tracy whispers, and genuinely sounds sorry as she—as she drops her hand from his back to the base of his spine, her suddenly-clawed finger slicing through the bottom of his shirt and shallowly through his skin.

Theo sucks in a sharp breath, already feeling his legs collapsing out from underneath him, Tracy catching him under his arms and lowering him carefully to the ground. She gets him arranged with his back to the wall, his paralyzed legs sprawled uselessly out in front of him, and then throws herself backwards as Theo strikes out, intending to grab ahold of her, intending to demand she explain.

And then the tunnels are rocked by a ferocious roar, and Lydia’s head snaps up and out, towards the sound. “C’mon," she tells Tracy, “We’ve got to keep moving.”

Tracy doesn’t move right away, just stays kneeled down outside of Theo’s reach and meets his accusing gaze, her own eyes pleading. “It’s going to be okay," she tries to tell him. “Liam said it’s going to be okay.”

“Liam told you to—” Theo starts to reply, breathless with shock, but another fierce snarl cuts through the air and Lydia yells Tracy’s name, starts taking off down the tunnel; Tracy gives Theo one last, guilty look, and then climbs quickly to her feet and hurries after Lydia. “No!” Theo yells after her, attempting to stand but managing nothing more than falling over onto his palms, his legs refusing to respond. “Tracy!”

But his snarled protest gets lost under another the chaotic sound of the fighting, Tracy disappearing after Lydia around a turn in the tunnel.

---

It takes agonizing minutes and Theo digging his own claws into his paralyzed thighs, desperate to trigger his healing, for him to be able to move again.

He can’t help but keep his eyes on the tunnel mouth the whole time, his ears catching the muted explosions of gunshots and the oddly-sonorous ringing of steel slicing through the air, and flesh; Kira back from wherever she’d disappeared to, apparently, and with her sword reforged. But it’s the fierce snarls that drive the mounting panic in his chest higher, because twisted through Scott’s and the Beast’s own overwhelming roars are Liam’s.

Finally feeling starts to return in twitching and painful shocks, and Theo throws himself over onto his knees, forces himself onto his feet to start stumbling down the tunnel, half dragging himself against the wall as he goes for support. He collapses twice on the way but finally makes it to the tunnel mouth, throws himself around the corner and then winds up tripping forward onto his knees as his legs give out once more.

And then he freezes there, staring.

It’s not the way that Kira and Tracy are whirling around the Beast that stuns him, each trying to find an opening and Tracy scratching her claws against any stretch of the Beast’s flesh she can reach before she has to dodge away again. It’s not Chris Argent, his gun hand dangling by his side and his free hand pressed tight over the bullet wound on his shoulder. It’s Liam, and the way he’s fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Scott, blue-eyed and fang-mouthed and not trying to attack the Beast, not trying to take Sebastien’s power, but instead keeping him stumbling back.

Back and away from Lydia, poised at the other end of the tunnel and sucking in a deep breath, pain all over her face but determination dug even deeper into the corners of her eyes, her lips, as she opens her mouth.

As she opens her mouth and screams.

---

The silence that falls after Mason collapses into Corey’s suddenly-visible arms, the reforged Argent pike lanced through the Beast’s spirit held fast in Parrish’s fire-limned grip, is near-complete.

Theo just stares, disbelief blanking his thoughts and draining the last of the strength from his limbs; he collapses fully onto his hands and knees and then falls sideways, onto one hip. Around the tunnel Parrish and Kira and Tracy are slumping back against the walls, panting and shaking and trading incredulous, stunned glances, Kira giving a shocky little laugh as she looks between Tracy and Lydia, who looks and laughs back, even half bent over with her hands on her knees.

And then he jerks, and his head whips around as Liam suddenly breathes, “Holy shit. Holy shit,” his eyes blue-flared and his arms and chest bloody but with his expression just fucking exhultant as he stares at where the Beast had disappated into smoke, into nothingness; not even a damned memory left behind.

“Liam,” Theo breathes.

Liam’s eyes snap to him and he makes a small noise, confusion and anger and terror all chasing themselves over his face before it settles right back into triumph and he starts hurrying over, towards Theo. He runs right past Scott, who makes no move to stop him, and he ignores Kira and Lydia and Parrish and Tracy and Argent all staring at him as he drops to his knees and slides the last few inches until he’s resting right in front of Theo, until he can take Theo’s head in his hands. He’s grinning down at Theo, his grip around the sides of Theo’s face almost tight enough to hurt, but Theo barely feels it; can barely comprehend it past the absolute confusion stealing his thoughts, his breath as he stares back up at Liam.

But Liam doesn’t seem to notice, his fierce smile getting wider and fiercer as he tells Theo, “It’s over. It’s over, we did it.”

And that snaps Theo out of it some as he replies, “Did what? I don’t—I don’t understand.” He stops, sucks in a few shaky, unsatisfying breaths as he searches Liam’s eyes. “What did you do?”

“What I said I was going to,” Liam immediately answers, his brow furrowing before he suddenly curls over Theo to press their foreheads together, “I did—I did exactly what I said I was going to do, I got us what we wanted.”

Theo just pulls back and stares at him. “What we…? But the Beast’s power…but your pack, the chance to have a real—”

“I have my pack,” Liam cuts him off, and fiercely, his fingers tightening with bruising force around Theo’s face; Theo stops, his mouth dropping softly open. Liam gentles his grip, stroking his fingertips over the already-healing marks he’d left as he tells Theo, half-whispering it, “I’ve always had my pack.” He smiles down at Theo, a little shakily, a little brokenly, “I just had to figure out how to protect it.”

“Liam…” Theo whispers, his voice cracking on Liam’s name, and Liam just laughs, a little choked and wetly, and ignores the silent stares of Scott and Lydia and Kira, of Argent and Parrish, of Tracy, as he kisses him; he just pulls Theo’s mouth up to his own and kisses him.

---

A week later, and Theo is squeezing the handle of the gas pump one last time before shaking it brusquely and pulling it out his truck’s tank, turning to replace the nozzle in the kiosk.

Up at the front of his truck and leaned back against the bumper, Liam has his arms crossed and is staring out into the tree line bordering the gas station, a small smirk on his face. Theo screws the gas cap back on and then closes the cover before making his way forward to join him, coming to rest with one hip leaned up against the sun-warmed metal next to Liam’s own and raising an eyebrow when Liam tips his head to look up at him.

“Not very stealthy, are they," he comments, and grins.

“I don’t think stealth is the point,” Theo answers, and tilts his head some so that he can glance out into the trees, and the McCall pack hidden somewhere within them.

Liam just lets his grin melt back into a smirk and laughs, low and quiet under his breath, before he pushes himself upright and starts circling the truck, heading for the passenger door. Theo watches him go and then turns back to the tree line, studying it for a few long, stretched seconds. Mixed in among the McCall pack’s wary, watchful scents are Corey’s, and Hayden’s, and beyond them—faint and growing fainter—are Josh’s and Tracy’s. A week ago, Liam had smirked at the four of them in the ruins of the operating theater, still bloody and triumphant from the fight with Sebastian and with his hand wrapped possessively around the back of Theo’s neck, and had told them: a deal is a deal. Theo had swallowed, and said nothing, and pressed harder back into the grounding pressure of Liam’s hand.

The truck rocking behind him as Liam opens the passenger door snaps him out of it, and Theo looks back at him through the windshield for a beat before looking back at the woods, and smirking. And then he pushes off the truck’s bumper himself, and turns away.

“So," he says, once he’s climbed inside the truck and shut the door behind himself. Beside him in the passenger seat Liam already has a cheap, fold-out paper map spread across his lap, his fingers wrapped lightly around the edges and his knees held carefully still beneath it. “Where to?”

Liam just looks up, and studies him for a moment, and then says, “I don’t know,” the corner of his eyes crinkling up with the force of his grin.

And so Theo smiles back, can’t help it, but then he has to look away, a small knot of something—uncertainty or fear or something—lodging in his throat. He swallows, the lump of it nearly painful, and finds himself staring out the windshield, out at the open road, as he murmurs, “It’s just us, now.”

Beside him, Liam shrugs. “It’s always been just us," he counters, and this time the smile he gives Theo when Theo looks over isn’t just a smile; Theo holds his gaze for a moment, and then he finds himself nodding once, quick and firm.

He nods, and then he reaches for his keys dangling from the ignition; he turns the engine over.