Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The best summer of Hayden’s life starts all because of a dusty old yearbook from eleven years ago, and even then, it was all up to chance.

She guesses that if she’s going to assign responsibility for the next three months of her life to any one thing, it would make more sense to pin it on her own sense of curiosity, Theo Raeken’s unreliable and complicated work schedule, or, really, what she actually finds in the garage when she goes looking for something else, but all it takes is one five-minute conversation about shitty school photos to kick everything else into gear.

It’s not that Hayden’s even particularly hell-bent on finding Valerie’s old yearbook in the garage to see if her junior picture is really as bad as she claims it is - she’s just bored, and it’s something to do. It’s the first day of summer vacation after her own long, stressful junior year, all of this newfound freedom still doesn’t feel quite real yet, and with what feels like an infinite amount of time ahead of her, going and digging around in the garage for no good reason right after breakfast seems like a perfectly good way to start the day. She’s sure that people like Mason and Corey are out joyriding right now, probably making their way down to the amusement park near the coast or skipping straight to the beach to kick off the summer their way, but Hayden has always believed that the first week of vacation should be spent as simply as possible, so that’s exactly the code that she’s planning to follow along with as she makes her way outside.

Hayden had moved into this house with Valerie five years ago, tragic circumstances having stuck her with her older half-sister out of nowhere and forcing them to move around a couple of times before any place really stuck, and it occurs to her as she pulls up the garage door that she doesn’t think she’s ever seen Valerie clean it out even once. There’s very clearly a lot more in it now than there was the last time Hayden had come in here several months ago - things that end up in the garage are really just glorified trash half the time, too important to just get tossed out with the garbage but also still very lucky not to have ended up in the piles at the dump - so she quickly realizes that looking for the yearbook is going to be an hours-long affair. Trying to walk anywhere feels like one of those action-movie scenes where the main character has to slash his way through a buggy and overgrown jungle, and it doesn’t help that Valerie kind of sucks at organization and barely bothers to label anything she puts in here. 

The attempt at finding the yearbook isn’t successful considering that she starts at noon and ends at two-thirty and has only found and looked through four boxes simply and unhelpfully labeled with just ‘books.’ It was interesting seeing some of her old baby books that Valerie got from the old Romero house back in Beachwood and probably kept for sentimentality purposes, but there are only so many piles of board books that she can look through before her eyes get tired of pastel tones and bubble letters that aren’t what she’s searching for. After she closes the last box up again and gives a half-hearted look around for another one, finding nothing, she sighs, sits down on one of the sturdier boxes near the door, and wipes some of the sweat off her brow. Okay, she thinks to herself with another deep breath in. Maybe this summer is going to start with one really cold shower and then all of the fans in the house being brought up into her bedroom.

All of the fans in the house sounds like a very appealing concept, so she’s getting up to get that started when she stops in her tracks for the first time since she got in there. All thoughts of the strawberry ice cream from the back of the freezer and eating it in front of a fan that’s blowing straight in her face halt when she spots a small red wheel peeking out from behind a box, and she approaches it slowly, almost in disbelief. Surely it’s not…

It is. 

Hayden grins to herself as she turns the corner, leaning down and pulling out her old eighth-grade skateboard from where it’s wedged in between two boxes of what she assumes are outgrown clothes. She absently glances back at where it once was, noticing an even older and smaller one behind it, but her focus is set on the one that she turns over in her hands. She can’t believe that she forgot about this. Skateboarding used to be one of her favorite things to do ever since her father gifted her her first one in fifth grade up until the beginning of sophomore year when things got complicated, first with having to get a job to help out Valerie and then with, well, everything else that had taken up her time and forced that hobby out of her mind, but just like everything else in this garage, once the skateboard had been set down in there the first time, it hadn’t come back out. 

Now that she’s looking at it again in all its glory, noticing the outdated stickers on the bottom and feeling the scrape of its worn-down grip tape against her skin and the once-clear and now-cloudy wheels under her fingertips, Hayden decides that that was a complete travesty. It may have only been about a year since she last touched it, but that feels like an eternity ago, and doing it again makes her feel overwhelmingly nostalgic. She’d forgotten how good it feels to hold its weight in her hands. 

One good look at it after the initial wave of strange emotion lets her know that it’s still in good condition, no wobbly wheels or cracks in the wood to be seen, so instead of closing up the garage door and heading back inside like she’d planned, she walks right through it and out onto the driveway with a new idea in mind.

She really only plans to play with it for a few minutes, figuring that she’ll just test it out and try some tricks for old times’ sake, but the feeling of the wheels gliding on the concrete under her feet is addictive and she ends up out there for another hour and a half. She only stops a couple of times to make sure that the board is really okay after all of its time in retirement - it is - and to put on some music on her phone around halfway through, too eager to get back on and going to get distracted for too long. She’s not even doing anything too ambitious, a little afraid of getting too confident right off the bat and wiping out, but in all honesty, it’s the most fun that she’s had on her own in weeks. 

Rolling around and quickly re-learning how to kick off shouldn’t be as entertaining as it is, and it probably helps that she finds out pretty easily that she’s retained a lot of her skill from her earlier years and that she also has even more of an advantage now than she did back then. There’s not a lot of positive things that Hayden can say about being a werewolf, still occasionally struggling through full moons and being paranoid about every bump in the night, but she finds herself being actually grateful for it for once when she realizes that she has a newfound sense of balance courtesy of her supernaturally-fast reflexes and, apparently, a supernaturally-strong equilibrium.

She forgets all about the yearbook that quickly, not bothering to make a mental note to look for it another day, so captured by what she’s doing that she won’t even remember it at all until she recalls the beginning of this summer months in the future. She just keeps going, and when it gets to be time to come in for dinner a lot faster than she thinks time should have possibly been able to go, she takes a second to look down at the skateboard before making her next move. It’s really not a debate at all what she’s going to do.

She picks it up as she walks back to the open garage door, but she keeps it right there in her hand as she pulls it closed with the other. Instead of leaving it in there to get dusty for a second time, a mistake Hayden promises herself that she will never make again, she takes it right through the front door, up the stairs, and into her bedroom when she goes to get changed out of her slightly-sweaty clothes for dinner. There’s not a lot of space for it in the little room, but she clears a spot for it by the door, leaning it up against the wall with a decisive nod. She’ll be sure to do more later.

---

If this were a normal summer, Hayden would have already spent a lot of her time working, but this year is different in a way that she loves. Valerie knows about her, uh, condition now - not the chronic kidney disease that had required her to get the transplant in the first place, the condition that comes with special healing abilities that stop that one - since there had been no other way besides telling the truth to convince her to leave the area for a few months after the Ghostriders swept through the town, which means that Hayden doesn’t have to work to lie and help her pay for medication that she doesn’t need to take anymore. As far as she can tell from what she’s learned from Scott and the others, she’ll never have to worry about her body rejecting the organ ever again, so instead of feeling the need to make the most of every bit of free time before she heads off to go work semi-illegally at the nightclub, Hayden can take her time and do everything when she feels like it. Her second day of summer vacation, a Friday that she’d ordinarily have to work on before and after the club’s nightly opening, is just as free as the first. She wakes up at eleven-thirty that day, eats breakfast leisurely, and after getting dressed in a loose t-shirt and a pair of jeans that she isn’t too attached to, she grabs the skateboard from by her door and heads outside with that and her water bottle.

Despite how easy it had been yesterday, Hayden still expects to need a little more time to adjust to being on the board again, which is why she’s kind of unreasonably surprised when she doesn’t. The saying ‘it’s just like riding a bike’ doesn’t really apply here since there are a few things that she has to remember how to do without basic instinct driving her along, but it’s not too much harder, either. She tries her hand at just rolling around the driveway at first before moving on to avoiding obstacles and then attempting to hop over objects when that gets familiar, weaving between her and Valerie’s cars and jumping stray rocks and branches in her path, but she finds that it gets a little too boring a little too quickly. 

Getting bored with something only twenty minutes in would usually be grounds enough to go back inside and find something else to do, but Hayden knows that she’s not too bored with the skateboard - it’s that what she’s doing with it is just too easy. She reminds herself that it’s good to take things slow and that she shouldn’t go into this with too much enthusiasm on the off-chance that she’s still only on a streak of beginner’s luck, but Hayden has always been driven by challenge and competitiveness, either with someone else or herself. Once she finds out that she can jump over her water bottle when it’s turned on its side and when it’s right-side up, the low-level practice is over. She knows that there are other things that she can do, and more specifically, other places to go to do it.

Valerie is at work so she won’t mind Hayden leaving, but she still shoots her a quick text as she picks up her things and sets her skateboard down on the asphalt of the street instead of the driveway. Part of her thinks to open up Google Maps to find where she needs to go, but she could never forget this street even if she tried.

---

Anyone watching Hayden pass by would probably think that she’s going nowhere, and she guesses that they wouldn’t be wrong, but she does actually have a clear spot in mind. The little skatepark a couple blocks away from Hayden and Val’s house is so small and so hidden in the area where the town fades into trees and undeveloped land that most people don’t even know it’s there, Hayden herself having come across it the first time on accident while she was on a directionless walk. She’s not exactly sure why it’s there, but for its lack of space and notability and a real street address, it looks professional enough that she’s just chalked it up to being an abandoned project that ran out of money halfway through. Either way, the concrete-laid spot has served her well over the years, and she finds herself getting more excited about returning to it the closer she gets.

When she gets there, she pushes open the gate of the tall chain-link fence surrounding the whole thing and leans on the side of it for a second just to take it all in. She’s not sure if she’s surprised or not to see that the place looks just as basically-untouched as it had before. The years have been good to it, just stray leaves and branches from neighboring trees scattered on the ground and the only trash being caught on the fence from the outside - none littered by people who have been on the inside. It’s not exactly clean and it’s not exactly dirty either, an in-between, natural state, but what interests Hayden the most is that it even lacks the graffiti that covers most of the abandoned structures in this town. She’s not sure why she’s so satisfied by that. There’s not a single speck of paint around the place or anything else showing any signs of life, and if her enhanced senses weren’t enough, that one detail is enough to know that this park has been vacant for a long time, possibly even as long as the last time she’d been there when she was fifteen.

(She’d seen Josh Diaz here once, back before she’d known him and lost him, back when he was seventeen and offering a freshman Hayden a hit of his joint when she’d looked at him for a second too long to go unnoticed, but that was a long time ago. This place, for the most part, has always been hers’.

That’s okay, she thinks even as Josh’s image flashes through her mind on her way in. That’s okay. The pack-togetherness mentality can be overwhelming sometimes. She can appreciate some time alone.)

The park itself doesn’t really have much going for it in the way of features either, comprised of just two midsize levels, a flat one higher up with a short staircase and railing leading down into the second one where the ovular bowl is set in the ground with around ten feet of space surrounding it on all sides, but that just means that there’s less to get used to again - Hayden goes in feeling pretty optimistic. She doesn’t glance at the railing twice as she steps up onto the lower one - she’d never been able to slide down that without completely screwing it up even at her best, but she notes to herself that she could try it later - but rolls around the outside of the bowl for a while, trying to gauge just how jarring the drop would feel after two days of being only on flat land. That’s where she starts her exploration for the day.

It takes a few last-minute stops and a couple of trips just sliding down without the board to get a feel for it and work up the nerve, and dropping in is still a little difficult and makes her heart momentarily jump up into her throat, but she gets it done. It’s messy and it’s a lot less coordinated than it could be and she does almost fall off when she reaches the bottom and the board starts to arc back up with the curve, but she prides herself on the fact that she doesn’t fall right back on her ass and the sense of accomplishment from trying it at all is still sweet and strong.

It’s addictive enough that even though it’s been literal years since Hayden has been able to get out of the house and let her guard down for more than a few seconds at a time, constantly aware of her body and surroundings just in case something decides to leap out of the woods at her, she manages to lose herself in her environment for the first time since she was turned. Each motion she practices shakes a little bit of tension loose, and soon enough all she registers is the board under her feet, the easy glide of her body as she moves with it, and the slight breeze in her now pulled-back hair. It’s freeing in the best of ways and gives her a rush that doesn’t even rival how it used to feel before; The relief is incomparable, because the stress of the rare day that she was beaten by her rival at something as trivial as a spelling bee in middle school is nothing like the stress of the complicated mess that her entire life is today that she can let herself forget about now. There are no monsters out here, no claws and fangs needed from her or guns with poisoned bullets from the more human of them that she’d taken every possible step to avoid when she’d first caught wind of them, and no seventh-grade boys with blue eyes and frequently bruised knuckles, either. It’s just her and the board.

---

That day she stays until four PM, which is later than she’d meant to stay and the time that Valerie texts her and asks when she’s coming home, but she comes back the next day...and the next day, and the next. Each of her sessions there get longer as she goes, starting earlier or ending later or both, and it just keeps happening like that. 

She spends the first two weeks of her summer at the park when she’s not tending to basic pack business or hanging out with her sister at home, sticking around until the sun makes her dark hair burn hot on her head and the heat makes her shirt stick to her back. On any given day she wakes up, gets dressed, eats her breakfast, says goodbye to Valerie, checks to make sure nobody in the pack needs her for anything important, and then leaves for the rest of the day. She’s pretty sure she’s caught Valerie not-so-subtly trying to make sure she’s not, like, high by checking to see if her pupils are dilated, and she’s asked Hayden several times if there are any new people in her life that she could be spending her time with, but Hayden doesn’t mind. The way she’s thrown herself into this might seem weird to Val, but it’s good to her, so prying questions are just something that she learns to be okay with.

The first time her all-day, only-sunlight routine is broken is because of something Valerie does, but it’s probably not entirely intended to stop her from going out - she just decides that she finally wants to paint the living room after months of saying that she’ll get around to it, so Hayden spends that Saturday inside with a roller in her hand and an old pair of jeans and a black cami on her body.

Painting is nice and so is spending some time with Val, and she’s sure that agreeing to stay in for once is helping to convince her that she hasn’t, in fact, picked up some kind of physically-impossible drug dependency within the last two weeks, but she still finds herself wishing she was outside while she’s doing it. Halfway through the process, even though she’s definitely enjoying the air conditioner, Hayden makes the promise to herself that she’ll go out after they’re done. 

Val ends up tapping out once seven o’clock hits and they can’t wait any longer for dinner, so after eating pizza while sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, Hayden gets her things together and goes. She doesn’t bother with changing her clothes even though they’ve definitely taken some paint-splotch hits, just taking all of her usual things plus a leftover breadstick for the road, and gets on her way after telling Val she’ll be back by ten. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she recognizes the implications of going out at night, pertaining both to Valerie’s false suspicions and Hayden’s own supernaturally-inclined apprehension, but she pushes that even further away. Threats have to sleep sometime too, don’t they?

It’s not a very smart way to think about it and she knows it, especially after having taken such precautions to avoid threats, but maybe that’s why she thinks it - she’d had her and Val pack the necessities and live out of a cheap motel two hours away for months until Scott had been able to reassure her that it was safe enough to come back, and Hayden’s tired of letting things like that happen. It’s not a very smart way to think about it and she knows it, but what’s a life without risk? flows through her head on its own, and she’s not very inclined to fight that logic.

But as it turns out, Hayden does meet something that catches her off-guard that night. It’s hard to tell exactly how to feel at first - threat or risk? Threat or risk? - but it should say enough that she’s willing to debate it at all.

She doesn’t meet it on her way there. It’s not something that jumps out of the woods at her and knocks her off her feet or something that starts to slowly creep in on her as soon as she’s left the safety of a streetlight’s glow. She meets it once the trip’s already over, once she gets there and kicks up her board to take it into her hand, popping the last bit of her breadstick into her mouth. She meets it when she looks up, startles at the sight of someone else’s five-nine frame kicking around inside, and freezes in her place.

Threat or risk? She asks herself as she stands by the gate, watching him with scrutiny. Her eyes rove over his body and every move it makes, her fingers twitching at her sides. Threat or risk?

Just as she starts to ask herself again, she watches Theo Raeken almost trip and fall right over himself, and that makes the distinction a little clearer for her.

Risk, she decides as she pushes past the gate and walks in, some unknown force pulling her forward despite all of her better instincts, but it’s not hard to set her feet into motion. What’s a life without risk?

---

Theo has come to this park a couple of times, just on days that he can’t pick up any more shifts after already working past the legal number of hours and on sleepless nights that feel too long to sit through until daybreak, but there’s something different about this one: Tonight’s the first night that he has a board with him.

Obviously he’s aware that it’s a little stupid to have been hanging around a skatepark without a skateboard all this time, a detail he’s reminded himself of many times over the past couple of weeks, but he really can’t be critical of himself now that he has one, either - he’d definitely still be doing it if he hadn’t been hit with the pure luck of finding one. 

Don’t get him wrong, working at the grocery store in town is nothing short of awful, but it has its occasional perks. One of those perks is the dumpster outside. Usually poking around out there after his shifts are over is just to supplement the shitty pay he gets from actually working there, Theo being formerly-homeless and subsequently still willing to get his hands dirty for the chance at finding some rare untainted food reaching its sell-by date or maybe even some clothes that had came in off the truck with minor but still-unmarketable defects in them, but nothing he’s found out there has ever been what he considers a luxury. 

Theo hasn’t had anything to entertain him, let alone something like a skateboard, since he was a child, either too wrapped up in life-alteringly bad decisions or, more recently speaking, too focused on pinching every last cent to pay rent for his tiny apartment to get anything for himself that’s just for fun. There’s still an emptiness in his stomach even tonight that’s starting to eat away at him because rent that week had left him bone-dry and he hadn’t gotten out to the dumpster in time to get anything from it before one of his co-workers followed store protocol and dumped bleach over all of it, so it’s not surprising that the board he’s rolling under one foot isn’t his.

While he’d been outside coughing at the acrid smell of Clorox ruining what he could have eaten for dinner, he’d spotted the skateboard off to the side, something that wasn’t even tossed out by an employee or carried in the store. He assumes that it was left there by some kid who saw a problem with it and could easily afford to just forgo fixing it and buy a new one, but all it had taken was a little interest from a guy who happens to keep a set of little screwdrivers in his truck to get it running (almost) as good as new. Now here he is a few hours later, ready to put it to good use. There is, of course, something to be said about his skills when it comes to actually getting on the board since he hasn’t done this since he was in elementary school, but he’s decidedly not thinking about that.

Theo has been decidedly not thinking about a lot of things lately. 

Tonight’s different because it’s the first time he has a board, but it’s also different in the way that it’s the first time he ever sees anyone else there.

Theo might be guilty of purposeful ignorance, but he’s not in the habit of flat-out lying to himself, and it would be a lie to say that he thought he was always totally alone out here. Maybe he’s been trying not to think about that or the fact that he knows exactly who else has been here, his sense of smell picking it up immediately every time, but he knows - he’s been parking his truck a block and a half away and making sure to cover his scent when he leaves, because he knows. He’s sure that Hayden has been coming here for a lot of the same reasons that he has, and he doesn’t want to ruin that for her. God knows he’s already ruined enough.

But his efforts are wasted that night, because even though Theo has been careful to only come after the sun has gone down and her regular hours there seem to be over, she shows up and sees him anyway.

He knows right away that Hayden doesn’t want him there. If his guilt-nightmares and haunting memories of what he did to her and her friends two years back combined with any basic shreds of common sense weren’t enough to tell him that, the way she just stands there by the gate and looks at him definitely is. Her heartbeat kicks up a notch in anticipation and his goes even quicker as their eyes meet, and suddenly they’re both at a crossroads.

He’s expecting some kind of confrontation, some kind of a ‘fuck you’ or ‘not you again’ or ‘get lost’ if not a more silent one that involves her walking up to him and giving him a well-deserved punch in the jaw - they’ve seen each other throughout the last couple of months, but only during pack meetings that Scott insisted he go to, and he’s sure that their presence was the only thing keeping those highly-capable fists away from the fragile bridge of his nose. He’s so busy bracing himself for that impact that it takes him a second longer than it should to realize that it’s not going to come.

Theo just watches, more than a little dumbstruck, as Hayden pushes her weight off the gate, walks right by, and ignores him entirely. He’s sure that she can feel his stupid eyes on her back as she sets down her board on the other side of the park, but he’s lucky enough that she doesn’t seem to even care. She just keeps her own eyes ahead, determination - maybe to ignore him, maybe to resist getting physical, or maybe both - clear in the firm set of her jaw, and acts like he’s not there.

---

It goes on like that for the rest of the night until Theo finally decides to just fuck off and leave her alone, having had enough of wondering if she wants him to or not, but they cross paths again soon enough.

Theo really does try to time it strategically so that he won’t get in her way - he goes even later at night just in case she ends up coming after dark again and puts even more real effort into figuring out what days she’s there in the afternoon and what days tend to be skipped more often than the others, but it doesn’t work. He quickly finds out that her schedule is unpredictable and seemingly random, allowing her to come and go as she pleases, and that his silently thought-out attempts at keeping his distance are useless. She always seems to be there when he shows up, and since she spots him a good ninety percent of the time before he can retreat, he ends up having to go inside and act like he wasn’t trying to avoid her. 

It makes things awkward for him, and he guesses that he could always just leave and avoid it, but he has several things that make him stay. The first one is that he’s kind of picked up the same view on risks that Hayden has - what’s life without them? The second one goes along with the first. He’ll take the risk and will gladly fuck off if Hayden tells him to, which he’s sure that she would if he really got on her nerves, but in the meantime, he’s willing to have some conditions put on being here if it means he gets to stay; It’s become something of a safe haven for him, too. The third is that he may or may not just be waiting for the inevitable fight to happen and be out of the way. Another risk of being there is getting his shit rocked, which would honestly be a relief at this point. He’s not going to actively provoke her, but he’s been waiting for the other shoe to drop for a while now, and he won’t be upset when it happens.

The fight, however, never ends up happening even though Theo keeps waiting. Neither of them really say anything to each other the first couple of times they share their space, Theo out of hesitance and Hayden out of what seems a lot like disinterest, which is mind-boggling at best.

Theo takes that as a good sign. Hayden has always been able to cut deep with her words when she wants to, and there have been a lot of opportunities for her to do that to him, this totally-secluded setting being perfect staging for another one. Unless this is some kind of a twist power play designed to make him paranoid - which would definitely be working if it was - Theo could be getting the best case scenario right now. The way she doesn’t immediately turn around and walk away whenever he’s there before her or tell him to turn around and walk away when she’s there first makes him wonder if the animosity and tension between them could be starting to fade out, but then again, he censors that hope almost as quickly as it starts to form. After all he’s done to cause this rift, he has never and will never get the luxury or work up the sheer nerve to decide something like that himself. That’s all on her, and since Theo has gotten even worse at reading people lately, he’s not in any rush to say which way she’s leaning. He stays to his side of the park, Hayden stays to hers’, and they hardly ever cross over in the bowl, because if Theo’s being honest with himself, he really fuckin’ sucks at skateboarding.

As it turns out though, he ends up getting some indication that his hopes might be coming true because of that. Hayden speaks to him for the first time on the fourth night that they see each other there. She’s taking a break from all of her fancy shit to pull her long hair back into a ponytail while Theo’s just trying to do a goddamn kickflip, something he used to be able to do in the fourth grade to seem cool for his few friends, and she’s not exactly hiding her judgement towards him like she usually does. There have been a few times that Theo’s caught her looking at him out of the corner of her eye, but this time she’s openly staring, and he doesn’t blame her for either of those.

“That’s…really bad,” She finally says after an especially terrible attempt gone wrong, voicing what Theo obviously already knows, but it’s not like he can be mad about it - she’s not wrong. 

He responds with just a nod and a heavy sigh, still a little afraid of saying anything and screwing up the just-as-silently agreed upon code of silence, and he assumes that that’s going to be the end of it, but he feels himself tense up as he realizes that she’s coming over to him. She crosses the invisible and basically-meaningless line between their territories with her board in hand like it’s nothing, a move Theo is thrown by, and keeps walking until she’s right next to him.

Theo’s not entirely sure why it’s suddenly so hard to breathe.

Realistically speaking, Theo knows how to do a kickflip - he’s just making an ass out of himself because something is stopping him from executing it correctly. He lets her show him the step-by-step of the trick anyway, figuring that it’s the easier option and that maybe he’ll just be able to pretend that he’s learning something new, but then she sticks around waiting to watch him try it. 

He loses a lot of dignity before she finally realizes that the movements aren’t the problem - he’s just too stuck in his own head. He keeps psyching himself out every time he has to actually get back on the board after flipping it, which is pretty pathetic considering all of the other much scarier things he’s done in his lifetime, and it makes the tips of his ears burn hot with embarrassment. Luckily, Hayden doesn’t keep him like that for too much longer.

“Okay,” She says with a start after she’s apparently had enough of watching him crash and burn. “Your technique isn’t actually that bad. I think your problem is that you just won’t let yourself do it. I used to have that problem too, but you really just have to say ‘fuck it’ and let go. That’s the only way,” She tells him, and before he can even register it, she’s moving back over to her own board again and doing it herself. Her feet land straight on the board and it barely moves at all underneath her, and Theo has to take a second just to blink. “See? Simple.”

“You’re, uh,” Theo croaks, sounding stupidly dumbstruck, and stops to clear his throat. “You’re really good at that.” 

Jesus, what is the matter with him?

Hayden raises an eyebrow at him, evidently also having noticed the weirdness, and he might’ve been more worried about that if her voice didn’t come out sounding a little amused a second later. “Yeah…” She trails, looking at him from the corner of her eye in a way that’s clearly a little bewildered, but she moves on quickly. “Come on, try it yourself.”

Theo thinks he’d rather deal with more of Hayden’s eyebrow-raises as it sets in that he’s about to have to do this, but he’s kind of locked into it now. He’s understandably a little hesitant to just jump right in, picturing himself hopping onto the board and immediately sending himself straight down, but since Hayden’s obviously not planning on going away, there’s not a lot more that he can do besides get himself together. He takes a deep breath, tells himself that he’s going to get this shit right - that he’d better get this shit right because he’s already embarrassed himself enough for one night - gets on, and...doesn’t fall.

He might be imagining it, but when he looks back over at her after getting over the initial shock of his success, he thinks that there could be just the hint of a smile on Hayden’s lips. He’s not sure if it’s more satisfied or amused or what, but it’s there, and it has him thrown even more off-guard.

“Better,” Hayden says as he dismounts, nodding once as she starts to turn away. “Practice that.”

---

They don’t talk again that night.

Theo watches Hayden walk back to her own side of the park, kind of wondering if the interaction had even happened at all with how quickly it seemed to have come and passed, and that’s really it. It leaves an air of uncertainty between them, some kind of subtle but almost tangible new...not tension, but a presence that neither of them can tell the exact meaning of right away; Negative or positive? Something or nothing? An ending or a beginning? 

Theo feels particularly stupid about letting himself consider that last one and rolls his eyes at himself for it, forcibly reminding himself that he’s probably the only one feeling it, but he isn’t. Hayden hasn’t overthought it enough to start wondering if that conversation was a beginning to something, but the uncertainty lingers around her for the next week and a half, too. It manifests itself in everything she does, everything she says and thinks and notices when it comes to him, especially the things that she doesn’t quite understand.

She doesn’t realize it as it’s happening, but the something between them starts and grows for the same reason that she’d spoken to him in the first place. Theo and Hayden end up talking a lot more than either of them probably expected when they’re at the skatepark together during the next couple of nights, and at first Hayden stresses herself out when she tries and fails to recall how those conversations kept going, but the words that flow naturally between them to drive them along aren’t the important part - the important part is that Theo still sucks at skateboarding, and that’s the thing that starts them off. All she really needs to know is that she keeps starting conversations because Theo keeps sucking. If Theo were better at skateboarding, she wouldn’t have anything to comment on and she’d probably just keep her mouth shut and continue going about her business, but he’s...well, not.

She doesn’t feel particularly mean for thinking about Theo that way because it’s just undeniably true, not that it’s his fault. Hayden can tell that Theo hasn’t done this in a while since he’s only just now starting to discover his advanced balance and how it pertains to how he moves on the board, and it’s doing the exact opposite to him that it did to her. Hayden is infinitely better at this now than she was a few years back, but Theo has the kind of frustration in his movements that tells her that he used to be good and now he’s worse. He just hasn’t gotten the hang of it yet, always overcompensating and instinctively trying to catch his balance when he doesn’t need to, either leaning a little too far forwards or a little too far backwards in result and throwing himself off-kilter.

It’s honestly just kind of satisfying for Hayden to watch, and once again, she’s not even doing it to be rude. Theo has potential, but it’s interesting to see him trying to do something that he isn’t flawless at for once. She just would’ve thought that for all of the care he puts into the near-perfect way he makes sure to carry himself, some of it would bleed over into something that requires a lot of spacial awareness like this, but apparently not.

That amused satisfaction doesn’t last forever though, and eventually she starts feeling bad, so when she starts making her comments, they’re not altogether negative. There are things that aren’t kickflips that Theo is worse at, and Hayden happens to have experience with almost all of them, so the opportunity slides itself right in front of her often.

She guesses that their something starts Theo keeps doing terribly and Hayden stops being able to pretend she’s ignoring it. Maybe their something starts when for the second time, she decides to just come over to his side to tell him about it so that she doesn’t have to try and project her voice over the echoing hole in the ground, which, in hindsight, is kind of symbolic, all things considered. It could be that their something starts when she stays over on his side until he does - or doesn’t - get the move right, or maybe their something starts when her time there stretches and she finds herself lingering. No matter what it is, the invisible line straight down the center of the park starts to metaphorically blur the more they cross over to each other until it means absolutely nothing, good-natured comments become even more good-natured and much more frequent, and they start laughing with each other more than at, and that’s how they both know that something, whatever it is, has started. 

But out of everything, the most concrete piece of evidence for their something that Hayden finds is the night that she finds herself bringing two water bottles with herself instead of one: Her usual blue reusable for herself, and a cold plastic one from the mini-fridge in her room for Theo. It’s obviously not still cold by the time she ends up handing it to him when they’re done for the night, both of them tired and leaning against the fence side-by-side, but the look on his face is grateful as well as taken-aback and she’s left to notice how the silence hanging between them no longer feels like it’s out of obligation as he uncaps it and takes his first sips. Right now the quiet feels comfortable and safe in a new way, a soft and cool breeze blowing through the surrounding trees and Theo’s slightly grown-out hair, and Hayden’s eyes get stuck on it when she glances over to look for what’s supposed to be just a second.

He looks a lot calmer now than he did earlier that day. They’d arrived that day while the sun was still shining, Theo off work and Hayden bored in her house and both of them meeting each other there completely by accident for the first time in a while, and they’d spent a lot of their time in the bowl, which Theo had been understandably avoiding. Hayden would be lying if she said she was a hundred-percent confident in Theo’s skills when she first noticed him eyeing it up, but his first time trying had actually gone a lot better than either of them were expecting. There were definitely some bumps in the road - some of them more literal, including the time that Theo managed to roll over his own foot - but other than that, things had been pretty smooth-sailing. With Hayden’s guidance from a distance, he’d managed to get all the way down without slipping right off and he was even steady enough on his feet in the end to hop off without stumbling.

That had been enough for Hayden as far as good experiences go, but that was also the first time that she’s ever seen Theo smile for real, all teeth as he’d stood at the bottom of the bowl, biting his lip and looking away to try and hide that he was as satisfied with himself as he was. His green eyes had still been wide and bright when he’d looked back up at her, and even though it’s hours later now, Hayden can still see that picture as clearly as she had in the moment. She imagines seeing it again tomorrow, because that’s where she figures they’ll be - right here by the fence or back down there in the bowl, just where she’s come to think that they should be.

Hayden realizes that she’s been looking at Theo as he is now for a little too long, zoned off in thought, when she notices those curious eyes that break through the memory. She looks away with a shrug and brings her water bottle up to her mouth to cover, forgetting to flick up the straw lid first and making Theo snicker when she doesn’t get anything. Her face feels just a little too warm as she looks up at the sky, but it’s a distraction, so it works. 

She’s been telling herself that she’s been coming here at night more often lately because it works better with her schedule, because she values the time spent with Valerie and the pack during the day, because the ambiance is just nicer when she gets there when the sun’s going down and turning the sky from orange to deep blue, and maybe on some level those things are true, but whenever she’s actually there, it’s even harder to make herself believe that that’s the whole of it. Hayden’s not in the habit of lying to herself either, and if she’s being completely honest, she likes someone else being here. She likes the talking and the quiet laughing and overhearing his shuffling footsteps and occasional sighs and she likes just being able to sense someone else’s familiar presence nearby, even if this skatepark used to be her place, and even if it is Theo.

She doesn’t scrutinize herself for that too much, doesn’t go digging around her head for logic or useless answers to useless questions, going as far as to make an effort not to until the threat of her mind drifting there becomes basically nonexistent. It happens easily, a lot more easily than Hayden from a year ago would have expected from herself.

There are times that she realizes that she probably shouldn’t be so easygoing about this, but she’s tired. She’s spent the last two years angry at everything, especially Theo, always frustrated whenever he walked into a room or paying extra close and critical attention whenever she heard his name brought up in a conversation, and she’s not sure if she fully forgives Theo for everything he’s done yet - their history is short but complicated, and it’s not going to just fade entirely into the background on its own - but her resolve is breaking fast. When she looks at Theo now, she doesn’t see someone she wants to yell at, hit, kick, doesn’t see the same man that she’d once spent hours imagining screaming out all of her anger at, and that’s fine. It’s the summer before her senior year, everything else around her seems to be going okay, and she’s tired of being angry. It’s time to just let things be simple for once. If she wants to hang out with Theo, she doesn’t have to fight herself on it.

Besides, it’s kind of hard to question herself about her choice in company when it looks like Theo has the same ideas as her. Theo could have all kinds of reservations about her even though they’d be for different reasons, some of which he’s already shown by the way he behaves, but she doesn’t scrutinize herself too much for it when she starts showing up every night with the idea of him in mind, especially because when Hayden told him one night that she wouldn’t be able to get there the next, Theo showed up the next day in the mid-afternoon to find her and didn’t even try to act like he thought he’d be alone.

She smiles as she rests her lips against the plastic straw. Theo crumbles his finished water bottle in his hand, and without thinking about it or even glancing his way, Hayden holds out hers’ for him to take.

---

It all just kind of goes from there.

Theo and Hayden’s interactions get even more colorful the more they see each other. The silence and muttered greetings of their past meetings have long since turned into smiles and nods and constructive criticism with sarcastic insults thinly-veiled within it, conversations that had once focused only on two allowed subjects, the weather and skating, ‘God, it’s hot out today’ and ‘you need to lean back a little more,’ turn into being about anything and everything, real stuff like ‘I just remembered that I still have summer reading to do’ and ‘Yeah, I don’t miss my skipped high school years,’ and they even get exchanges like ‘Jesus, you’re annoying’ and ‘You wouldn’t know what to do without me, Raeken’ that are so casual and commonplace that a sixteen year old Hayden would think she’s hallucinating them. By the end of June, Theo doesn’t shy away from speaking to her anymore, no longer holding that nervous and hesitant tension in his jaw that she’d always assumed was guilt or sometimes even fear, and Hayden is immensely satisfied with that development. Theo tells her stories about working at the store and his asshole of a landlord, Hayden gives him plenty of opportunities to poke fun at some of the other pack members with her that he’s clearly always waiting for, and the more they talk, the more she realizes just how many little things they know about each other. Every time Theo references some minor detail about her in conversation, something burns warm in Hayden’s chest. She thinks about the time she managed to convince him to play twenty questions with her a lot because of instances like that.

(“When did you start skating?” Theo asks, staring up at the starry sky. It’s late and they’d run out of energy to skate a while ago, but neither of them seem to want to go, so they’ve been like this for almost an hour now. Theo rests his head on the arms up and crossed behind him as he lays on the ground, face right next to Hayden’s thigh where she’s sitting up and leaning back against the fence. The tired ache in Hayden’s bones lessens a little as she breathes out slowly.

“Damn, that was my next one,” She sighs. Theo gives a fraction of a smile, eyes slipping closed lazily; Maybe two-thirds of one. Three-fourths, if she’s lucky. “It was fifth grade. My, um...my dad found me screwing around with the board he had from when he was a teenager. I think I still have it somewhere.”

She does. She knows she does, and she knows exactly where it is - up in the attic, a step above the garage. It’s only up there and not in the house because she hasn’t worked up the courage to go looking for it again.

“Anyway, I was sort of expecting him to be annoyed since I kind of tore up the garage looking for something to do when I found it, but he was excited. I guess he forgot how much he loved it, because he was...so happy to teach me what he knew. I mean, I sucked, since I was like, ten, but we had fun. He got me my own two weeks later.” Her chest feels a little tighter on her next deep breath, and Theo’s even quieter next to her now. She’s not sure if Theo had already known about her parents or if the heaviness that had slipped into her voice gave it away, but she’s pretty sure he knows now. One thing that she’s always known about Theo is that he always seems to understand. Either way, that memory’s a fond one, and she smiles softly to herself as she pictures her dad’s hazy face; Definitely three-fourths for her. “...You?”

“Little earlier than that for me. Maybe third grade, back before…” Theo trails off, swallowing thickly. Hayden lets it go. “And I tried to pick it back up again when I was sixteen, but, well...it’s not...like I had a lot of time.”

Hayden can hear the tightness in his voice even more clearly than she’d heard the heaviness in her’s, words restrained and hesitant. She understands that coming from him; She wouldn’t want to bring up their past herself if she’d had his role in it, either.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knows that they’re not going to be able to let this slide forever, that one day one of them is going to say something that pushes them too far into that territory and they won’t be able to ignore the inevitable conversation anymore, but tonight’s not that night. Things are good right now, simple, and she can feel the sick tension in the air starting to build. The moment’s about to flip into something much different, but she decides that she’s not going to let it.

“Okay, um…” Hayden says while Theo’s still holding his breath, pausing and chewing her bottom lip. “Favorite color?” She asks for a lack of better options. Theo lets out this breathy, punched-out laugh that sounds half-surprised and half-relieved at the simplicity of it, and Hayden doesn’t mind at all.

“Oooh, pressing question,” Theo comments. Hayden rolls her eyes lightly. “Hm. Blue.”

“Blue?” Hayden repeats. “Boring.”

Theo scoffs, leaning up on one elbow to look at her. “Wh- well, what’s your favorite color, then?” He demands, sounding genuinely a little offended, and it takes everything Hayden has in her not to start laughing, especially when she realizes the corner she just backed herself into.

“... Light blue,” She says a couple of seconds later, making it sound like it’s a totally valid and not at all hypocritical answer after what she just said about his. Theo flops back down with another scoff, shaking his head.

“Asshole,” He mutters with a roll of his eyes, Hayden laughing over him. It’s not nearly that funny, but he keeps smiling and he doesn’t close his eyes back up again, and all it does is spur her on.

His hand rises up and forms into a lazy fist as she’s starting to get ahold of herself. She thinks that it’s about to be a light nudge to her thigh as his arm starts to loll closer, but as if he has an invisible string connected to his wrist pulling it the other way, he stops and lowers it again.

They linger in the resounding silence and listen to each other’s heartbeats and the occasional chirping of one lone cricket in the opposite corner. In the moment, it doesn’t even occur to Hayden to think any deeper about the curl of Theo’s hand and the way it’s now resting over his stomach.

“...Favorite food?” He comes back with a few minutes later, the pause so long that Hayden had almost forgotten they were playing. “Mine’s pineapple.”

“Strawberry ice cream,” Hayden says thoughtlessly, leaning her head back against the fence. “Least favorite?”

She’ll think more about it later.)

In fact, it’s times like that night and that game of twenty questions that make Hayden realize that when she sets alarms even though it’s summertime and then wakes up before them full of excitement and anticipation for the day ahead, she likes the company at the park because it’s Theo - not in spite of it being Theo. 

She’s not going to try and say that the realization hadn’t caught her off-guard at first, because it had, very strongly, but it makes sense; They just have this connection. She used to think that Theo’s humor was really just him being an asshole, and on some level she was right, but if he is an asshole, then she has no place to judge, since they’re one and the same. Instead of making her want to punch something, his bite makes her smile because she’s learned to appreciate his sarcasm instead of resent it, and his serious, genuine moments always have her full attention. Maybe they’ve been avoiding talking about anything too heavy so far, but there are moments that Theo’s voice slips down into something quieter, something firmer and raspier, that she realizes that they can and could be serious with each other if they wanted to, and the thought of that is strangely thrilling. 

Really, everything about their current situation feels seemingly perfect. Anybody looking in from the outside would probably think that they’ve been this way for a lot longer than they have with the way that everything just flows so naturally between them. As far as their something goes, Hayden doesn’t see any other problems with it - until she does.

It takes her a while to notice it, but the two of them have never touched. Not one high-five, not one helping hand, not even one accidental brush of the fingers - there’s been nothing. 

It’s not even like Hayden is one of those people who likes to show things through touch, having gone through a short phase herself around her first shift and the next couple of months afterwards where she’d wanted to snap at almost anyone who got too close, but it’s kind of hard not to start thinking about the physical distance between her and Theo with the way it’s brought to her attention.

She first realizes that the touch thing is a problem when she’s trying to be helpful. It’s a hot Wednesday afternoon and the sun beating down on Theo’s skin is obviously starting to get him frustrated as he tries to figure something new out - a heel flip, something that he’s only done successfully once because it has a lot to do with the footing he still hasn’t gotten the hang of - so Hayden’s been kind of lingering around to make sure nothing goes terribly wrong. She starts sitting off to the side, but after the third time that Theo almost wipes out, she gives up on looking uninterested and goes over, and soon enough her fingers are twitching at her sides with each time that he looks like he’s going to fall. 

If Theo were at all a normal person, he’d be lucky that Hayden was there in time to steady him when he actually does fall, but all Hayden ends up doing is making it worse. Theo starts to trip over the board as it flips over and comes back down a little too late for him to land on it properly, Hayden instinctively puts her hands out to try and get to him, but instead of falling into her, Theo takes the split second of momentum he has to angle his body away. Instead of letting Hayden wrap her fingers around his bicep to pull him back up, he goes tumbling down onto the concrete as he winces through his teeth, and Hayden’s pretty sure that she hears bones crack.

“Jesus Christ, Theo, what the hell?” Hayden breathes, looking at him like he’s insane from where she’s standing above him, and since she still hasn’t caught on, she offers out her hand to help him pull himself up with. She’s expecting to just help him up and then poke fun at him for it, ask him how he managed to fall that hard, but instead her hand goes untouched for a second too long. Something inside her shifts as she watches Theo look at it, look away, and then push himself up off the ground on his own. Okay, seriously. What the hell…?

Theo clears his throat, muttering a sorry without looking at her - sorry for what, Hayden has no idea - which doesn’t help the situation at all. It doesn’t help when he continues to avoid eye contact, either. He does anything he can not to look at her, picking up his board and dropping it back down for no reason and scratching the back of his head while Hayden stands there in confusion. “Maybe I’ll just...try that again a different time.”

Theo then gets back on his board like nothing happened, stumbling again on an ankle that clearly hurts, and rolls off. They’re a lot quieter than usual for the rest of the day, making Hayden feel like how she did when they were still back at square one. Theo cruises around the park in circles, not attempting anything else probably because he’s pretending he isn’t injured, and Hayden only really lets that slide because she has no idea what just happened.

She doesn’t stay around for too much longer after that, not interested in watching Theo quietly hiss at the pain in his ankle, and she ends up thinking about it a lot on the walk back home. Yeah, obviously things had been awkward and kind of stilted with them in the past, but whatever that was was something else entirely. Even in their worst days at the very beginning, Theo had never gone as far as to hurt himself to...to what? To avoid being near her? To avoid touching her?

She guesses that she could be overthinking it, that Theo’s reaction to her trying to catch him could have just been a pride thing, but there are two things wrong with that: One, Theo Raeken has too much pride for any of it to be lost by someone helping him, and Two, he’s done this in the past, even if she hasn’t realized it until now. As Hayden walks home, she recalls all of the other times she’s stood by Theo as she’s helped him figure new moves out and all of the other times that he’s made sure to keep his distance. Now that she’s thinking about it, Theo has never taken advantage of her held-out hands.

At first she can’t help but be a little hurt, even though it’s understandable - she has no clue what happened to Theo in his past, and being touched could be something that he hates because of it - because for a couple of hours, she can only come up with one reason for it: Theo doesn’t want her to touch him. Hayden gets boundaries, and she makes a mental note of it not to accidentally pressure Theo into crossing any of his to please her, but she can’t help but wonder if he’s this way for everyone or if it’s just her specifically. 

She looks at her hands as she’s getting ready for bed that night, setting her toothbrush down and letting her eyes linger on them. In the past Hayden has thought of herself as more of a bystander when it comes to pack things, never the one to charge forward and hurt - mostly because someone else always got there first - but these hands have inflicted pain that she hadn’t even thought about until now. A vision of almost two years ago suddenly comes to mind, the day after Theo had come back and anger and bitterness was still flowing through her veins, when she’d grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and shoved him back into a wall and screamed only some of that desperate frustration into his face when her plan to trap a Ghost Rider hadn’t worked and he was there for her to blame. She can’t remember if she’d hit him then or not, only remembers that his mouth was bloody and his eyes were full of tears when she’d stepped back, and she hadn’t even considered that moment to be an act of real violence under her belt at the time because it was him and she’d hated him, but maybe he hasn’t forgotten. Maybe she’d really screwed this whole thing up before she even knew it. The thought makes her feel a little nauseous, and she wishes that there was some way she could fix it as she crawls into bed.

Sleep doesn’t come easily that night, mind too full of guilt to do anything but stay awake, but maybe that’s for the better. If she was able to go to sleep right away, she wouldn’t be staring at the ceiling replaying every little memory she has of Theo, and she wouldn’t realize one that she also hadn’t taken into consideration. She’s in the middle of wondering if Theo has been afraid of her this whole time, on days that they’ve met up to skate and on nights that they’ve spent talking and opening up, when she remembers the time that they’d played twenty questions. Hayden had made fun of Theo’s favorite color when her own wasn’t that far off - ‘boring’ blue versus light blue, not an important distinction - and Theo had reached up to lightly hit her with the back of his hand.

But he’d stopped.

Hayden almost sits up in bed when she realizes what that means, relief and then incredulousness flooding through her. Theo doesn’t want Hayden not to touch him; He doesn’t want to touch her, thinks that he shouldn’t, thinks that he can’t. Jesus Christ. He must think that she would flip out on him. His aversion to touch is for the completely opposite reason.

It’s a valid concern, and Hayden really should’ve thought of it sooner. Theo has been doing pretty much everything else to walk on eggshells around her, developing this something as far as he can without risking setting her off, so she’s not sure why it’s taken her so long to pick up on this part of it. She’d known that Theo’s guilt over his past ran deep, but the fact that he’s scared to touch her even when she’s invited him to is a lot. 

She ends up being able to go to sleep after that development, and she’s definitely a lot less nervous about going back to the skatepark the next day than she would’ve been if she hadn’t thought that far. 

She goes in without any plans to change anything, Theo luckily seeming like he’s pretty much back to normal when she gets there both behavior-wise and ankle-wise, but that doesn’t last for long. Hayden tries to go back to normal with that new knowledge in mind, but now that she knows what she knows, it’s impossible not to notice his flightiness again. After a while she really starts kicking herself for being so oblivious, because now she sees it happen all the time. It doesn’t take her long to get frustrated with it. She has no idea how she’s supposed to tell Theo that it’s okay to touch her without it seeming strange and making him want to run away, but it’s really starting to get on her nerves.

It all comes to a head only three days after what Hayden’s been silently calling the broken ankle incident. It’s another hot afternoon, temperatures rising up into the high nineties for the fourth time that week, and they’re definitely both feeling it. Theo’s been fanning himself with the neckline of his T-shirt all day and Hayden hadn’t even bothered with jeans, having decided that morning without any debate to just take the risk of skating in shorts and a cropped shirt, but none of it is really helping - in fact, Theo is in a better state than she is by far. This time, she’s the one getting fed up with the sun.

“God…” She mutters frustratedly as she screws up for the billionth time, sorely tempted to kick her turned-over board even further away. It doesn’t help anything that she can feel eyes on her as she steps back and brushes some of the stray hair off her forehead, Theo sitting off to the side with another water bottle she’d brought for him that day and looking a lot more put-together than she’s sure she does right now as he watches her. He sighs deeply as he pulls the bottle away from his lips, clicking the cap shut in his hands, and Hayden has to look over. She tries to get her expression to soften a little before she does, but she knows that some of her irritation is definitely still coming through. “Can I help you?” She asks, only just half -sarcastically.

“No. I just…” He starts, nodding to the board. “I actually know how to do that one.”

Hayden can’t help but raise her eyebrow at that, resting her hands on her hips. “Really?” She asks, and forgive her if she sounds a little skeptical, but she isn’t wrong to be; Really? “Out of everything I’ve watched you fall on your ass trying to do, you can-?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Theo interrupts, pushing himself up off the ground and brushing his hands off on his jeans. He walks forward with an almost challenging look on his face - one that Hayden starts to return just on instinct - even though they both know that he knows she’s right. “Make fun of me all you want. Maybe I should just leave you to struggle alone.”

Some part of Hayden wants to test that, keep that skeptical look on her face, but the other side wins out pretty quickly; This heat truly is oppressive, and Hayden’s not going home without doing something right. “Fine…” She sighs, making it sound extra put-upon and exhausted since she still refuses to be totally serious. 

Theo doesn’t disappoint with his reaction, saying nothing but rolling his eyes as he kicks Hayden’s board back over to her with one foot. He circles around her as she gets back on without having to be told, checking out the form she gets herself into, and Hayden swallows thickly. She straightens her back out thoughtlessly, suddenly very aware of her body, and waits.

He stops in front of her, eyes assessing - shoulders, legs, feet - and they linger on her waist and hips for a few more seconds than the rest. Hayden pushes back the urge to clear her throat even as his focus drops back down to her shoes. 

“Your footing is off, for starters,” He begins. Hayden isn’t really thinking about it as he moves one of his own feet to prod at hers, gently kicking them ever so slightly more apart so that her stance is wider. She feels her center of balance change right away, but Theo isn’t done. “And I think the biggest problem is that you’re standing too straight. Tilt just- a little further to the side…” Theo trails, and now his eyes are back on Hayden’s bare skin again, and it takes her an extra second to un- straighten her spine. She tries to be as fluid about it as possible, planting her feet on the board more decisively now that she has it right and starting to lean in the direction his head is tilted, but she gets stopped just as quickly.

“Wait,” He says, her body halting at the sound of his voice. “Too far. You just- here, just-” He starts to think out loud, clearly starting to get a little frustrated at himself, but then his hands rise up on their own and the moment freezes.

They’re left there with Theo’s hands suspended midair, Theo having caught himself just before they made contact with her waist, and now they hover over her skin uncertainly. 

“Uh,” Theo says dumbly, the first time Hayden’s ever heard him audibly caught off-guard, and the stupid look on his face might even be cute if his hesitation wasn’t causing that once-forgotten burn of irritation to well back up in Hayden’s chest. His fingers twitch a little but he doesn’t take his hands away, stuck there now and pretending that this is fine, and Hayden’s not sure if that’s better or worse. “Okay.”

His next approach is very clearly thought-out; His hands move to guide her where he needs her to go, so slow and careful never to touch her that it’s painful to watch, and Hayden really has to stop herself from rolling her eyes. Her strange nervousness is gone and replaced by slight annoyance now, wondering when the hell Theo is going to just give in, and she thinks that she should be commended for the amount of time that she lets it go on before she finally snaps. A full minute of Theo’s useless goading passes, but when the pad of his ring finger accidentally brushes over her skin and he goes to flinch back, Hayden can’t stand it anymore.

“Jesus Christ, Theo,” She scoffs, and without another second of hesitation, she grabs his hands, pulls them back over, and presses them down. Theo can’t hide the sharp breath he takes in or the way his eyes widen and Hayden almost jumps at how hot his palms are on the exposed skin of her stomach, but she pushes any reaction she has back. Now it’s Theo’s turn to swallow, head tilting back up to look at her and eyes widening when he finds her already staring back, but Hayden forces herself to act like this is all ordinary. “What do you want me to do?”

Theo hesitates for a few more seconds, blinking up at her rather owlishly from the two inches she has on him from being on the board, but Hayden’s gotten to know him enough to know that he’s kind of predictable - he’s not going to back down and admit that something is weird, no matter how much it might be. He shakes himself off a little, schools his features back into the unnaturally blank expression that he used to wear all the time, and starts to move her where he needs her to be.

Hayden ends up getting the trick right once Theo finally gets his head in gear, and unlike her, he doesn’t stick around to make sure she can do it more than one time, but she doesn’t mind. She wasn’t trying to scare him away with what she did, so she lets him walk off and take a long drink from his water bottle and act like he isn’t as thrown as he so clearly is, his gait a little off as he very not subtly paces around for a minute. It’s fine. That was a bridge that they needed to cross, and even though the way they’d crossed it wasn’t planned, she’d always figured there was going to be some stumbling.

Luckily, Theo seems intent on making things seem like they aren’t weird, and Hayden can definitely tell that his attempts at conversation are more thought-out and testing than they usually are, but it works. She takes advantage of it and talks back, and after a couple of hours, the atmosphere between them feels almost normal. Theo keeps looking at her with a hint of caution and thoughtfulness in his eyes and Hayden can still vaguely feel where Theo’s hands had been, but it works.

It also probably helps that they don’t stay for long, the blindingly hot sun ending up coming in handy when they both get too tired to be outside anymore. They walk out of the park together with tired meandering steps, boards and empty water bottles in hand, Hayden mentally preparing herself for the trip back home. It sounds like hell, and she huffs out her next breath.

“You know what I would kill for right now?” Hayden asks, not thinking about the admittedly kind of awkward wording of that. Theo looks at her curiously. “One of those slushies from the gas station convenience store. The one on thirty-fifth. Red.”

“I always preferred blue,” Theo comments even though Hayden barely hears it, her body probably too busy fighting off heatstroke to really register. Another minute passes and Theo’s truck parked off to the side of the street comes into view, and she’s expecting that to be the end of it, but then he stops. “...You want to go get one?”

She definitely registers that one.

She’d really only brought up the idea to keep the conversation flowing, but that’s how Hayden finds herself sitting in the passenger seat of Theo’s truck, feet propped up on the dashboard with a cold plastic cup in her hand where they’re parked off on the side of another random street. The air conditioner is on full-blast and they alternate between drinking from their cups full of ice and artificial flavoring and just pressing them up against their faces to cool down, and it feels like literal heaven, which is not something Hayden ever thought she’d think about being in Theo’s truck, but her point still stands. They don’t talk much, not that they’d be able to hear it very well anyway over the AC and the music from Hayden’s phone that’s playing through the truck’s bluetooth - “It is way too hot to be listening to happy music.” “What? Phoebe Bridgers is not ‘happy music.’ Are you even listening at all? ‘Moon Song’ is literally about infidelity.” “...Why did you put on a song about infidelity??” - but it’s peaceful.

They spend as much time as possible out there, Theo only starting to drive again once there’s no way to deny that their drinks have melted down into nothing but water and syrup, and even then, he drives a little slower than necessary. He chides at her to sit properly in her seat when the truck’s moving and gives her half-heartedly serious warnings not to get anything on the upholstery, and she laughs at him for it, and he smiles, and things are good. Hayden notices him taking the backroad detours instead of the faster main streets and grins to herself, hiding it by looking out the window, and things are great.

When they pull up in front of Hayden’s house, Valerie’s car is in the driveway and they can both see her movements in the window, so Theo doesn’t get out of the truck; Hayden’s sure that if Theo’s had any run-ins with Val, a cop, they probably weren’t very positive ones. She doesn’t push.

“Hey,” She says softly, a little smile on her lips, and Theo turns to look at her. With her cup still in hand, Hayden bumps her knuckles against the back of the closest hand that Theo has on the steering wheel, setting one silent reassurance in place: it’s okay. “Thanks for today.” Theo doesn’t say anything, looking once again speechless as he just nods back, but that’s enough for her. She’s vaguely aware of Valerie watching her through the window, able to see her lingering around Theo’s truck, but she ignores it as she gets out. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

Theo nods a little dumbly behind her, not that she can see it, but the sound of his voice comes a second later. “I- uh,” He starts. “I get off at seven.”

And when Hayden turns back to look at him, stopping in the middle of her driveway when she could’ve kept going, that’s when they both know what their something is. Their something is slushies on the side of the road, games of twenty questions, Theo’s hands on her waist, making fun of each other, meeting up at the skatepark. Their something is what keeps them coming back every day that they can, what has Hayden looking back at him through the rolled-down window of his truck, what has something warm swirling in her stomach as she nods and starts back up the rest of the driveway. Their something is what feels suspiciously like friendship, and it’s felt like that for a good, long time.

She looks back at Theo’s truck one last time before she opens the door and steps in, and as Theo drives away, she can’t help but smile to herself again. Valerie, of course, is right on it. 

“So...there is somebody new in your life?” She asks, a grin quirking at one side of her mouth as she tries to draw more out of her.

“Nah. Not new,” Hayden says. Valerie looks at her curiously, and she takes a deep breath and considers. “Just an old friend,” She says instead, and as much as that’s a total lie, it weirdly enough still feels right.

---

The way that Liam ends up finding them the first time is by an admittedly pretty common and in-character method for him: On accident. 

He’ll take it to his grave that the way his day plays out is not his fault - not entirely, at least. The only thing he’s guilty of in his mind is being a good person. 

Really, he blames Alec. He’s the root of all this. Maybe if Alec hadn’t asked to borrow Liam’s car - or what’s left of that ten-year-old secondhand disaster, in more realistic terms - to drive up to see a girl he likes and Liam hadn’t so graciously and generously tossed him the keys at the last pack meeting that weekend, he could have been the one to get the last ride before the thing finally sputtered out for good so that he could at least drive himself home from lacrosse practice and not be stuck walking the whole way back. David had driven him there that morning before his shift at the hospital and Corey had suggested putting together a schedule with him so that he could help him get around, but since they haven’t started that yet, this sunny Monday afternoon finds Liam going his own way.

(Which is, well, pretty accurate in terms of how his trip has gone so far. As it turns out, his phone’s GPS was really the only reason he’s been able to navigate the town all this time, and it’s not much help now that he’s walking and it can barely register that he’s moving at all. According to Waze, he’s been on Cornelia Street for the past half an hour.

He also may have gotten a little sidetracked, but he’s not going to think about that - It was for a good reason! The gas station and convenience store was just right there, and it’s the only place in town that sells his favorite brand of hot chips for a decent price. He had to stop in and stock up.)

Anyways, for reasons that Liam is choosing to be completely unaware of, he’s lost. The trek had started out okay, but once he’d started making stops and realized that he apparently hasn’t been paying attention to what any of the streets he drives down literally every day to get to and from school look like, his once-purposeful trip had soon fizzled out into more of a meandering walk. He’s not entirely sure how he’s going to get home, but for now he’s made peace with it and has decided to just keep walking until he gets somewhere, and he’s even broken open a bag of those chips.

He’s even less sure about how he ends up walking so far in the wrong direction that he winds up on the long roads with no sidewalks or curbs around the wooded outskirts of town, at least knowing as he looks around that this definitely isn’t right, but going that length is how he stumbles upon the little skatepark with a backpack full of the same snack, his lacrosse stick strapped to his shoulder, and a whole lot of curiosity.

In hindsight, what makes him stop on the side of the road and look around in the first place is what would and should make anybody turn and run the other way - disembodied voices coming from somewhere in the woods is generally not a good thing to come across - but Liam can’t help but think that they sound strikingly familiar. Maybe that reasoning makes what he does next even worse, but his survival instinct is apparently weak enough that he only considers that for a brief second before he’s leaving the relative safety of the pavement and pushing forward into the trees anyway.

The sounds of two people talking and laughing and two heartbeats beating in sync get louder the closer he gets, and once he finally stumbles up to a tall chain-link fence and finds the open gate to see who they are, he’s not quite sure for a minute if he believes it. There in front of him are Hayden and Theo, too busy with their own conversation - friendly conversation, happy conversation, natural conversation, conversation at all - to notice that he’s there, and he feels his brain break as he takes them in.

At some point he absently notes where they are and what a weird place the woods are for a skatepark, but after a half-second of thought he realizes that the setting means nothing at all to him - his focus is on them and only them, as it always has been. They’re sitting close on the concrete, bodies angled in towards each other with their legs criss-crossed while their skateboards lay abandoned off to the side, talking and smiling like they’ve been doing this for years, and Liam has to take a deep, shaky breath where he stands because his heart suddenly feels like it’s swelling two sizes larger in his chest just from looking at them. 

Since Liam has never been the strong and silent type, his mind immediately races as it comes up with things he could say, conjuring up anything from ‘What are you guys doing here?’ and ‘I didn’t know that you guys were…?’ or ‘Jesus Christ, I know I see you every week but I missed you both so fucking much,’ but what comes out of his mouth instead is probably for the better.

“Thank God,” He blurts instead, hearing himself say it more than he actually feels his lips moving. Hayden and Theo startle and finally look up at him in surprise, Hayden’s lips a little parted and Theo’s eyes a little wide, but the words just keep falling from Liam’s mouth before either of them can even start to think of something to respond with, and that’s the thing. His Thank God sounded to himself like he was about to go with the third option, but he’s not - He’s not talking about anything important, hardly even knows what he’s saying or if he’s saying anything at all, talking just to talk, only knows that Hayden and Theo are right there in front of him and that they’re together, and yeah, Liam has seen them stand near each other at pack meetings and stuff while he’d tried his hardest not to stare, but he’d always assumed that their proximity was out of coincidence and obligation. This is different, not at all what he ever would’ve expected, and it makes his heart positively soar for reasons he’ll think about later. “I just-”

Hayden and Theo both look a little concerned as he keeps rambling, starting to push up on their hands, probably wanting to come and check if Liam’s okay or if he’s going insane because he knows his eyes are too wide and there are, like, twigs and shit poking out of his hair from walking through the trees, but he feels his feet moving before his brain even fully decides to make them and suddenly he’s plunking himself down right in front of them, ending their attempt right there. They share a look as he criss-crosses his legs and tosses his bag of chips into the middle of the circle that he’s created by joining them, and instead of responding to their concern, all he feels is relief even as his motor-mouth keeps going. “My car broke down yesterday when I lent it to Alec so I had to walk home from practice, and I- I’ve been lost for like, an hour now. I was starting to think that I was going to have to hitchhike home, which is really not safe for people like us, so I’m... so happy you’re here,” He pours out truthfully even though this is the least important reason for it out of all of them. “Kind of thought I was a goner, there. I had no idea where I was and, like, if I’m going to survive Monroe’s fuckin’ army aiming guns at us, I am not going to die because some random rogue decided to take the opportunity to pick me up off the side of the road and then dump me in a ditch somewhere. That would not be a good way to go. That would be embarrassing, really. I just-” 

All at once he cuts off, managing to finally catch himself, which is more because his natural reflex to breathe takes over than anything else. It’s as if everything sets in right then; Hayden and Theo are there and staring at him, and he’s so close to be able to see it now, and God. God. His body loses all of its tension, shoulders sagging down as he pushes that breath back out, and he can’t help the smile that spreads across his face, wide and unapologetic. “...Hey,” he says, an end and a beginning, and that’s what he’s sticking with.

Liam had barely been able to register the stunned looks on Hayden and Theo’s faces in his rush to just talk to them, but it doesn’t matter now anyway; Even though they both still look like their brains haven’t quite caught up with reality yet, one in particular more than the other, Hayden’s face starts to soften. Her eyebrows go back down even though her eyes themselves remain a little wide, a smile starts to pull at one corner of her lips, and Liam gets to see the exact moment she really looks at him again - looks at him like they’re not some basic strangers who only see each other from across crowded rooms, looks at him like she really knows him. 

“Hey,” She says breathlessly back a second later, the rest of her air punched-out in a way that sounds almost like a laugh, and Liam’s stomach swoops.

After that, Liam forgets all about the pains of practice with Nolan as his co-captain and his failed and twisted journey back home. He just sits there, looks between them as much as he wants to and as much as he can, and stays, allowing himself to sink fully into this. He can tell that he’s made a splash with how quiet things are, how tentative their soft but happy words come out, and it’s mostly him carrying the conversation, but to him, that’s fine. Hell, as far as he’s concerned, that’s perfect. He hasn’t gotten to really talk to Hayden since she and Val came back to town a few months ago, nothing past a few awkward ‘hi’s’ here and there, and Theo had never really been much of a talker when it wasn’t a life-or-death situation back when they used to see each other a lot more, so if this is how Liam gets to have them - nervous but still trying, distant but attempting to bridge that gap - then he’ll take it gladly. 

He talks with Hayden and asks her about the summer homework that he admittedly still hasn’t even started and compliments the faded but colorful stickers on the bottom of Theo’s skateboard and pushes the open bag of chips towards him to make sure that he’s included even though it seems to be taking a little longer for him to get used to this than Hayden had, and they both accept his offerings with little hesitation. It’s awkward and a little stilted and it’s weird because Liam has had so many deeper conversations with both of them in the past, but he loves it. He loves…

He loves this.

And, yeah, there are definitely more important subjects that he could steer them towards, but the longer he sits there, the less he finds that he even wants to. He still wants to know about all of this, about how they found each other and how long this has been a thing and how they ended up this close after all that had happened between them, especially because both of them are so stubborn and Liam had honestly thought they’d stay apart for life, but he doesn’t want to break this moment by getting too serious, and it also - strangely enough - doesn’t seem to matter now that he’s here with them. He wants to know those things, but he’ll learn them another time; For now, he’s content with talking with Hayden and remembering how she used to run circles around him when he’d attempted to best her at skateboarding back in elementary school and asking about the music that’s paused on Theo’s phone - a Phoebe Bridgers album, which Liam already knows has to be Hayden’s impact on him even without seeing the satisfied smirk on her face when she looks over to check, too.

They talk like that for a long time, getting caught up without digging too deep in a way that still manages to be satisfying, until the sun starts to go down behind the trees and Liam’s mom texts him asking if he’s going to be back in time for dinner or if she should put a plate aside for him. He doesn’t really want to leave, but everyone knows that you don’t keep Jenna Geyer waiting, so he sighs and decides to make his exit. 

He’s not expecting Hayden and Theo to go with him after he says goodbye and he’s not really thinking about where he’s going to go as he makes his way to the gate, temporarily forgetting that he only ended up there because he was lost, but then he stops when he hears them shuffle around and get up to follow. Hayden uses one hand on the back of his arm to guide him towards a clearer path through the woods that he’d missed on his way in, a path leading out to Theo’s familiar parked truck, and he hides a grin by looking down at the ground as they walk on either side of him.

Liam has been told that he’s a hopeless romantic too many times to plausibly deny it - lots of times by his mother and Mason while he’d gushed to them about people he met at school, several times by Hayden while they were together and he used to dramatically wax poetic about her eyes and smile and laugh both to make her laugh more and because he was really, truly feeling it, and once by Theo, not in those words and more about his tendency to be a little stupidly optimistic and savior-like sometimes - “your dead friends are dead” might not sound like “hopeless romantic,” but it had still gotten some of the same point across - so he knows that he’s being ridiculous as these feelings stir up, but something about walking out to Theo’s truck with them, watching Theo flip his keys in his hand, and seeing the mischievous glint in Hayden’s eye as she gets in shotgun and sticks Liam with the backseat makes Liam think that he was meant to be here. When Theo turns on the truck and the Bluetooth immediately connects and starts blaring “Chinese Satellite,” a song that Liam has heard a lot because of Hayden and that Theo must have been listening to on his way there without her, and he scrambles to shut it off and pretend it wasn’t there as Hayden bursts out with laughter, Liam starts thinking about thanking Alec for wanting to borrow his car instead of giving him hell for it, starts thinking about doing that now and maybe later down the line, too.

And it’s stupid, so, so stupid and so corny and such a hopeless thing to think, but Liam starts to consider that there can be more than one way to get home, and that maybe he’s already done it once today.

---

The way back home that day feels different for obvious reasons, but Hayden doesn’t start being able to pick them apart in all of their distinctions and subtleties until she feels Theo pull his truck up to the curb in front of Liam’s house.

First and foremost is Liam’s presence there in itself, him sitting in the backseat and looking between them as he talks in a way Hayden knows from experience comes right from the reserve of excitement and energy that’s always just waiting to be used to fill a space, but then there’s also the fact that they’re stopping on the way to Hayden’s to drop Liam off, and then it’s just Liam’s house that’s starting to blow her mind a little, Liam’s house with the carefully kept garden of flowers that runs along the long front walkway and the big porch with the swing hanging by the front door. Jenna is inside right now, Hayden realizes with a pang as she looks at the big front windows. Jenna is inside right now, probably making dinner or finalizing one of her blog posts about those carefully kept flowers - Hayden still follows that blog, so she knows more about marigolds than she probably should - and if she had a little more courage, she could get out of the truck and do more than just leave her ‘likes’ on Jenna’s website. She swallows as she thinks about walking up to the front door and saying hi again for the first time since she left town and broke her son’s heart; Jenna’s always treated her like a daughter, so she has no doubt that she would be welcomed right back.

Hayden misses her so much.

It’s mostly to shake those thoughts off, but as Theo looks over her and out through the passenger-side window, green eyes flickering with recognition, Hayden starts to wonder if he has an experience with this house on Walnut Drive too - Maybe during the war that she was absent for. She doesn’t ask about it, both because she’d never think that it would be a good idea to - especially not with Liam right here - and because she doesn’t really get a chance to, anyway.

“Hey, so, um,” Liam pipes up from the back, speaking like anyone is capable of forgetting that he’s there, sounding nervous for the first time that day as he lingers around for an extra minute. His fingers drum lightly on the back of his phone and he holds it out past the center console towards Theo a second later, Theo only seeming to realize just then that Liam’s talking to him and looking back. “I...kind of realized that I don’t actually have your phone number, so…”

Theo looks at him incredulously for a minute, eyes flicking from his hopeful face to the phone in his hand and then back again, but the screen is already open to Liam’s contacts and Liam isn’t pulling it back. It still takes him another beat to actually take the phone, and when he does Hayden almost misses the relieved smile on Liam’s face as she watches Theo start. He puts in his number and saves himself as just ‘Theo,’ which Hayden knows Liam will change to have a lowercase ‘t’ instead to match all of the other ones, and she swears that she sees Theo’s fingers shake a little.

Liam doesn’t seem to notice, taking his phone back with a grin, and Theo’s temporarily saved from the thoughtful look Hayden can’t help but throw his way because he still doesn’t get out. Instead, Hayden looks back to see him clicking around a little, tapping the last time with a slight flourish of finality, and he looks very satisfied with himself as both of their phones buzz. Hayden opens hers to see that Liam has added them to a new group text just called ‘skating :),’ predictably starting with only a simple ‘:).’

“There,” Liam says happily. “Do you think you’re gonna be back tomorrow? Because I have practice again, but it’s only ‘til three and I’ll probably be able to get a ride from Corey this time. Don’t worry, I’ll have him drop me off further down the road.”

Hayden and Theo look over at each other almost simultaneously as they try to wrap their heads around the fact that Liam wants to come back and also, less importantly, that he’d picked up on the unspoken and mostly un-thought about rule that the skatepark is supposed to be kept quiet. She raises her eyebrow at someone who clearly has no answers for her, and she briefly wonders when they started having silent conversations like this. She’d try and think on it more, but Theo just keeps staring back, looking as if he’s still not sure that Liam’s serious, so Hayden’s the one to turn around.

“Sure,” She says faintly, nodding as kind of an afterthought. “We’ll be there.”

“Great,” Liam says, grinning wide. “I’ll see you then.”

That time he really does get out, scooting across the seats to get to the right door and opening it from the inside, and tosses a look back at them as he makes his bounds across the front lawn. 

Jenna opens the door for him before he’s even done climbing the front porch stairs, holding her hands out for a light hug that he returns as he passes and then glancing curiously up towards Theo’s truck, and God, there’s that pang again. Jenna’s face flickers between multiple emotions, none of which Hayden can really pick apart from this far away, but she knows the soft smile that finally settles on her lips well enough to know that whatever those emotions are, she doesn’t have to worry. Hayden gives a wave back when Jenna raises her hand to, feeling something warm start to bloom up inside her chest, and belatedly realizes that Theo is doing the same thing in a way that’s clearly out of more than just basic politeness.

That little wave and the unreadable look on Theo’s face should be enough, and they definitely do help lead her there, but it’s not until they’re pulling up to Hayden’s house that she realizes what is quite possibly the biggest shift, the biggest thing that’s made today feel so inexplicably different. It happens when she’s about to get out of the truck, murmured goodbyes said and her fingers wrapped around the handle of the door - both of their phones buzz again just as she’s pulling it, and they both stop to look. Theo opens his phone first and Hayden hears him suck in a breath and hold it as she unlocks her own.

Sometime that day, Liam had taken a picture of them while they weren’t looking, and that’s what’s popped up in their brand new group text. Hayden is looking at Theo, smiling in the middle of a sentence while Theo’s eyes are on the ground, one of his knees drawn up to his chest as he listens to her and reaches for the bag of chips, and her first thought about it is that it makes Theo look so much younger than he seems - so much younger than he seems even though he’s only nineteen and this picture is how he’s supposed to be. 

But it’s Liam’s second message that really sets everything into motion; ‘cute’ comes in a minute later like he’d debated on whether or not to send it before he pressed the button, and Hayden’s eyes snap over to Theo to see his reaction to it so quickly that she almost doesn’t register the word at all.

After that, figuring the rest of this out is easy. It occurs to her right away that there was a reason she immediately looked to him instead of sitting there and feeling it for herself. She’d thought that while they were there, more out of just idle curiosity than anything else because she’d been dealing with her own fair share of swirling emotions, that Theo seemed...not off, but different, and now she knows why; Theo’s eyes stay on his phone for much longer than Hayden’s did her’s.

The first place her mind goes back to is the beginning of it all, the real beginning of the day that had been marked by Liam showing up there in front of them, and how everything had really started to change the second that he stepped foot past the threshold of the gate and the first relieved note of his voice hit the air. Liam hadn’t seemed to notice anything off about Theo as he’d come over to him and sat down, too busy rambling about his walk home from practice and something having to do with hitchhiking that Hayden hadn’t been quite able to catch through his quick pacing and her own state of shocked brain fog, but now that she’s thinking about it, she’s not sure that Liam would have caught it if he had had a clear mind, either. 

She’d never really thought of it this way until right now, but during the end of the Wild Hunt and the months following it, Theo had effectively been Liam’s. Everyone in the pack knows on some level that Liam was always the one with him, always the one put in charge and therefore the one who knew him the most out of anyone else, which is why it’s such a jarring realization for Hayden to figure out that she knows him better. She assumes that Theo was quiet during the war with the hunters and the Anuk-ite - he’d been slipping into acceptance when it came to his role as nothing more than an outsider when Hayden had made her way out of town, a state he’d apparently kept himself in even when they needed him involved again - and that that version of Theo is just what Liam thinks he truly is, but Hayden knows that that’s not it at all. That quiet, eyes-on-the-ground-and-staying-there Theo is just another mask that stays over his face when everyone thinks that the other layers that have been shed were the only ones, another mask that only slips back over him when he’s nervous, when Hayden’s pushed the boundaries of their conversations to just before the breaking point or during the first few times he’d dared to touch her and now, apparently, whenever Liam is around.

And maybe that wouldn’t be enough, but it’d just kept going. There was that deer-in-the-headlights look when Liam had first gotten there, but then there was also the way that if he wasn’t keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the ground and avoiding eye contact like the plague he was looking at Liam like he wasn’t sure that he was actually real, the way he never seemed to get it at first that Liam was talking to him whenever he tried, always giving slightly surprised-sounding replies to whatever it was he was asked and accepting Liam’s compliments about the stickers on the bottom of his board that he and Hayden both know weren’t put there by him, the way he’d taken Liam’s phone and put his number in with uncertain fingers, and the way he’d waved to Jenna a few minutes back, an image that has not left Hayden’s mind since, as though he’s met her before.

Sometimes it’s hard for her to remember that life in Beacon Hills went on without her even though it felt like hers was at a complete pause, especially now that she has something with Theo that’s so distanced from the rest of the pack and everything else, but that wave has it all coming back to her that Liam and Theo have months’ worth of time together that she wasn’t there for. She hadn’t heard any of it from Theo, who has never brought up Liam once this summer - another thing that Hayden is definitely taking into consideration - but if there’s one thing Liam likes to do, it’s talk. He’d told her stories about the ending of the Wild Hunt while she’d rested her head on his chest counting his breaths and then told her ones about the war over long, multiple-paragraph text messages that she’d read while laying in that awful motel room bed missing him like hell and thanking God that he was still alive and thinking to let her know of it while she’d tried desperately not to cry. It’s like it’s Theo and Liam’s thing to save each other’s lives even when they hated each other, and maybe on some subconscious level that had been one of the things that helped Hayden warm up to Theo as easily as she did, but to Theo, who has been used as nothing but a punching bag or bait or a living, breathing test subject, she knows that it has to mean a lot more.

Hayden remembers the first time she’d been to Liam’s house. It was about a week after their first kiss, Liam so excited to introduce Hayden to his parents as something more than someone he’d complain about loudly at the dinner table when they asked him about his day as a kid. David was kind and connected with her over working closely with Val a couple of times when she was younger and Jenna had taken to her like she’d always been there, giving Hayden her cell number in case she “ever needs anything at all” and telling her that she’s “welcome here anytime.” She doubts that they were any different towards Theo, except for his first time meeting Jenna and David, Hayden pictures it happening right after the war; Liam’s parents finding out about him and her and all the others and the war ending match up pretty closely on the general timeline of that month from what Hayden’s heard. She imagines Liam, always generous, taking Theo back home after the fight at the hospital and helping him get those three bullets out of his shoulder in the upstairs bathroom. Maybe it was just the two of them, Liam standing between Theo’s thighs while Theo leaned back against the counter with his fingers gripping the front edge, or maybe the bathroom was crowded as Jenna and David helped too with her natural mothering manner and his expertly-crafted home first aid kit and medical knowledge.

But for some reason, the way that Theo looks at the picture for so much longer than it really requires, probably just trying to register that on top of hanging out with them, Liam now has a picture of him saved on his phone, is what slides the conclusion in front of her; The way he notices her thoughtful gaze and looks up at her, expression flickering into something anxious like he’s been caught, like he’s scared that she knows, is the final nail in the coffin.

Theo is in love with him.

That revelation seems like it should come with a million different things in Hayden’s mind firing off at once, but despite the deep breath she sucks in without thinking about it as she waits for it, it really, truly...doesn’t. She knew as she was getting there that it wouldn’t.

It’s not like she has any room to judge or wonder why, and it’s not like she can blame him for any of it. Liam is and has always been this force of nature that draws you in and wraps you up and makes sure that you can never truly let go, even if you don’t mean to get there, even if at first you don’t want to be there, even if you pack it all up and go miles away and try to cut the tie for both of your sakes - he’ll always be there. Hayden has always wondered how more people weren’t in love with the force that is Liam Dunbar in all of his sweetness and devotion and everything, so if she feels any one thing, it’s that she understands. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knows that this should make her jealous, make her angry, make her upset, but she just - understands.

Hayden knows what it’s like to be in love with Liam Dunbar - she has been, and as far as she can tell right now, she always will be. She understands all of it.

She doesn’t force Theo to address it, not that she could even figure out the words to try; Theo is staring straight ahead out of the windshield now with his hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel and Valerie is peering through the blinds curiously again and Hayden’s starting to feel like she can’t breathe for reasons she doesn’t know yet, so she reaches for the door handle once again and makes a real effort at it to actually pull it this time. When she pauses at the last second, she knows that it’s really the last time - something’s telling her that if she stays here for too much longer, she’s going to say something stupid, and she has no clue what it would be.

“Tomorrow?” Is what comes out of her mouth, Hayden turning around to look back at him only after the word is already out in the air, half to see his reaction, half to make sure she actually said it. Theo is in love with him. Her heart starts to pound with something so strong it threatens to bowl her over, so strong that it hurts, Tomorrow, tomorrow, please say tomorrow.

“Yeah,” Theo says faintly, and that’s enough. Hayden bites the inside of her cheek to hide the face she wants to make. She thinks that it’s going to be a smile, and if that wouldn’t freak Theo right the hell out, she doesn’t know what would. Tomorrow. “Tomorrow.”