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Saving Malia from the jaws of death isn't supposed to feel like this.
It isn't supposed to be like this, it isn’t supposed to end in a nightmare, Theo thinks hysterically, as he jackknifes upright in bed with his skin already prickling from the glass-cold beads of sweat and his organs feeling rearranged inside him.
He hadn't done it out of any particular inclination for heroics. She'd been trapped inside a circle of mountain ash, captured and motionless with yellow wolfsbane snarling outward from the gaping wound in her abdomen, in a horrifyingly ironic callback to the time Theo himself had almost gutted her with a shotgun.
He'd broken the circle of mountain ash. Slashed her binds, burned out the wolfsbane. Efficient, pragmatic, watchful of the clock as everyone else engaged the swathe of hunters around the warehouse to buy him time to complete the rescue.
It didn't feel noteworthy. Certainly not enough for Malia to wake with a grumble, peek open one eye at him from across Deaton's room, and fling a careless thank you his way that had left him slack-jawed and wrong-footed in astonishment.
So now he barely understands why any of it features in his dream.
He's sat at the head of a table that eerily resembles the McCalls', with its characteristic puncture marks from werewolf incidents and Stiles incidents alike. Food laid out in heaps, mismatched sets of silverware poking out from everywhere, as the chatter of the pack whirls around him and hands reach out for seconds. There's a toast made with La Croix to substitute the champagne that Melissa discovers is missing at the last minute. A cheesy speech, too, bizarrely headed by Argent and then encored by Jenna and the Coach, the latter of which makes no sense to Theo. Liam is clapping the loudest and Mason is shoveling food onto Theo's plate. Wolf whistles ring out all around in celebration of his heroism. Of him.
And then the table grows longer and longer, and Theo glances up to seek Liam's eye where he was seated close by just a minute ago, except this time he's somehow drifted much farther away and no matter how many times Theo reaches across the tabletop to tap his forearm or clears his throat to catch Liam's attention, the other boy never turns his way.
Theo glances back down at his plate, and suddenly it's empty. Spotless in a way that dusty dishes on display in a buffet cabinet might be, deceiving to the human eye at first glance but lacking their usual luster from years of disuse.
"Dessert! Dessert!" someone in the throng exclaims with a clap of glee. Theo doesn't recognize the voice or care much to identify it.
And then somehow the McCall house has turned into a bona fide banquet hall without Theo noticing it—just as dreamscapes are wont to warp underneath one’s slippery grasp—because then someone is shoving a silver platter under Theo's nose, still covered with a winking domed lid but steaming hot to his senses even in the muted consciousness of his dream self.
"Only the best for our hero," says the person to whom the server's arm is attached. They sound familiar. Familiar like the dread of the creaking step in your childhood home at two a.m. where you weren't allowed to come down for midnight snacks. Familiar like the lurch of your stomach as you flipped and plummeted from the monkey bars or the swingset to the jagged-edged woodchips of the playground below, despite everyone telling you this would happen and what a stubborn thing you were who didn't deserve rewards for not listening.
The domed lid comes off. Clouds of steam puff out and sting Theo's eyes, prompting them to water, but his limbs feel too heavy for him to wave away the vapor so he can see better. It's a long drag of time before his vision clears.
And then he understands. Somehow, in his dream state that not even he can fully comprehend, he understands.
On the platter, still warm and beating and dripping blood from every orifice as it moves, is a human heart.
Theo is hardly struck by surprise when he moves on instinct and looks down at his own chest. He's mute not with shock, but with—the lack of creativity on the part of his brain, he supposes, as he slowly registers that his ribs have cracked open and the prickly feeling of his skin was from the steady dribble of still-fresh blood down his stomach from the cliff-sharp edges of his broken bones. Eight rows of ribs pierced through and peeled back to reveal nothing but a hollow inside him.
"Bon appetit," says the server, and when Theo looks up he finds their face is now the waterlogged shade of an eleven-year-old Tara attached to the body of a nameless woman in banquet uniform.
—
Theo is drenched in terror the second he wrenches open his eyes. He trades one darkness for another, hurtles from one senseless hellscape to another scene of confusion as he blinks and shudders and muffles a cry with his fist while the suburban bedroom swirls into focus around him.
The moonlight from the window doesn't help to reorient him. He's up and out of bed before he can count another second, the sheets and covers snaking around his legs and tangling his steps before he's recovered control of his body. He lands on the carpet with a sharp jolt to his elbow. He doesn't cry out in pain—silence at minor inconveniences is a well-practiced habit that will take a lifetime to break—but he lets his mouth fall open in a silent gasp, processes where he is, and then goes on stumbling to the door of his room and yanks it open.
The smell of Liam pervades the hallway almost as strongly as it does the room next door. Theo doesn't turn to the right to enter the other boy's space—doesn't think he can muster up enough dignity to do this again, after Liam had just calmed him down from a nightmare the week prior—and so instead he turns left and somehow makes it down the stairs without braining himself on the banisters.
Except that his senses were flooded from the dream and he had no space left to realize his error until it was too late. Because Liam is not, in fact, upstairs in his room as Theo had assumed, but downstairs in the kitchen slumped over the breakfast bar where Theo should have picked up on his heartbeat in the first place.
Theo takes a second to take in Liam's posture, the looseness of his limbs, the way he nurses something in his hand while his head lists sideways and rests against his left fist.
Slowly, cautiously, Theo pulls little bits of himself back together. He takes a tentative sniff of the air to confirm his suspicions: wolfsbane and liquor.
Liam moves his head infinitesimally to address him. There's no way he didn't already know Theo was coming downstairs, what with the racket the chimera had made tripping over the carpeted steps.
Liam looks like he wants to say something. With Liam, it could be anywhere from something apologetic to something completely acerbic with the full intention of instigating a fight.
But in the end, Liam doesn't say anything. Something about the way he tips his head instead invites Theo to drift over on his barely-human feet to join the beta back on the ground in the land of the living. Theo's gaze dips down once to the glass bottle in Liam's hand, and that's all it takes for Liam to lean back and stretch out the drink to share it out of the magnanimity of his drunken heart.
The first swig burns on the way down Theo's throat. So does the second, and then the third. Theo goes for two more gulps before handing the bottle back.
Liam takes it. He drinks from it, letting just a little bit dribble down the side of his mouth before smearing it away with the corner of his sleeve, and all Theo can think for one blinding moment is how both their mouths have shared the same lip of the same bottle.
He could ask about what's keeping Liam up at night. Keeping him up long enough to break out the temptation of drowning everything in a diluted version of the poison that creeps into their lives. Long enough to make Liam not care anymore about David coming home from the night shift and possibly glancing at the liquor cabinet, and then sharing with Jenna the case of the missing bottle when she gets back from her flight.
But Theo doesn't ask. Because he still remembers the smell of Tara's blood dripping from his heart onto the silver platter on his dream. Still tastes the gum-aching desolation of looking down at his own chest and realizing there's never been anything inside except the great void he always suspected was writhing within.
Instead, Theo hears himself say: “I still remember the first time I lied.”
Liam glances up, brows pulled together and bottom lip tucked under his teeth at the nonsequitur.
Except that it’s not, not really, because the look in Liam’s eyes tells Theo plainly that he knows there’s a destination from this starting point in the conversation. And that he trusts Theo, dream-broken and liquor-tongued, to get them there.
“I was seven,” says Theo.
For all anyone knew, he could have been five. Always gangly and small for his age.
His mother had bought a precious new hardbound copy of King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry for Tara. Theo can still remember to this day the smell wafting off the pages fresh from the bookstore: the way Tara had crinkled the gold foil-edged paper bag in her excitement to get at the present, the way she had tucked her thumb and forefinger around the collar of his shirt to have him take a sniff, too, the way the spine had cracked as the book fell open in Tara’s palm as if it held all the secrets of their little world. And the illustrations—G-d, the art inside the book. Theo had never seen brush strokes quite that vivid set to paper in black and white, but suddenly he found himself hungering for the next page, to feast his eyes on more horses, even though he’d never even given a second thought to the animal as anything special before that day.
The print was too small and the book was too wordy for Theo to read at his age. Tara indulged him, though, reading parts of it to him when she felt in the mood to put up with his badgering, even though she’d never been the most fluent with her dyslexia. Theo would flop on his stomach across the end of her bed and prop his bony chin up on his fists and listen. Interject sometimes with dramatic gasps at the action, and then demand that she flip the book around so he could see the illustrations when something particularly juicy in the story came up. He could always tell when an illustration was coming.
Tara had her own bookshelf, just as Theo had his. Hers was filled with bigger books that had nicer pictures in them, some of them glossy-paged anthologies of stories with the silver foil on the edges of the pages and full-length colored illustrations tucked inside. Theo had a habit of slipping into her room when Tara was off at tennis practice in the afternoons just so he could pick another book from her shelf and pore over the pictures. No matter if he couldn’t understand all the words just yet, because the images spoke vividly enough to him.
He got careless, though. One day he padded into her room with a chocolate muffin clutched in one hand and with the other he reached for King of the Wind. He curled up on Tara’s window seat with his socked feet tucked in and balanced the muffin on one knee while he flipped through the pages with his clean hand. He’d overestimated his dexterity, though, because just as he got to his favorite set of illustrations of the horse race at the end with the sultan’s white mare of the luxuriously glossy coat, the muffin wobbled and plopped straight onto the middle of the page.
His breath froze in his throat. And then his heart began to jackhammer as he stared down at what he’d done. The huge, oily, sopping stain of chocolate in the middle of the best picture in the whole book, ruining the thing entirely.
He remembers mopping frantically at the stain with the edge of his hoodie sleeve, and then panicking even more when the chocolate streaks ruined the yellow ribbed cuff, too. He slammed the book shut and shoved it back into its place on the top row of Tara’s bookshelf, then dashed off to the bathroom to rifle through the cabinet under the sink where he knew his mother kept the spare bottle of stain remover.
He remembers scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing forever at the cuff of his hoodie until it turned an acceptable murky gray instead of the streaks of mud it originally looked like. His fingers were raw-skinned and pruning from the chemicals and the water by the time he was done. He still had to sneak back into his sister’s room to retrieve the accursed chocolate muffin. As he tiptoed up to the window seat, his gaze was tugged inexorably upward toward the bookshelf, and something inside him whispered that he should pull the book out again and check the damage. Just to be sure.
But then he started to panic all over again, knowing that if he looked at it now, he’d never be able to keep quiet to Tara, and Tara—being the golden child—wouldn’t understand that there are some things that don’t need to be shared with their parents. His mom and dad would know, and his mom would put two and two together that it had been Theo who had damaged yet another happy bit of their life, and Theo couldn’t possibly imagine what he could do to make up for that.
“It didn’t matter, though,” Theo shrugs as he nears the end of his rambling narrative. “She found out anyway. Tara was too excited about the book and when she got to the end, she saw the stain. She—showed my mom, of course.”
Liam has long ceased taking swigs of the near-empty bottle and instead has been worrying the edge of his upper teeth around the glass lip as he listens. He pushes off the counter and pins his lake-blue eyes even more fixedly on Theo’s face. “What…what did she do?”
“Confronted me, obviously,” Theo says. Words are still slow to come to his lips. It’s important that he get this part right, he thinks. He casts about for a moment to reorient himself. “Um. I lied, of course. She had the belt in her hand when she came to my room and asked me about it. I—” Theo’s throat spasms even now, a phantom recreation of how tight his vocal cords had wound that afternoon when his mother had filled the doorway.
The next breath through his nostrils stings the inside of his nose. Theo can’t look at Liam, can’t get himself to focus on anything in front of him, really, in this part of the story. “She didn’t even ask me more than twice. She just…blinked and said, okay. I was shaking. I didn’t know what—what that could mean. For me. Then she just said, we’ll prove it. We’ll…go to the store right now and show them this book. And if they say that stain was there when they sold it to me, then that means you’re not a liar.”
Liam’s eyes widen at that detail. His mouth hangs open, and the corners of his eyes have gone pinched, like he has a million things to say about that but not a clue how to find the words for them.
True to her word, Theo’s mother had taken them both, Theo and Tara, back up to the bookstore on Main. She’d called down the manager in that deadly calm voice of hers and cracked open the book to the exact page with the horrid, monstrous stain. Because she’d gone and bookmarked it with a green sticky note sticking up out of the pages so she wouldn’t waste time having to find it.
The cashier, a curly-mopped bespectacled woman, was there as Theo’s mother shoved the offending object into the manager’s hands.
“No, ma’am,” the manager had said with infinite patience. “We don’t sell damaged books. All new here, no used.”
Theo remembers distinctly how he had glanced out the display window of the shop into the glare of the setting sun, and how he’d considered what would happen if he bolted out the door right now and into the street as the stoplight turned green. If breaking his body on the asphalt might cause a distraction great enough for a chocolate stain on pictures to become only a smidge of a sin long forgotten.
He didn’t get to find out, though. The cashier, jolly and buck-toothed, had taken one look at Theo’s trembling frame and slid her gaze back to Mrs. Raeken, and then had said: “Oh, my Lord! I’m such an idiot! That must have been the book I was flipping through that day I was snacking on a Hershey bar in the stockroom out back. I meant to write that off as damaged, but it must have slipped my mind. Must’ve been real busy out front and I was called up to the till or something. I’m so sorry about that.”
Theo listened with cotton in his ears and a buzzing in his stomach. He couldn’t have found the wherewithal to mouth thank you to the angel of a woman even if he’d remembered to.
His mother had glanced back and forth between the cashier and her son with a quiet kind of fury etched in the secret corners of her face.
Theo waited that entire drive back home with a pain in the center of his chest like a knife waiting to spring out. Something had to happen, he knew. Something bad.
But instead, nothing.
Things almost went back to normal. Except that where there was disinterest before in his mother’s eyes as she glanced at him, now there was ice.
He already knew, emotionally precocious thing that he was, he knew that he’d been born with a void in his gut and a last-minute name slapped on his forehead. Theodore, gift from G-d, the name you give to a baby to cover up the fact that it was an accident that dared to even be sick. And the expensive kind, at that.
Theo couldn’t bear the silent exile at that age. He almost wished she’d beaten the truth right out of him instead.
So he told the truth. He overcompensated, checked in with her wherever he went, even if it was just to the back yard to fish out tadpoles from the creek or to the basement to dig up his pack of marbles. He showed her all of his grades. He told her all about his friends, Scott and Stiles, down to the last playground joke.
He watched, and he listened, and he waited to be just good enough.
“That wasn’t all,” Theo says quietly, as he trades the bottle back and forth with Liam. “The cashier got fired. Because of me.” He shakes his head. “I took the book with me, by the way. Down with the—down to the tunnels. Didn’t have the nerve to open it until I was probably twelve. And the worst thing was…when I looked at that picture again, the stain was hardly there. Poof.” He makes a demonstrative sound to accompany his gesture. Pinches his fingers together in illustration. “There was just one small streak of chocolate. Like this. Hardly anything, just a smudge on the butt of one of the horses.”
Liam goes still. His heartbeat evens out, like he knows this is it, the destination they’ve been anticipating is arriving.
“You—” Theo starts, then stops. He starts again. His jaw clenches as he stares off to the side at the faint scratches in the well-loved hardwood of Liam’s home. “You ever feel like no matter how much good you do, how many truths you tell, that giant stain will always be there and you’ll never rub it out?”
The question is meant to be rhetorical. And so Theo is blindsided completely when Liam comes up with a quiet, “Yeah,” without missing a beat.
Theo’s head jerks up. For the first time tonight, his eyes find Liam’s directly, and they come into focus of one another. A bit of the inebriated haze slips from the expression on either of their faces.
“I almost killed my father when I was twelve,” says Liam.
Theo stares.
Liam doesn’t elaborate, not for a long minute. When he draws a breath, supposedly to follow up on that statement, he instead says a simple, “Come on,” and beckons with his head upstairs.
Theo follows him. He’ll always follow Liam. Whether it’s into battle, into the next city and the next chapter of Liam’s life, or here, down the hallway to Liam’s room and out the window onto the terrace so they can both clamber with sock-footed incoordination up the gutters to the edge of the roof. Theo’s brain still feels like it’s sloshing in his skull, so he lets the other boy climb up first, then reach down a hand to grab his and pull him up.
Liam looks brighter-eyed and calmer in the moonlight. Must be the true werewolf healing kicking in, letting soberness creep into his pores faster than it does into Theo’s.
“Your parents aren’t home,” Theo slurs, as if just now putting the pieces together that Liam was aiming for privacy.
Liam shakes his head in agreement. “Guess not. But I’ve never told anyone about this, anyway. Feels—” He doesn’t finish.
Theo gets it, though. It would feel like a stain on this house full of love and healing to dredge up something still dripping with blood from an old and open wound of the past.
“I told you what my father was like,” Liam says, small and quiet.
Theo nods, long and slow. He doesn’t dwell on the pain that shot through him that night that he’d woken Liam from a silent night terror inspired by his biological father. Jenna bears the haunted look of someone, too, whose happiness draws from the need to spite the unnamed tragedy that smeared her and Liam’s memories together.
Theo’s known this, intellectually, ever since he infiltrated the pack. He’s only known Liam like this, though, known him in his soul, since after hell and after the war and after—everything that needed to change in order to change them around each other irrevocably.
“I had a hammer in my hand and I went into his room one night,” says Liam. “They were sleeping in separate bedrooms by that point. He was—sleeping. Snoring, actually.” Liam shoves his hands under his thighs and presses the palms flat against the sandpaper roughness of the roof shingles. “I was just inches from him. Just—standing there hovering over him. I was picturing all the times he’d beat us, all the times he’d—beat her. How neither of us could do a fucking thing.”
Liam’s voice crests and then falls flat. Like this is the part where he’s learned to step back and lock it all away. Don’t feed fodder to the flames.
But that’s not how things die inside Liam, Theo knows. Not the way things die inside anyone, for that matter, because a book is a book and a lie is a lie and a boy who feels like his life was an unhappy accident, whether at seven or twelve or fucking nineteen years old, will never get over that gaping maw inside his chest.
“I didn’t do it,” Liam adds, speaking to his knees. The bottle has less than an inch of cloudy brown liquid in it and he pushes it across the rooftop to Theo to finish it. “I didn’t do it.”
“Yeah,” says Theo. He takes a drink and almost drains it, then stops. “I know.” He hands the bottle back to Liam.
Liam takes it and finishes it.
“That’s because you’re a good person,” says Theo.
“No,” says Liam. “It’s because I made a good choice that I felt horrible about at the time.” His lungs seize as he inhales. “I still feel horrible that I didn’t go through with it. Despite everything else that tells me otherwise.”
There are few things about Liam Dunbar that drive Theo speechless these days, but now here he is, dewdrops from an aging rooftop seeping into his sweatpants, and he sits there and stares at Liam, stunned.
And then he breathes out, all in a rush because something tells him if he doesn’t get the words out now, there may never be a time again when it is still right to utter them: “I almost killed you.”
“Yeah,” Liam breathes back, an echo of Theo’s previous line. “I know.”
“I could have killed you,” Theo reiterates. Because the difference feels significant. Because his throat is closing up, and the void inside him is widening at the realization of everything he could have truly destroyed if the true alpha’s pack didn’t defeat him, and now he aches, he aches, he aches.
Liam draws his legs up to his chest and turns his head to press a cheek against the hills of his knees so he’s looking sideways at Theo. The empty bottle dangles from his hand. “I could have killed you, too,” he whispers.
“You wouldn’t.”
“Theo,” says Liam. It’s long and sad, the syllables drawn out. Like Liam is softly chastising him for forgetting the truth he just learned, that Liam is more than capable of failing to regret the darker side of himself.
“You chose not to,” Theo amends. “I wouldn’t have made that choice if you all hadn’t stopped me.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yeah. I do.”
The breath leaves Liam in a lengthy concession. “How…” he whispers. “How would you have done it?”
“Quickly,” says Theo. He fixes his eyeline on the glimmer of the telephone poles under the moonlight several houses over so he doesn’t have to feel so gutted as he speaks. “I wouldn’t have made you suffer.” He pauses. “Not you.”
“Even then?” Liam asks.
“Even then,” Theo promises.
“How would you have done it?” Liam prods again.
Theo shuts his eyes. Soberness is returning to him rapidly, and it’s making his eyes sting, how there’s no backing down from this part of the conversation anymore. At least he’s too fatigued down to his bones to care anymore how this shifts whatever it is that has been hanging between them. Small mercies.
“Claws to the throat, probably,” he admits in the smallest of voices.
Liam makes a noise of acknowledgment.
And then, because Theo thinks his unbearable honesty at this hour has at least earned him a little bit: “How would you have done it?”
“Long,” Liam whispers, still looking at him. “Slow.” It’s a hellish miracle how he’s able to stare at the side of Theo’s face as he speaks these words. “I had a lot of rage in me. I would've wanted you to suffer, at the time.”
“I betrayed your trust.”
“Yeah,” Liam agrees. “You did.”
Theo can’t help but pick up on the past tense and fixate on it. Turn the verbs over and over on his tongue until he goes crazy with the need to know what kinds of words Liam will put in the present tense.
“You don’t anymore,” Liam tacks on.
“I’m not good,” is all that Theo can offer him. Senseless little truths to overcompensate for the fact that he’s done nothing but lie since they met. Senseless little truths to overcompensate for the fact that it’s him, and that’s all he’ll ever be.
“I’m not good, either. I make good choices that I hate. You’ll make good choices that you hate, too, and then. Boom. People think you’re a good person.”
Something unlocks in Theo’s chest, then.
Here it is, the cracking open of the book that’s held the secret of its stain for far too long.
Here is a boy who crawled up from hell and fell into good choices by accident, because there’s no other possible way for him to live now and to find those scraps of love he scrambles for greedily to press into the nothingness inside his heart.
Here he sits next to a boy who fell from a father’s fisted hand and rose into good choices on purpose, through cracked knuckles and gritted teeth.
“I didn’t hate getting Malia out of the warehouse today,” Theo admits, desperate and raw.
Liam grins back, just as crazed and full of sadness. “Then you’re already better than you think.” He pauses. “Would you do it? If you had the chance again?”
“Save one of the pack? Yeah.”
Liam shakes his head. “I meant the other thing. Kill me. If you had to, again.”
Theo turns to look at him and doesn’t say anything for a long, long time. He knows what Liam is asking. Pretend there aren’t these unspoken feelings between them, or that magnetic pull that tugs them into each other’s bedrooms and under the covers together at night. Pretend it’s just Liam and Theo, not LiamandTheo, living under one roof, with nothing much to lose if Theo listened to his violent instincts.
Slowly, carefully, Theo reaches out a hand. Liam moves into his orbit: hearing the silent request and granting unconditional permission.
Theo wraps his palm around the back of Liam’s nape and holds him there securely. Liam’s eyes are blue, clear like running water, bottomless and full of trust as they hold one another’s gaze. Theo drifts closer and closer, and then his eyes flare and the fangs spring from his gums.
Liam’s eyes dip down to his mouth and then back up. After a moment, he tilts his head back.
Theo closes the gap and presses his open mouth to the pulse point in Liam’s neck. Liam’s blood thrums in his jugular, and Theo can almost taste the vitality of it. A small and distant part of him still remembers how it smelled, the temptation of victory and power and of driving his claws and fangs into soft, unprotected flesh so he could never be worthless again.
Liam’s adam’s apple bobs as Theo’s fangs close around his neck without breaking skin. His pulse doesn’t ratchet up even by a hair.
And it’s that realization, of all things, that sends the tears spilling drunkenly down Theo’s face.
In the next moment, the warmth of Liam’s hand is bleeding into Theo’s neck, too. Liam’s claws are out, pricking at Theo’s pores. He has the talons of two fingers fixed around the jugular in Theo’s own throat.
With a shuddering gasp, Theo releases his fanged hold on Liam’s neck. Liam retracts his own claws, but he keeps his hand there, fingers pressing and caressing the throbbing skin of the chimera’s throat.
“Never,” Theo answers him, belatedly but truthfully. “I would never.”
“Neither would I,” says Liam. He inches his hand up to thumb away the stream of moisture from Theo’s eyes that doesn’t seem to stop. "You're not dying for me."
"Yeah," Theo agrees inanely. Spent.
“C’mere,” Liam says, and it sounds like come here, lover, my old enemy, who’s passed the test.
Theo takes one look at him and collapses into Liam’s shoulder. He buries his face in the space between Liam’s jaw and his neck and breathes, breathes, just breathes in the scent of the boy he almost lost.
It might have taken hell for them to have gotten to this rooftop, but now, as Theo looks back on the nightmares of labyrinths in the hospital and hearts repossessed, he thinks—the universe knew what it was doing when it plunged him underground and cracked open his book again.