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Theo’s laid out flat atop one of the operating theater’s ubiquitous tables, his head resting on the jacket he’d folded up into a makeshift pillow and a book propped up on his chest, when the Surgeon appears literally between one blink and the next, and dumps a body at his feet.
Theo’s immediate reaction is annoyance. He’d stolen this book from the library three towns ago, and he’d been trying to get through it ever since, but between the Doctors’ constant experiments—and the recovery time he needed afterwards—and the undercover missions that they kept sending him on, he just hadn’t had the time. Swallowing his irritation and already mentally cataloging the closest places to dump a body—the stretch of forest reserve off of the highway, probably, though the junkyard would be easier—he sits up and swings his legs over the edge of the table, snapping the book shut as he goes.
Only to then freeze, because the body below him—moves.
“Watch,” the Surgeon orders, in their inflectionless, mechanical burr.
That causes Theo’s head to snap up from his wide-eyed, off-footed staring. “What?” he demands furiously. “For how long?”
But the Surgeon is already moving away, disappearing deeper into the operating theater in their jittery, skip-framed way. Theo stares after them, disbelieving, but his attention is yanked back down to the figure stirring just below his absurdly dangling feet when it uncurls, and starts to push itself shakily upwards.
Gold-flared eyes blink blearily open, and then rise slowly to meet his own.
---
The gold-flared eyes turn out to belong to a young werewolf named Liam, and the first time he tries to run, the Doctors make Theo go after him.
“Excuse me?” Theo demands, when he returns to the operating theater covered in blood and disgusting viscera and clutching the Doctors’ desired grimoire in one hand; its former owners had been reluctant to part with it, strangely. “How is this my problem?”
“You were told,” the Surgeon intones, without looking up from where their hands are busy with—something, whatever-it-is laid out flat and unmoving and glimmering wetly across one of the operating tables.
“Watch,” the Pathologist agrees, handing the Surgeon a sharp-edged tool that catches and throws the overhead light.
“I was also told—” Theo starts to argue, holding up the grimoire demonstratively, but the Surgeon just raises their head, the movement jerky, and repeats, “You were told.”
Theo snaps his jaw shut, his nostrils flaring. It takes conscious effort not to punch five holes in the delicate grimoire he’s holding, the shift pushing insistently out at the tips of his fingers, and to instead put the book very carefully down on the table just inches away from the Geneticist. He turns right back around on his heel and leaves again.
The only saving grace of the situation is that Liam is laughably easy to find. He leaves a scent trail that Theo would have to be dead to miss, and he’d only managed to make it one town over by the time Theo tracks him to the middle of the rundown city center, where he’s stood with his lip between his teeth and his eyes darting around the surrounding buildings, clearly trying to figure out what to do next. But then his eyes land on Theo, and widen: Theo bites back a curse as he takes off.
He catches Liam in an alleyway between two apartment complexes, stepping out into the mouth of it to cut off Liam’s escape and then lunging forward and pinning him face-first against one of the brick walls when Liam sucks in a startled sound and tries to wheel back around the direction he’d come. They hit hard—Theo isn’t exactly trying to be careful—and he can hear it when Liam’s breath leaves him in a pained whoosh; when Liam’s forehead cracks hard against the brick, and scrapes as he gasps and turns his head.
But he doesn’t give up; Theo’s never sure, looking back, why he’d expected Liam to just give up. Instead Liam plants both of his hands palm-flat against the brick Theo had just pinned him against, and shoves. It knocks Theo back several startled steps, and by the time he’s snarled his annoyance and made to reclaim his lost ground, Liam has spun around to face him, feet staggered and with blood running down his face from the already-closed cuts on his forehead.
“I am not going back there,” he declares, his fangs lengthening even as he says it, turning his statement into a snarl.
Theo just smirks at him. “You are.”
Liam shakes his head and settles more firmly onto the balls of his feet, his claws now out and shifted, too, though it's clear from the awkward angle he’s holding them at that he’s still wildly unused to the feeling. “You can’t make me,” he threatens shakily, his eyes flaring gold.
But Theo just assures him, “I can,” and ducks Liam’s clumsy strike as he springs up from his crouched position and drives his shoulder directly into Liam’s sternum, simultaneously winding him and slamming him back against the brick wall behind him, Liam’s breath whooshing back out of him, and this time he can’t get it back as easily; this time, when his head smacks against the wall, his eyes go unfocused, and he starts to slump. Theo catches him and hauls him back upright, pressing his mouth to Liam’s ear so that he can hiss, “And the next time you waste my time making me come after you like this, I’m going to take it out of your hide.”
He pulls Liam off of the wall, after, one clawed hand wrapped tightly around the back of his neck, and drags him stumbling out of the alley, and back to the Doctors.
---
And he does take it out of Liam’s hide, the next time Liam tries to run: just not in the way he’d intended.
“Here’s your pet,” he snaps at the Doctors, dropping a wetly-gasping, still struggling Liam at their feet, and then leaving him there—bloodied, with several of his ribs still knitting back together—while he goes to deal with the claw marks that Liam had scored across his chest and lower right thigh. They’re deep, and frustratingly slow to heal around the pieces of shredded shirt and denim caught within the wounds, and it takes Theo over an hour to pick them all out; he has to reopen several gashes before he’s done, cursing Liam’s name all the while.
The next time Liam runs, he actually manages to sever one of Theo’s Achilles’ tendons before Theo can subdue him, and Theo has to break his back, snarling, to keep him from running off again while Theo heals. Liam glares hatefully out at him the entire time, until finally Theo can haul both himself and Liam back to their collective feet.
But the time after that, Theo doesn’t have to go after him: the Doctors do it for him, Liam’s timing having unluckily coincided with the Doctors’ desire to do—whatever it is they need to do with him; Theo still hasn’t figured it out, and he has no intention of asking. He comes back to the operating theater from one of his latest assignments in time to see the Surgeon striding towards one of the operating tables where the Pathologist and Geneticist are waiting, Liam slung unconscious over one shoulder with one of the Surgeon’s arms hooked over Liam’s body to anchor him in place.
There’s a pair of burnished gold goggles gleaming in their other hand.
Theo watches silently as the Surgeon deposits Liam onto the operating table in silence, and tells himself that his throat isn’t tight. The Pathologist and Geneticist immediately move to strap Liam’s arms and legs down, and Liam’s head lolls and his brow furrows as he clearly wakes up. As he does, he tugs subconsciously at the restraints, and Theo hears the second his heartbeat starts to pound.
He looks away before he can see Liam’s eyes snap open.
But then the Surgeon demands, “Report,” and he has to turn back.
It takes effort to keep his eyes on the Surgeon’s mask, and not let it drift helplessly down to the keenly-bladed scalpel in their hands; not let himself imagine, remember, its sharpness. He says, “The Larouvière pack is rumored to draw their strength from an artifact taken from their homeland. It’s no Nemeton, but…”
He deliberately leaves the thought hanging. The Surgeon makes an acknowledging sound.
“Investigate,” they order.
Theo jerks a short nod, and then—turns around, ignoring the sounds of restraints pulling taut against the table, of rubbered heels dragging against the slick metal surface; of bitten off sounds that don’t manage to stay trapped in a throat.
He has his orders. He leaves to go follow them.
---
He doesn’t get back from investigating the Larouvière pack until the early hours of the morning, his skin and clothes reeking of the alpha’s son’s cheap cologne. His mouth isn’t any better, tasting cloying sweet; one of the betas had pushed him up against a nearby car and kissed him as he’d been leaving, and when she’d pulled away, smirking, the slick of her lip gloss had been left behind. All Theo wants to do is head for the empty house he’d found to squat in and take a shower, brush his teeth, sleep, but he knows he can’t; at least not until he’d written down what he’d found. He settles for shucking his jacket and throwing it across one of the tables as he passes; it helps lessen the cheap chemical smell clinging to him, anyway.
But as he’s pulling his arm back, he glances idly to the side, and stops.
Liam glares at him, but only for a moment. That’s all he can seem to manage, his head rolling back towards the ceiling the next moment with his expression melting out of its snarl and into a twisted, pained grimace. There’s sweat in his hairline and shivers wracking his frame, and it doesn’t seem to matter that the restraints that’d previously strapped him down are hanging loose: Liam’s still laying flat on the operating table, and in practically the same position that Theo had last seen him in. He makes no move to get up.
Theo looks away, fully intending to keep walking, but then he bites off a curse, and stalks over to a nearby set of shelves to start pulling down vials.
As terrible as Liam looks—and he does look terrible, his hair hanging down in lank, sweaty strands over his sickly-pale forehead, and his chest rising and falling in these shallow, uneven gasps—he still catches Theo’s wrist when Theo reaches for him, his grip hard enough to grind Theo’s bones together. “Not a chance in hell,” he spits, and from the tang in the air immediately afterwards, he’d clipped his tongue getting the words out between his full-body shuddering.
Theo resists the urge to yank his hand free, and instead focuses on keeping his hold on the syringe between his fingers light, and easy. He says, “Don’t be an idiot. Whatever satisfaction I’d get from finally being free of you, it’d be nothing to what the Doctors would do to me if I jeopardized their current experiment.”
Liam’s nostrils flare, once at satisfaction and again at experiment, but after a few dragging seconds of studying Theo’s face, his grip around Theo’s wrist starts to loosen. “What is it?” he demands, raspy and only after swallowing; his throat apparently dry enough that Theo can hear it click.
Theo lifts his other hand—he’d threaded his knuckles between his selected vial tops and brought them over for exactly this reason—to show Liam the labels. “Vitamins,” he says. “Minerals.” He sets the vials down and busies himself pushing up one of Liam’s sleeves, the cotton sweat-damp and cool-feeling; one of the causes of Liam’s shivering, Theo’s sure, the wet fabric pulling away whatever meager heat his body is managing to generate. “The Doctors took samples, right?” he asks, though he knows the answer; Liam still seems to appreciate the chance to nod. “These will help,” Theo tells him, ignoring how unexpectedly quiet his voice comes out. “They’ll jumpstart your body’s healing. Help it replace what was lost.”
He doesn’t wait for Liam’s agreement. That seems like a bridge too far, somehow. Instead he forms a cuff with his hand and presses it down on Liam’s trembling elbow, holding it down and swelling Liam’s veins out so that he can slide the syringe’s needle into the largest. He siphons Liam’s pain as he does it, but he assures himself that that’s just good sense: the last thing he needs is Liam jerking away and possibly blowing his own vein while Theo’s trying to inject him. Only then he keeps siphoning, even after he’s emptied the syringe and withdrawn the needle tip from Liam’s arm, and that’s—harder to explain.
Liam doesn’t notice. He’d tilted his head back against the table the second Theo had put his hands on his arm, and he’d arched it back further when Theo had pressed the needle into his skin. It takes him a good few seconds—panting, the muscles in his neck straining—to bring it back down, once Theo has finished. He slits his eyes open and looks over.
Theo looks back at him for one second, two, and then he pushes off of the table, and goes to put the vials away and discard the syringe. He leaves Liam there and doesn’t look back once he’s done, disappearing further into the operating theater without a word.
When he comes back later—information from the Larouvière pack recorded, notes to himself to follow-up on captured—Liam’s still on the table, but now he’s sitting up, his hands braced straight-armed on either side of his hips. Theo notes that they’re still trembling, slightly; but only slightly. He looks up when Theo steps back into the main room.
Theo finds himself stopping without consciously knowing why, or even necessarily wanting to. Liam works his jaw.
Finally he asks, “How long did it take you to figure out that—treatment, or whatever?”
He’s asking a question, but layered underneath it are several assumptions, and those he says like facts. Still: he’s fishing. Theo knows he’s fishing.
And Theo could lie. Probably he should lie, for this or that reason, but when he opens his mouth what comes out is, “A while.” He smirks, though it feels more plasticky than it should, and tells Liam, “Trial and error experimentation is a lot harder when you’re your own test subject.”
Liam flinches. Doesn’t cover it up and maybe doesn’t try to; maybe doesn’t know enough to try to. His fingers spasm around the edge of the table.
But he doesn’t ask anything else, and he doesn’t say thank you. And that’s the reason Theo gives himself, when he tries to give a reason at all, for why he tips his chin in Liam’s direction after a few seconds and asks, “Can you walk?”
Liam frowns at him, and then shifts tentatively against the table, like he was actually, physically testing his limbs and body out. “Yeah,” he says, after a moment. “I think so.”
“Then come on,” Theo tells him, and moves to snag his discarded jacket.
He takes his time shrugging into it. Long enough for Liam—who hesitates, but then begins to move slow; to move carefully—to catch up to him, and then he turns and leads him out.
---
If he takes any longer leaving, Theo’s going to be late to meet the son of the Larouvière pack’s alpha. That’s obviously not good for a whole variety of reasons, but he can’t find the goddamn shirt he’d been planning on wearing, which probably means Liam took it: he’d gotten in that habit lately. Theo’s not exactly sure why it matters but it feels like it does, so he comes into the main body of the operating theater, having already searched their squat and Liam’s favored haunts, and yells, “Liam, seriously, where’s my goddamn—” before stopping dead.
The Surgeon doesn’t look up from where they’re prepping one of the operating tables. It’s empty, but Theo recognizes the set-up, and more to the point the tools that the Surgeon is laying out. He immediately feels ice bloom in his chest. “I can find him,” he tells the Surgeon through numb lips. “I can bring him back.”
“Unnecessary,” the Surgeon intones.
“But I can—” Theo tries; has to try, even though he knows it’s going to be useless.
“Unnecessary,” the Surgeon just repeats, and then they’re proven right the next second, because the Pathologist and Geneticist step out of the shadows, dragging a bloodied, still struggling—still snarling—Liam between them. He and Theo make a split second of eye contact, but then their line of sight is broken; the Pathologist and Geneticist throw Liam down on the table, and Liam disappears behind the wall of their backs as they and the Surgeon quickly, ruthlessly strap him down.
A few seconds later the Pathologist and Geneticist split to step around opposite sides of the table, and Theo’s eyes immediately catch on Liam’s again.
Liam looks desperately back, flare-eyed and with his expression wrenched.
Then Theo jumps, because the Surgeon demands, “The artifact.”
Theo looks up into their mask. There’s maybe fifteen feet between them, he can’t actually see his reflection in the strange planes of metal and glass, but he can feel how stricken his face must be. Panic bolts through him as he forcibly smooths it out, even as just over the Surgeon’s shoulder, Liam snarls something vitriolic, and wrenches, uselessly, at his restraints.
“The alpha’s son is going to show it to me today,” Theo tells the Surgeon, adding, “I finally—convinced them,” as he swallows down the sharp tasting something that immediately rises in his throat, forcibly ignoring the memory of how he’d convinced him; phantom fingers trailing down his sides and phantom breath breaking across his neck.
The Pathologist holds out a tool over Liam’s strapped-down body. The Surgeon takes it. “Acceptable,” they decide.
They look down at Liam, then, so Theo does, too. Liam’s head snaps sideways like he can sense the attention and Theo nearly takes a step forward before he can stop himself; before he winds up staggering a step backwards instead.
Liam is in fact wearing his shirt, he notices. Theo has to turn and leave before he can see it split open under the Surgeon’s knife.
---
He returns to the operating theater as soon as he’s done; as soon as he’s slipped away from the alpha’s son, and stolen the artifact, and then slipped back to the alpha’s son, who’d rolled over and murmured and rested a hot, proprietary hand on his bare flank.
He’d stared at the opposite wall until dawn had crawled its way across the plaster, after that, and he could feign a slow, sleepy awakening, the alpha’s son sensing it and blinking open his eyes to look at him with a cocky, self-satisfied grin. “Duty calls,” he’d leaned over to murmur in Theo’s ear, and then he’d climbed over him, deliberately low and deliberately smooth so that their bare skin had dragged, and then he’d tossed out a, “See you later”—not a question—as he’d pulled on his clothes. The only thing that had kept the sneer off of Theo’s face was the knowledge that he very much wouldn’t.
But he forgets about that, doesn’t care, because—because, and he speeds back to the operating theater as fast as he dares, the stolen artifact carried carefully in a padded box strapped down in his truck’s passenger seat with one of his hands pressed to its top to hold it in firmly in place. Once at the operating theater, he hurries down into the dank dark space, ears-eyes-nose already half-shifted as he casts around for something, for anything; that he senses nothing causes something hot and thick to stopper up his throat. The box he leaves on one of the first tables he passes—the Doctors would find it, no problem—and he rushes back to the main body of the operating theater with his tongue between his teeth to keep from calling out.
But Liam isn’t there.
It should be a comfort, except it isn’t, and Theo swears, deliberately calling up the rest of the shift to let it flow up his throat, and out through his nose. When he next inhales Liam’s scent comes with it and he follows it, shoes squeaking on the damp concrete floors as he winds his way deeper into the operating theater.
Liam glares up at him when Theo finds him, collapsed with his back against one of the tunnel walls; sweaty; shaking: he hadn’t made it far. He’s got his right arm wrapped protectively around his stomach, and Theo can see how hard he’s breathing; how shallow. Looking at him, he can hazard an extremely well-educated guess what the Doctors took, and he winces in immediate, helpless sympathy.
“Liam,” he murmurs, coming forward. “Let me—”
But Liam snarls at him. Theo jerks to a startled halt, and stares at him.
“Liam,” he tries again, going to his knees and reaching forward, and this time Liam doesn’t fight him.
He tilts his head back against the wall as Theo runs his hands over his arms, his legs, his chest; as Theo pulls his protective forearm away, and probes at his abdomen. He lets out a low, helpless moan, then, and Theo closes his eyes briefly, before twisting around so that he can reach inside his own pocket. He comes up with a capped syringe.
Liam watches him through narrow, slitted eyes. Theo feels it like a physical weight against the back of his bent neck, focused as he is on carefully sliding Liam’s sleeve up, and positioning his left arm for access; on uncapping the syringe with his mouth. He takes a deep breath after, the cap left between his teeth, and braces himself as he simultaneously slides the needle into one of Liam’s veins, and starts to siphon him. Leaving the cap between his teeth had been deliberate: he bites down on it, hard, as Liam’s pain slams into him.
He’s shamefully relieved when Liam pushes him away the instant the syringe is empty. Even still, he shudders with the fading remnants of Liam’s pain, his limbs juddering as he falls back onto his heels, then immediately back onto his sit-bones; unable to hold himself up.
He spends a few long seconds with his eyes closed, just breathing through the fading remnants of Liam’s pain, and then he slowly slides them open.
Liam’s already looking at him, but that’s not the part he cares about. Liam’s pallor already looks better, and he’d uncurled, some, like the pain that’d been eating him away from the inside out had eased.
Theo exhales out, shaky.
He looks back up to meet Liam’s eyes, then. “You ran again,” he says; not a question.
Liam scoffs and looks away. Theo stares at the side of his face; the curve of his throat, exposed by the angle.
“I really thought,” Theo finds himself saying, and he tells himself that the tightness in his voice is annoyance, and not—whatever else it could be, “that you’d gotten that out of your system.”
Liam rolls his head back along the filthy concrete wall until he’s looking straight at Theo again. When he speaks, its not to respond to Theo’s accusation. “Did you get whatever it was from the Larouvière pack?” he wonders, caustic.
Theo stares at him for a moment, throat getting tight. “I did.”
Liam lifts his head and repositions it. His eyes never leave Theo’s own. “What did you have to do for it?” he drawls, his nostrils flaring pointedly.
Theo feels his jaw clench and he forces his chin up, even if what he actually wants to do is hunch down. “What I had to,” he snaps back.
He braces himself for another of Liam’s derisive snorts, but it doesn’t come. Instead Liam’s eyes start to bleed gold, the bright color filling up his irises until his usual blue is drowned away.
Theo swallows, and isn’t sure why.
“Where were you even going to go?” he asks, changing the subject back to the one that actually matters. “It’s not like you remember where you came from, or who you’d be trying to run back to. It’s not like they’d remember you.”
Liam flinches, and hard. Theo feels something twist in his chest, but refuses to name it: it’s just a fact. He’d simply stated a fact.
“Maybe not,” Liam snarls, eyes still gold, gold, gold, “but at least I wouldn’t be here.”
Theo stiffens, recoiling, and then starts to draw back. But Liam doesn’t let him get far, snapping out a hand and catching his wrist with his fingers closing hard enough around the bones that Theo actually, legitimately feels something give. He hisses out a soundless snarl and yanks his hand free.
“There’s no point,” he reminds Liam ruthlessly, the throb of his healing wrist turning his syllables sharp as he stands. “You’ve seen it for yourself: the Doctors will always find you.”
He says you, meaning Liam, but when Liam scrambles up to his feet after him, Liam says, “So we destroy the goggles,” like he’d understood the term more broadly.
Theo stares at him. After a few moments he shakes his head. “They’ll just remake them, or create something else.”
God, he sounds tired. He is tired. His shirt still smells like the Larouvière’s alpha’s son and his other shirt, still draped around Liam’s shoulders, is bloodstained and sweat-stained and cut open, the slices surgically precise. He starts to turn away, towards the operating theater exit.
“So you think I should just give up?” Liam yells at his back.
Theo stops, and doesn’t look back.
“I think you should survive,” he counters quietly, and then he keeps walking.
---
Theo wakes up later that night, instantly and instinctively, and with adrenaline already coating the inside of his mouth. He snaps open his already-shifted eyes to look straight up at the Surgeon standing above his bed, only to quickly realize that they’re not looking at him.
It’s only then that Theo registers the other heartbeat in the room.
He jerks his attention down. Liam slides his gaze upwards to meet his eyes, but he doesn’t have to turn his head, because he’d already been sat with his back against Theo’s bed, his head turned towards Theo. Theo has no idea how long he’d been there or how he’d managed to get so close without Theo waking up, and he feels his mouth start to drop open—either to ask or just because he’s so damn surprised—but either way he’s jolted back to reality the next second.
“Come,” the Surgeon intones, and Theo’s body starts to move before his conscious brain has even caught up, throwing off the covers; pushing itself up.
But a hand comes down on his mattress, and draws him up short. Liam levers himself to his feet, standing up in front of him, and Theo stares up at him, his mouth feeling oddly dry and his head feeling oddly cotton-filled.
“Come,” the Surgeon repeats, and Liam’s expression—spasms, for a moment, something unreadable chasing itself across his face as he twists to look down at Theo, before it spasms again, and settles into a scowl as he looks up at the Surgeon instead.
“I am coming,” he bitches, gesturing his arms pointedly out wide: look at me, waiting to go.
If the Surgeon takes issue with his tone, they don’t show it. They simply turn and start walking away towards a seemingly solid wall, half of it shrouded in shadow given the way the moonlight is playing through the room’s single window.
Liam turns and gives one last, searching look at Theo, and then he turns and follows the Surgeon into the dark.
---
Theo’s in the Doctors’ newest operating theater when Liam saunters in, rapping his knuckles along the wall to announce himself and grinning when Theo glances up at him. He’d stopped trying to sneak up on Theo awhile ago, as dumb an idea as that had always been, and had instead switched tacks to being as gregarious and grandiose as possible; Theo snorts and looks back down at what he’d been working on.
On cue, Liam keeps coming until he’s right at Theo’s elbow, peering over his shoulder to squint curiously at the object in Theo’s hands. “That looks boring,” he decides.
“That’s because you have the attention span of a golden retriever,” Theo shoots back, mild.
“Bark, bark,” Liam replies, and drops something onto the table next to Theo with a deliberate thump. Theo glances at it, eyebrows climbing, and then sets down his tools to reach for it.
“What’s this?” he wonders, not meaning the obvious, since it’s obviously a book.
Liam shrugs, affecting a degree of nonchalance that he’d have a better time pulling off if he could wipe the smirk from the corner of his mouth. “Just something I’d fetched—” he says, calling back to Theo’s golden retriever comment; Theo rolls his eyes, “—based on the title and the description on the back cover.” His smirk widens. “The guy who’d been reading it certainly seemed to be enjoying it.”
Theo snorts, eyeing the bookmark still stuck between the pages. Considering it’d been placed about three quarters of the way through, Liam had probably been right, and its former owner had been enjoying it. Turning the book over, Theo scans the back cover, then lets out a little huh and flips it right way up again so that he can open it to the first two pages and scan them.
Above him, Liam’s smirk goes from satisfied to triumphant.
Huffing a laugh, Theo closes the book and sets it back down. “Thanks,” he says, one hand still flattened over the cover.
The curve of Liam’s mouth flickers; becomes more of a close-mouthed grin. After a moment he blinks and looks briefly away, before twisting so that he can cock a hip against the table by Theo’s elbow, and tip his chin towards the space in front of Theo. “So what is that, anyway?”
Theo turns back to the object he’d set down. “You remember the Larouvière pack?”
The line of Liam’s mouth flattens out and his eyes immediately flicker gold. “Sure,” he says easily, though his fingers go white-knuckled around his biceps. “New Orleans.” He grins, the twist of it a little mean. “The alpha’s son wasn’t the best judge of character.”
Theo rolls his eyes, accepting the dig—and shoving away the memories that try to rise with the ease of long practice—as he reaches forward for the object, and lifts it for Liam’s inspection. “This is the artifact I stole from them. It turned out to be useless for what the Doctors wanted it for, but—” he sets it carefully back down, fingers lingering over it, “—that doesn’t mean it can’t still be valuable.”
He squints back up at Liam.
“Shouldn’t you be with the Scherer pack?” he wonders.
Liam just shrugs. “They’re out in force, looking for the omega that one of their betas sensed.” He tips his head sideways so he can grin at Theo again. “I figure I should give them a day or two of chasing their tails, you know? Gotta play at least a little hard to get, isn’t that what you always claim?” He bumps his hip purposefully against Theo’s arm.
Theo flows with the movement, huffing out another laugh as he picks his tools back up. “Just never seems like your style,” he observes. “Patience isn’t exactly your strong suit.”
Liam goes suddenly still, leveling him with a long look. “It is when there’s something I want at the end of it,” he says seriously.
Theo stares at back at him, unsure how to respond. Only then he doesn’t have to, because Liam shakes himself—literally, like a dog—and pushes himself to standing. He shoots Theo one last absent grin and then wanders away, leaving Theo watching after him, tools still held frozen in his hands.
After a moment he looks back down at them, and then forces himself to shrug and return to his work.
But hours later, when he puts his tools down and straightens up, he realizes that Liam is still there: apparently, he’d never left. He looks over when he realizes that Theo is watching him, bemused, and grins; he’d laid himself out flat on a nearby empty operating table, his jacket folded up under his head in the same makeshift kind of pillow that Theo tended to favor when doing the same. He’d also stolen the book that he’d stolen for Theo at some point, his hands holding it cracked open above his head with one finger absently keeping his place. It’s only then, hearing it speed up a bit, that Theo recognizes that he’d been absently keeping time by Liam’s heartbeat, the steady thump of it forming a background soundtrack to his work that he hadn’t even realized he’d been tuned into.
He blinks.
“You hungry?” Liam asks, rolling himself to a sitting position. He keeps hold of the book, his finger still slotted between the pages to mark his place. “One thing going for this shit town, it’s got that great diner.”
“Yeah,” Theo agrees, after a moment. “I could eat.”
---
Theo comes into the kitchen of their latest squat, sees Liam hunched over a bowl of cereal disinterestedly reading the back of the box, and frowns. “What the hell are you still doing here?” he demands, causing Liam to whip around fast enough that he dribbles the spoonful of milk and cereal pieces he’d been lifting to his mouth all over the counter. “You’re supposed to be getting that list of supplies from the Challis Darach.”
Liam had looked back at the mess of spilled cereal and made a face, but at that, he turns back around. “What?” he says, confused. “You said you were going to do that.”
“No,” Theo corrects, removing a copy of the list from his jacket and shoving it against Liam’s chest. “I said you were going to do it for me.”
Liam drags his eyes back up from where he’d gone a little cross-eyed looking at the list Theo is holding against his sternum, still frowning, and then glares at him as he fully internalizes what Theo had said. Theo widens his eyes and presses a little harder, Liam grunting and knocking Theo’s arm away with one hand, and catching up the list with the other. He reads it over quickly and makes a face—yeah, he probably would spend the next several days reeking like day-old corpses—and then he returns his unimpressed glower to Theo.
“You want to be back before nightfall, you better leave now,” Theo warns him, and Liam bites off a pissed-off sound and shoves away from the counter, knocking his shoulder pointedly into Theo’s as he goes. Theo twists and watches after him until he disappears out the door and into the garage, and only then does he let his eyes fall closed, and the air flow out of his lungs, until his shoulders slump, and they’re empty.
He opens his eyes back up as the shadows behind him roil and twist. “Come,” the Surgeon orders, stepping out of them, and Theo spends a few more seconds just watching after where Liam had disappeared, and then—goes.
Liam banging into the operating theater later that night is what jerks him out of his pained, exhausted stupor. He blinks at the half-gathered vials and nearly empty syringe in front of him for a few seconds, uncomprehending, and then looks blearily up as Liam crosses the room.
“I got your supplies,” Liam sneers, throwing them carelessly down onto a nearby metal table. “And if there’s anything else you want to shove off on me, you can fuck right—”
He grinds to an abrupt stop, and stares. A second later he’s rushing forward.
“What the hell,” he says, horrified. “Were you attacked, why are you—” But then he stops, and blinks, and his expression twists angrily up. He gets a fistful of Theo’s shirt and yanks it up, immediately zeroing in on where the surgical slices cut deep into Theo’s chest and abdomen are still sluggishly closing. His eyes bleed gold. He stares at the damage for a few heavy seconds, and then his eyes flick sideways, and he reaches for the scattered vials.
“Did you start?” he demands. “What have you already mixed?
Theo just shakes his head. Liam snaps his teeth, and steps forward so that he’s bracing Theo up with his hip and the side of his body, while with his hands he picks up the syringe and stands up the vials, clearly preparing to use one on the other.
“Tell me the doses,” he orders tightly, and then when Theo doesn’t respond fast enough for his liking, he snarls, “Theo!”
The burr in his voice penetrates the fog in Theo’s brain. Theo forces out the dosages, one after the other, occasionally having to stop and really think about one or two. But finally it’s ready, and Liam shoves up his sleeve, and wraps his fingers tightly around Theo’s upper arm in a makeshift cuff. “There’s something else you do,” he says tightly as he waits for the veins to swell. “Tell me what it is, how to do it.”
Theo shakes his head. “It’s fine,” he rasps.
“I wasn’t asking,” Liam just snarls back, and Theo stares up at him, caught.
It takes Liam a few tries to actually manage to siphon him, once Theo has pulled together the best explanation of it that he can. Theo slumps forward against his chest when it finally works, panting, and Liam catches him with one hand around the back of his neck, his other hand still injecting him with the last of the serum, until it’s empty and he can slowly slide the needle free.
The puncture wound closes immediately.
Liam shoves him back by the shoulder, then, and spends a good few moments just looking at him, before slamming down the syringe with a snarl as he wheels away like he was about to go and do—just something monumentally stupid. Theo fumbles out a desperate grasping hand, and just manages to grab him before he gets out of range. Liam stops before he can pull Theo too far forward, off of the stool he’s just barely managing to stay on top of.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Theo manages to spit out, though it still comes out weak; breathy.
Liam jerks his head away, glaring meaningfully out at the—currently empty—shadows around them, and then abruptly he changes direction and steps back forward, crowding close enough that Theo has to lean back to look up into his face.
“You don’t do that again,” Liam warns him lowly, and Theo swallows. “Do you hear me? Not again.”
Theo means to deny knowing what he’s talking about, or at least to protest. But he finds that he can’t, not with Liam glaring down at him like he is; not with Liam’s heart beating against his own, Liam stepped up close enough between his legs that their chests are pressed together. So he nods, after a moment, shaky and silent and with his throat tight, and with his eyes still fixed on Liam’s. Liam searches his face, clearly trying to tell if he means it, and then he puts his hand back on the side of Theo’s neck, and he starts siphoning Theo’s pain again; Theo gasps and clutches reflexively at his wrist, holding helplessly on.
It’s a week later that the Doctors return, stepping smoothly and expectantly out of the shadows. Theo stiffens, going to rise, but Liam puts a hand down on his shoulder to keep him in his seat as he stands, instead.
“Well?” he demands, chin tipping defiantly back.
The Surgeon watches him for a few silent seconds. “Come,” they finally order, turning back to the shadows, and this time—with a single glance back over his shoulder at Theo, who’s staring, stricken, after him—it’s Liam who goes.
---
Theo comes back from his latest assignment into his and Liam’s latest squat already daydreaming about a shower, food, sleep, but halfway through shedding his jacket he stops. He can smell Liam—which, obviously—but his scent should be stale, not this fresh: last night Liam had said it’d probably be another three days before he got back, what the hell had—Theo shrugs his jacket hurriedly back on as he rushes up the stairs two at a time.
Liam’s in the hallway bathroom, the shower going full blast and Liam sat in the bottom of the stall against the wall, still fully clothed and with his wet hair dripping down into his face. Theo slows as he spots him, and finally stops just inside the bathroom door, one hand on the jam.
Liam looks up at him, and his eyes flare blue. Theo sucks in a sharp, startled breath.
Liam catches his reaction, and his expression crumples up. “I had it all planned out,” he says hoarsely. “It should have been perfect. It should have been easy.”
He thunks his head back against the shower wall, his eyes squeezing shut.
“It was just a dumb book,” he says, pained. “They should have just let me take it.”
He lifts his head, opening his—no longer shifted—eyes, and looks back at Theo.
“Why didn’t they just let me take it?” he pleads.
Theo hesitates, and then pushes slowly off the door, coming forward and easing the shower door open so that he can ease himself through. Water immediately splatters his clothes and his hair, soaking him.
He twists so that he’s got his back to the wall, and slides down until he’s sat against the floor next to Liam, their shoulders touching. He doesn’t say anything, but he leans his knee into Liam’s. He presses his foot and thigh against Liam’s own.
Liam turns his head to look at him. Finally he says, “We don’t match, anymore,” quietly, his eyes flaring briefly blue.
Theo stares at his hands, his fingers twisting together between his knees. “We would,” he reminds Liam after a moment, “if I was like you.”
He looks up at Liam, then.
Liam’s eyes squeeze shut again and his chin drops down to his chest. His fists clench where they’re braced on his knees, his knuckles going whiter and whiter until they physically can’t bend anymore; the jagged peaks of them strained and painful-looking.
Theo looks at them, and then at Liam’s crumped expression, and then he settles more firmly back against the wall.
He stays there with Liam in the shower until the water runs cold, and then: he stays there a little longer.
---
Even knowing why he’s so unreasonably on-edge doesn’t help, not when some asshole cuts him off in traffic: Theo snarls before he can stop himself, and then has to spend several seconds just breathing through the rush of rage that crests through him, tidal-like. Literally tidal-like: he glances at the moon hanging fat and full in the sky, then exhales deliberately out, stretching his clenched fingers away from the steering wheel to try and banish the cramped feeling that’d come over them.
His claws retract slowly into his nails.
Back at the Doctors’ latest operating theater, he makes his way down through the tunnels, resisting the urge to send his senses searching out ahead of him because he can feel the way that the shift is simmering just under his skin: just waiting, ready to seize the opening. Instead, he mentally organizes the report he needs to give, cataloguing the places that Liam would need to fill, but confident that he’s got the shape of it, the plan. Another few days and they’d have everything they’d been ordered to get, with the Thurows none the wiser.
Except when Theo crosses into the main body of the operating theater, Liam isn’t there.
Theo freezes, looking around. His senses break free of the hold he’d had on them and go arrowing out in all directions, searching and even stronger than usual; nearly staggering him with the sudden flood of information that comes back, but none of it what he actually wants.
He looks at the Surgeon and Pathologist and Geneticist, all clustered around a table working. “Where’s Liam?” he demands.
None of them so much as look up. “Unknown,” the Surgeon intones.
Theo feels every nerve in his body string tight. “What?” he says, horrified. “But it’s a full moon tonight, he—!”
“Unknown,” the Surgeon repeats, implacable, and Theo stares at their back for a few furious seconds, before he swears and whirls back around the way he came, the colors around him too sharp and the scents too crisp; the shift surging higher, pressing itself out of his eyes and nose and mouth and hands.
Theo deliberately focuses on one thing, and gives into it.
He follows Liam’s scent out into the wildlife reserve just outside of town, the moonlight bright enough to make it through the trees and illuminate the dark of the forest. He keeps his senses shifted, searching for any sign, any clue, and then: a snarl he recognizes, and someone swearing, “Jesus christ!” a split-second before a gun cocks. Theo stumbles to an unsteady stop as he hears the gun fire, and then he takes off towards the commotion, pushing himself to the very limits of his shifted abilities, trying to get there; trying not to think about what he might find.
He bursts into the right section of trees just as Liam roars at the posse of Thurow hunters retreating wildly away from him, Liam’s claws already dripping red and his blue eyes blazing. “Holy shit, holy shit!” one of the hunters swears, fumbling for their gun, but they don’t get a chance to raise it: Liam springs forward and tackles them back, sending them tumbling until finally they roll to a jagged stop, Liam on top as he rears up and—shreds their chest with his claws. “Liam,” Theo breathes, staring, and then he jerks as the remaining hunters curse and go for their own weapons.
“No!” he yells, throwing himself forward and knocking them clumsily sideways, Theo and one of the hunters crashing painfully to the ground. The hunter swears in surprise and tries to scramble away from him, and Theo can’t stop them, his head ringing; he’d slammed it into the ground when they’d gone over, and it takes him a moment, dazed, to shake it clear.
He looks up into the barrel of a gun.
There’s wolfsbane in the bullets; he can smell it. He stares down the barrel, frozen and barely breathing, waiting for the crack of gunfire—wondering if he’ll even have time to hear it—only for the hunter to suddenly cry out and arch back, blood erupting from their mouth and the shot that they do take going wild.
They collapse dead to the forest floor, their spine clawed open. Liam looks down at him, then, no recognition on his face.
A terrified curse off to the side of them. Liam’s head whips towards the last hunter and he snarls and bolts towards them, Theo scrambling over onto his back to watch as Liam catches them in their frenzied retreat, bearing them down to the ground and raising a single, clawed hand.
The hunter shrieks, nearly drowned out by the wet, visceral sound Liam’s strike makes, and then there’s nothing.
The hunter doesn’t get back up, but Liam does.
He straightens up to his feet, and turns to look over his shoulder at Theo. His claws drip onto the forest floor. Blood streaks his face and chest in thick, slash-like bands, and when Theo tries, tremoring, “Liam,” his head twitches. “Liam,” Theo tries again, desperate, “It’s okay, it’s—“
Liam lunges for him, already snarling.
They go rolling wildly back, Theo gritting out a cry as rocks and roots tear at his skin and clothes, and Liam’s claws rip at his flesh. “Liam, stop!” he yells, the wounds already healing as he grapples Liam’s hands away from his skin, and desperately tries to keep Liam’s snapping teeth from closing around his neck. “Stop, stop, it’s me! It’s me—!”
But Liam doesn’t stop, and Theo shouts as Liam throws one of his blocking arms away hard enough that he can feel something pop in his shoulder. He twists with it to relieve the pain, his healing already soothing the ragged edges, and kicks out at Liam’s knee as Liam surges towards him, blue eyes wild above his furiously snarled, fanged mouth.
The blow lands, Liam tumbling sideways with a wrenched sound as his knee collapses. Theo shoves away from him, scrambling to his feet and running; just flat-out fleeing for his life.
But Liam is up and after him in an instant, tackling him back down and sending them both rolling across the forest floor once more. Theo hits his back with the wind knocked out of him, colors dancing across his vision, and groggily, too late, registers Liam’s weight pinning him down. His eyes blow wide and he cries, “Wait, Liam, stop!” as Liam lunges for his neck, the sharp points of his fangs gleaming in the light from the full moon.
And, strangely: Liam does stop. With his fangs a hair’s breadth from Theo’s throat and his nose half-buried behind Theo’s ear, he suddenly stops, and inhales deeply, his ribs expanding widely against Theo’s own.
Theo freezes. Liam takes one deep breath, and then another, and then Theo sucks in a sharp startled breath as Liam abruptly jams his face against his neck, and groans.
His hips twitch against Theo’s, light at first and then more deliberately; a long, drawn-out drag.
“Liam,” Theo gasps, breathy and just completely thrown, only to bite back a yelp as Liam suddenly starts pulling at him, trying to push him over; his claws still fully shifted and tearing at Theo’s skin. Theo automatically fights him, grappling with his hands and ignoring Liam snarling at him, swearing, “Liam, what the hell are you—” before one of his legs drags up between both of Liam’s and he realizes, oh, and Liam is finally able to shove him over in his distraction.
Liam plasters himself against Theo’s back once he’s gotten Theo flat on his stomach, dragging his hard cock against Theo’s ass and lower back. Theo sucks in a sharp breath, fingernails digging into the forest floor below him, and tries to figure out what to do as Liam paws at him, Liam whining against the back of his neck and his hips continuing to jerk and jerk against him in short, uncoordinated thrusts.
One particularly clumsy thrust drives Theo’s hipbone hard into the ground, and Theo winces, shifting to try and relieve the pressure. Liam immediately snarls, shoving him bodily flat everywhere they’re pressed together and bearing him down, his fangs bared against the back of Theo’s neck.
Pinning him, Theo realizes; trying to keep him from escaping.
“Okay,” Theo gasps aloud, trying to think. “Okay.” Liam whines again, the tension melting out of him again now that Theo had once again gone still beneath him, and he noses at the back of Theo’s ear, the rush of his breath skating across the sensitive skin there. Theo shivers unexpectedly, can’t help it, and finds himself arching up against the tip of Liam’s nose and lips as goosebumps break out across his skin.
Even more unexpected: he can feel himself starting to get hard, pleasure skittering in uncertain bursts up his spine.
Okay, he thinks, mind racing. “Okay,” he says aloud, trying to think of it all as a puzzle, something for him to solve, and as one particularly stuttered thrust drags Liam’s hard cock against the back of one of Theo’s thighs, inspiration strikes. Taking a deep breath and briefly closing his eyes, he reaches down for the button of his jeans, and starts to undo them.
But the second he moves, Liam snarls again and—buries his teeth in the back of Theo’s neck. “Fuck, Liam!” Theo shouts, pained, but Liam just growls at him through his—through his mouthful of Theo’s neck, and holds him firmly in place as he reaches down, and starts yanking at their clothes again, and this time hard enough to rip them. Theo feels them tear, hears them shred, and then he sucks in a sharp breath as he feels Liam’s hard, now bare cock drag against the equally-naked stretch of his lower back, and he snaps out of his stillness.
“Wait, Liam, just—wait,” he orders desperately, Liam growling at him again and biting down even harder, but they can’t, not like this, and so Theo ignores the pain and his own spiraling panic and fights to get ahold of Liam’s hips, to push and shove at him while desperately shoving himself into position, frantically trying to hold onto his plan. And then: they’re there. Liam’s hard cock slides between his bare thighs and Theo clamps them down, sealing the space tight, and Liam makes a high sharp noise with his fangs tearing free of Theo’s neck, his hips automatically jerking.
He groans, after, ducking low to bury his face in the back of Theo’s bleeding neck, and his hips begin to work. After only a few thrusts the precome dripping from the tip of his hard cock starts to ease the way, and Theo shudders out a helpless gasp, pleasure skittering up his spine and jittering out across his nerves; to the very tips of his fingers, crooked against the dirt-covered forest floor. Liam’s cock nudges up against his balls, his own rapidly-hardening cock, and Theo throws out a hand to brace himself, burying his own groan in his outstretched arm. Liam takes advantage of his bent neck to nose his way deeper behind his ear, where his groans and whines and harsh bitten-off sounds echo even louder through Theo’s head; reverberate down his spine.
It doesn’t take long for Liam to come. Theo can sense it in the increasingly-erratic way his hips snap and he braces himself for it, but what he isn’t ready for: Liam puts his teeth back in Theo’s neck as his hips give one final, sharp roll forward, and he bites down hard.
Theo shouts in surprise, and comes, too.
They lay there panting afterwards, Liam only slowly cracking open his jaw, and releasing Theo’s bloody neck from between his teeth. Theo distantly feels the bite sluggishly healing, but it’s one input among many: his chafed inner thighs, now covered in Liam’s come; his sensitive, softening cock still occasionally twitching with aftershocks; Liam breathing heavy and proprietary against the back of his neck, still nosing against the sweat-damp hair there, and rumbling his satisfaction.
His spent cock nestles up against Theo’s ass. They’re in the middle of the woods and surrounded by dead Thurow hunters, and above them, the full moon is hanging heavy in the sky, still hours away from setting. Theo piece by piece drags his focus back together, still occasionally shuddering or shivering with sensation and with Liam continuing to nose at him, until finally he can risk a glance at Liam over his bloodied shoulder.
Liam catches the attention and looks back, holding Theo’s eyes as he leans down and presses his tongue to the ragged edges of the bite mark he’d left, and drags his tongue across it.
Theo gives an open-mouthed, punched-out gasp, his eyes slamming shut as he whips his head around to hide his face once more in his outstretched arm. Liam rumbles again and continues to clean him up, laving the bite mark on the back of Theo’s neck even as it sluggishly closes, and pressing them together in random, seemingly-thoughtless shifts; chasing what feels good, from the uneven way his breath hitches.
Theo’s eyelids flutter. He shivers. Gasps, when Liam slides them together somewhere sensitive, his fingers clenching and unclenching reflexively against the ground; dirt building up under his nails.
Time passes. The bite on his neck finishes closing, but Liam doesn’t stop nuzzling at him, doesn’t stop licking at him, dragging his mouth and teeth across Theo’s shoulders and the back of his neck and his ears; the low, satisfied rumbling in his chest never ceasing. Theo shudders helplessly and feels his body growing heavy, his thoughts becoming syrupy; aware only of the drag of Liam’s lips and hands and hips.
But after a while, he feels Liam’s spent cock twitch again against his lower back, and awareness slams back into him.
He must stiffen: Liam growls a low warning, mouth opening just slightly around the back of his neck—fangs pricking the skin—and Theo forces himself to breathe, to relax. “It’s okay,” he promises, reaching back to clasp the back of Liam’s head with one hand; holding Liam to himself. “It’s okay,” he repeats, as Liam’s growl subsides and he presses up into Theo’s hold, his hips continue to twitch against Theo’s back. Okay, Theo tells himself, beginning to move with Liam, giving these slow steady slides and grinds as Liam continues to harden, until Theo is sure that Liam is distracted enough that he can risk dragging a hand up his own side; against the the jacket he’s still absurdly wearing.
His fingers close against the object hidden away in one of the pockets.
“It’s okay, Liam,” he says again, one final time, and then he whips around—too fast for Liam to stop him—and stabs him with the syringe that he’d yanked from his pocket.
---
When Theo finally returns to the satellite operating theater the next morning, Liam is awake, and lucid, and watching him out of a grime-streaked face.
“What took you so long?” he demands, as Theo stalks up to the chain-link cage, and starts punching in the code to deactivate the electricity flowing through the links.
Theo isn’t in the mood. “I had to clean up your goddamn mess,” he spits, shoving the cage door’s handle down and the door open, and spinning back around without waiting for Liam to stand; Liam could get his own goddamned self out of the cage.
He staggers as he turns, swearing silently to himself. He’s so tired he’s practically cross-eyed, and all he wants to do is go back to his and Liam’s squat and slough off everything he’s wearing, preferably directly into some kind of fire, and wash off all the dirt and blood and filth from the night before falling into bed and sleeping for at least twelve hours. But he can’t, because the Thurows were going to notice their missing hunters soon, and wherever their trail ended up leading, Theo couldn’t let it be here. So instead he stumbles over to one of the operating theater’s tables and pulls out his phone, rubbing at his face with one hand and trying to think; trying to plan.
But Liam isn’t satisfied, apparently. “You still smell like me,” he calls at Theo’s back, and Theo stiffens before twisting around to stare at him, Liam still sat in the middle of the cage with his filthy arms draped over his knees.
Theo grits his teeth. “I could only clean up one mess at a time,” he throws back icily, and turns deliberately away from Liam again to keep studying the map he’d pulled up on his phone.
But barely a handful of seconds pass before he’s slammed into, and bent forward over the table with a punched-out sound at the force. Liam leans harder down into him, pressing, “But what if I like you smelling like me?” hotly into Theo’s ear, and dropping one hand between Theo’s thighs to stroke across the insides. The insides where he’d come, just a few short hours ago, and Theo feels his breath hitch even as Liam is groaning, and dragging the side of his face hard against Theo’s, demanding, “What if I want to make you smell like me again?”
Theo’s fingers spasm against the edge of the table where he’d caught himself. His breathing starts to speed, his ribs expanding too-fast against Liam’s own.
Pressed up against the edge of the table, his cock twitches.
Forcing a snarl, he wrenches himself back hard enough to dislodge Liam, and send them both stumbling away from the table. He whips around before Liam can recover and force his way back forward.
“Back off, Liam,” he spits, drawing Liam up short; Liam’s expression briefly shows his surprise. Theo lifts his chin, telling him coldly, “Forget it. The only reason I let you do anything to me last night is because otherwise you would have killed me.”
“No,” Liam denies.
He says it immediately. He says it like a fact. Theo cuts off in the middle of whatever else he’d been about to snarl—he can’t even remember what it’d been, though he’d been prepared to make it as cutting as he could—and watches through widening eyes as Liam steps forward into him, insisting, “Not you. I never would have killed you.”
But then his expression crumples, and he brings up a hand to hover reluctantly over Theo’s chest, his fingers never quite touching. “But I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself from hurting you,” he admits quietly, his eyes flicking up from his hand to Theo’s, and Theo knows he doesn’t mean the bruises and scratches that Theo had walked away with, however temporarily. “Thank you,” he says, “for figuring out another way.”
All the protests and denials and sharp cutting words dry up in Theo’s mouth. He just stares.
Liam’s expression sharpens. “And you didn’t let me just to keep me from killing you,” he denies then, snapping that same hand up and gripping—right over the back of Theo’s neck, where Theo knows he’s still wearing the imprint of Liam’s teeth, outlined in Theo’s own blood. Theo gasps and bows forward, his eyelashes fluttering.
Liam just tightens his grip.
“You wanted it,” he insists lowly.
He flares his nostrils, wide and pointed.
“You still want it,” he says.
He slides his hand around the front of Theo’s neck, tipping his chin up and forcing Theo to look at him as he says, “You can lie to anyone else, but you can’t lie to me.”
Theo feels his held breath shudder out of him, helpless. Liam grins, triumphant, and leans forward to kiss him, his free hand coming up to hold Theo’s head in place for it as he keeps his other hand firmly where it is; wrapped around Theo’s throat. It’s not an easy kiss, either: he jams their mouths together and drags his tongue across Theo’s lips, growling in satisfaction when Theo automatically drops his mouth open in response. He licks inside, tangling his tongue with Theo’s own and backing them up until Theo’s back cracks into the table behind them, and he can drop the hand he’d had around Theo’s throat to palm at his rapidly hardening cock instead.
Theo tears himself away from Liam’s mouth; has to. “Liam, we can’t,” he pleads, even as his fingers are clutching at Liam’s shoulders; even as his hips are twitching up against Liam’s hand.
Liam’s eyes narrow.
Theo heaves in a breath, never looking away from him, and reminds him, “They’d find out. And if they did…”
He trails off, his eyes darting uneasily to the shadows all around them. He drags them back to Liam’s own.
“They’d find a way to use it,” he concludes, swallowing. “You know they would.”
Liam’s jaw works. He glares around at the shadows, too, one hand still around the back of Theo’s head, the other now clutched around his hip.
He looks back at Theo. He says, simply, “No.”
Theo groans as Liam drags him back into a kiss, slumping forward helplessly into it and gasping when Liam grinds them together. But as good as it is, it isn’t enough to distract him from the low, sickening fear in his gut; the clanging alarm in the back of his head that’s making his mouth taste metallic. “Liam, we can’t,” he insists, ripping himself away again.
Liam forces himself to pause; Theo can see how deliberately he stills. He pulls back, and searches Theo’s face.
Finally he orders, “Look at me.”
Theo does.
“Tell me you don’t want this,” he says, “and I’ll stop.” He flicks his eyes back and forth between Theo’s own. “Look me in the eye, and tell me you don’t want this,” he swears, “and I’ll stop.”
Theo just stares at him, and doesn’t, because he—can’t.
Liam’s chin tips up. His expression hardens. “Then I’m not letting them take this,” he promises, just as softly; just as dangerously. “Do you hear me?” he demands, following Theo’s eyes when Theo jerks and forcing Theo to keep looking at him. “I’m not letting them take this.”
He pulls Theo’s mouth back to his own, and Theo resists, and resists, and then: he shudders, and kisses him back.
---
Theo’s back hits the wall in the bedroom he’d claimed in their latest squat with a thump, and Liam follows him back, grinning. “We’ve got at least three hours,” he hurries to say, biting it out between their frantic kisses while pulling at Theo’s clothes; while pulling at his own. “I just dropped off the Doctors’ last ingredient; they’ll be absorbed in their experiment until tonight at least.”
Theo drags his fingertips across the five streaks of blood dried flaky on Liam’s bare chest, perfectly spaced for a werewolf’s claws. “That last ingredient do this?” he wonders, smirking.
Liam smirks back. “For all the good it did them,” he shoots back, and opens his mouth against the edge of Theo’s jaw for the split-second before he bites.
Hours later, and Theo’s phone starts to trill on the nightstand, loud and insistent. Theo jolts awake from his half-doze, momentarily confused—had something happened?—and then he realizes. Reluctantly, he reaches out a hand, and shuts the alarm off.
The move shifts him momentarily away from Liam, who’d curled up behind him. His hand had been on Theo’s waist; it tightens as Liam goes tense against his back, and then Liam slowly, slowly, loosens his fingers.
But he doesn’t take his hand away. It’s Theo who has to move out from underneath it as he slides silently out of the bed, and heads for the bathroom; he hears it thump to the mattress behind him.
He comes back out damp, and fully clothed, and holding two small syringes in one palm. Liam had pushed himself up to sit against the headboard, one leg pulled up and the sheet draped over his lap, and he watches as Theo makes his way over, and hesitates at the edge of the bed before sitting down.
He holds out one of the syringes.
Liam doesn’t look down at it, initially. “I hate this,” Liam tells him, and Theo feels his expression spasm, something in his chest clench, and then he grits his teeth, and physically picks up Liam’s hand and forces one of the syringes into it.
“This was the deal,” he reminds him, and turns away from Liam to jam the remaining syringe against the side of his own neck, wincing slightly at the jab; at the cool rush of the contents flowing into his veins.
Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Liam jerk his head away, and lift the syringe Theo had forced onto him to his own neck.
Theo takes back the empty afterwards, and leaves him there. He’s halfway to the Doctors latest operating theater when Liam’s scent begins to disappear from his senses, Theo’s eyes drifting slowly, reluctantly closed as it fades.
By the time he makes it to the operating theater and the Surgeon looks up and demands, “Report,” it’s gone.
---
“This is only a follow-up,” Liam pants out between dragging kisses two weeks later, shoving Theo up against a darkened doorway and pressing in after him. Theo grabs at him, the bags he’d been carrying dropped and forgotten somewhere farther along the dank, disgusting alley that Liam had hustled him into, after his unexpected appearance. “Confirming their previous results. We won’t have long.”
“Long enough,” Theo counters, and spins Liam around to reverse their positions, and go to his knees.
---
“Liam, we shouldn’t—“ Theo protests weakly, as Liam presses a third slicked finger to his rim, and drives all three relentlessly forward. “This is such a stupid—“ He cuts off on a gasp, burying his face against his truck’s console and his crossed forearms, his whole body rocking with it as Liam thrusts his fingers.
After, he twists his head to look hazily back at Liam, who’d collapsed on top of him, panting and with his fingers still clenching, bruise-tight, around Theo’s hips. “It’s only for a few weeks,” he reminds him quietly, twisting even more to drag their sweaty, slick foreheads together. “I just have to retrieve the Habron pack talisman, and then—“
“I’ve got a pretty good idea what you might have to do for it,” Liam interrupts, squeezing his eyes shut and digging his forehead against Theo’s temple, the arch of his cheek.
Theo’s breath punches out of him. “Liam…”
Liam darts forward to kiss him, cutting him off before he can say anything else. “No, forget it,” he says hurriedly. “That’s not what I—” He stops, and takes a deep breath. “Do what you have to,” he says quietly, firmly, and looks Theo straight in the eye, “Whatever you have to, in order to come back.”
Theo stares dumbly at him, and then nods.
---
“You traitorous, half-breed little freak,” Quentin Storo snarls at him, hauling him up with Theo too dazed to stop him, the split on the side of his head only sluggishly healing, his thoughts slow enough to match. “Where is my father?” he demands, growling it golden-eyed directly into Theo’s face. “Where is my sister?”
Theo can’t respond, can’t pull together a convincing enough lie, too injured and too surprised and too surrounded by the Storo pack; or what the Doctors had left standing of it, anyway. He scrabbles weakly at Quentin’s hands, thinking, I’m going to die, and feeling animal panic tear at whatever tattered thoughts he manages to pull together.
And then Quentin’s eyes go wide and he chokes, blood bubbling up and over his lips. Theo collapses with him as he crumples, and when he looks up, stunned, it’s to see Liam with one hand up in the air, Quentin’s blood dripping thick and wetly from it. “Liam,” Theo breathes, but Liam just snarls around at the remaining Storo pack members, a clear warning.
A clear challenge.
Their eyes flick down to Quentin’s body, and back up to Liam. One of them takes a half-step forward, only to be caught by a second and yanked back. They retreat one step and then another, still pulling their packmate with them, their eyes never leaving Liam’s face, and after a moment and several shared, wide glances, the remaining Storo pack members melt one by one into the shadows, until finally they’re all gone.
Liam keeps watching after them for several long seconds, and then he shakes himself and reaches down with his bloody hand, and drags Theo up. “C’mon,” he orders, pushing and shoving at Theo, and never letting him stop until they get back to a beat-up, rust-colored sedan; nothing Theo recognizes. He stumbles into the trunk with a gasp, breathing hard and shocky, and is about to push himself up and stagger for the passenger door when Liam’s hands suddenly come down on his back and shoulders, folding him hard over the metal as Liam folds down after him.
His forehead touches the back of Theo’s neck. His breath comes fast and hard against the top of Theo’s spine.
Theo’s head is still a mess. “You were supposed to be in—“ he gasps, trying to do the math. “That’s on the other goddamned side of the—“ He twists around to stare at the side of Liam’s head. “How did you even know?”
Liam grinds his forehead against the back of Theo’s neck. “The whole thing was fucked from the beginning,” he grits out. “They never should have sent you to—“
He cuts off abruptly, and hauls Theo up and around to jam their mouths together. Theo flinches as he’s forced back against the edge of the trunk, but it’s a fleeting burst of pain: it means very little compared to Liam pressed up against him, grasping and groaning and moving against him.
And it means nothing at all compared to Liam’s hand on his face, and the stark, visceral awareness Theo has of the bloody handprint he leaves branded across Theo’s cheek like a mark.
---
Theo comes into the operating theater distracted, thinking about his latest assignment and puzzling at its optimal solution—playing out the if this’s, then that’s in his head—when he looks up and sees Liam leaned back against one of the stark metal tables, arms crossed and watching the Doctors hunched over an operating chair across the way. His brow furrows. “Aren’t you supposed to be—“ he starts to ask, but Liam just interrupts, “Not anymore,” and cuts his eyes over to Theo’s. “The Beacon Hills Nemeton woke up,” he says, and pretends not to notice when Theo misses a step at the name.
Theo swallows, and shoves the sudden skittering sensation low in his gut away. “When do we leave?” he forces himself to ask, straightening up and coming to join Liam at the table.
But Liam just says, “We don’t,” and his eyes drag back over to the Doctors, who are still—prepping the operating chair, Theo realizes. The empty operating chair.
Theo’s attention snaps back over to Liam.
Liam slides him a look, his eyes flaring a miserable, muted blue. “Don’t stay for this,” he mutters, pushing off the table and pausing for just a second at Theo’s side, before he starts walking towards the Doctor—towards the chair—just as the Surgeon straightens up, and turns to look for him.
Theo stands frozen as the Doctors strap him in, Liam offering up one wrist and then the other and titling his head back against the headrest at the top of the chair, his attention fixing on the ceiling. But it isn’t until the Geneticist is fastening the strap over Liam’s forehead, and the Surgeon is picking up a scalpel and reaching forward to force one of Liam’s eyes open at the eyelids, that Theo realizes what the surgery is going to be about.
He about-faces, immediately and without thought. Don’t stay for this, Liam had ordered, and Theo can’t, and he’s made it stumbling halfway down the tunnel leading back out of the operating theater when he hears the first scream.
He gets sick right then and there, hunched over with one hand on the slimy wall, and his eyes squeezing shut.
He pulls himself together, eventually; there isn’t anything else to do. He wipes his mouth, and straightens up, and he finishes walking out of the tunnel.
---
Months later, Scott McCall says, “Theo?” baffled, and Theo nearly blows the whole plan right there, too fixated on Liam stood golden-eyed just beyond Scott’s shoulder. But finally he manages to drag his attention back over to Scott, and grin. “I guess I look a little different since the fourth grade,” he allows.
Scott eventually invites him along with the rest of his pack to head to his house to clean up, to get dry; to change clothes. Theo accepts, and is just coming out of the upstairs hallway bathroom, half-blinded by the borrowed towel he’s rubbing over his head, when he nearly runs into someone trying to come in. “Oh, sorry,” Liam says, startling back a step, and it’s smooth enough and his eyes are wide enough that Theo could almost believe it, himself.
“No problem,” he dismisses lightly, at the same time that he flares his nostrils wide, and inhales deeply; letting his eyes drift half-closed, since he’s blocked from view by the doorway.
He opens his eyes back up.
“It’s Liam, right?” he checks, light and easy.
“Yeah,” Liam agrees, in the same tone. “And you’re…”
He trails off, like he’s having trouble remembering; downstairs, voices Doppler in and out as Scott’s pack moves around, and chatters at each other. Theo smirks. “Theo,” he fills in, and watches as Liam takes his own deep breath, his nostrils flaring just as wide as Theo’s had.
He’d let his eyes close, too, and when he drifts them back open, they’re flared; gold-bright.
He darts his gaze sideways, towards the stairs. Scott and Stiles had started moving for them, but only just. Liam grins, sharp, and slides his attention back to Theo.
“Welcome to Beacon Hills, Theo,” he says, and for just a moment, the gold of his eyes becomes a bright, burning blue.