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He’s on his back, practically verging on the inevitable darkness that will soon meet him, just a blink away from falling asleep forever, but the war is over, they are finally finished fighting. He’s alive, even though he’s toeing the line, he’s alive and so is Liam, and so is Corey and Mason and Nolan and Brett. The entire pack has survived a war that promised to leave no survivors. They are here and they are alive.
Stiles took another bullet to the foot somewhere between the gunfire and the arrows, he came to a crumbling halt with a sound that could only be described as a squeal, Derek rushing to his side. Now that the gunfire has ceased, the police arresting the hunters that were still left standing, Theo can hear Scott and Derek fussing over Stiles, helping him into Derek’s car.
Everyone else checks themselves over, then those around them, and that’s why it takes them so long to notice Theo, groaning on his back with at least thirteen gunshots.
“Oh fuck,” Brett yells from somewhere close to the warehouse’s entrance. “Theo!”
Liam hadn’t been the closest to him compared to everyone else, his scent was near Scott by Derek’s car, but he races over so quickly that he manages to be the first by Theo’s side. He’s preceded by Corey, Brett, and Lydia, who’s clamping a hand painfully tight over her mouth.
“Quick,” She announces, rubbing at her throat as if it will ease the scream begging it’s way up her throat, “he needs help, quick.”
Melissa had arrived in a single ambulance somewhere during the fight, Deaton and Liam’s dad accompanying her. She had announced right after the final bullet flew that the ambulance was secure with every possible supply that the S-Wing of Beacon Hills Memorial had to offer.
Liam lifts Theo up like it’s easy, and it probably is considering his joblessness and lack of daily meal. Theo’s being held bridal-style in the warmth of Liam’s arms, and he feels bad for getting blood on the wolf’s sweater, it had been one of his favourites.
“Theo, it would be so lame if this is how you died,” Liam grits, trying not to topple him as he runs towards the ambulance.
Theo finds that rolling his eyes hurts a little too much, and once they roll all the way back, to where they can only see darkness, it feels so much better.
“Hey. Hey, no,” Liam says, voice louder. “Open your eyes, Theo.”
Theo doesn’t, but he tries so hard. He would do anything to make Liam’s voice stop sounding so broken, but his ears start ringing to a deafening point as he tries to open his eyelids, and he thinks he can see colours in their darkness.
The stretcher is cold, so cold, but so is Theo, shivering from the blood loss and the leftover fear. He thinks he overhears that Monroe’s dead. Something about Argent and ‘true justice’. It’s not justice, though, because she should of spent her life behind a cell, rotting away for her part in the deaths of hundreds of teenagers, supernatural and not. Justice would be her suffering the same fate as all the others had: maybe bleeding out on a hospital floor after being betrayed, or maybe watching her entire family get killed for something she can’t change. She deserved to be hunted in a manner similar to The Most Dangerous Game but instead she’s going into an unmarked grave. She got off easy, and now Theo’s going to have to return to an eternity of being chased down empty hospital hallways by his dead sister. He’s not sure who decided who gets off easy and who doesn’t, but it seems twisted and cruel from his perspective.
Melissa doesn’t know that he’s still awake, so she doesn’t warn him for the oncoming wave of pain. No one does, but he can feel someone’s fingers running softly through his hair right before he blacks out for good.
-
Theo is used to waking up tired, as if he didn’t even sleep a wink to begin with. This feels different, it feels like all of his life force has been drained from him. The distinct smell of hospital doesn’t help in the slightest, too close to his skinwalker hell, but the nearby heartbeats help somewhat. He’s alive, but he’s not sure if that makes him lucky or unlucky.
He opens his eyes, looking around as he adjusts to the bright white lights. Brett sits in a chair, head drooped forward. His heartbeat stutters as Theo’s heart monitor grows more frequent, and he’s soon stretching back, groggy and confused. His eyes go wide, looking at Theo as if he’s looking at a ghost.
“Oh my god,” Brett gapes, lips parted, “you’re alive.”
Theo shrugs, too tired to plaster on a smirk. “Guess I am.”
Theo only notices now how puffy Brett’s eyes are, red and damp in a way he’s never seen from the born-wolf. Brett realizes what Theo is seeing and averts his eyes,
“I’m going to get Melissa,” Brett says, getting up and leaving through the open door. Theo spots a duffle bag next to the bed, the orange sweater he stole from Liam poking out. He takes in a full 360 look of his hospital room before grabbing for it and opening the room’s window.
The drop wouldn’t kill him, but it would hurt like a bitch, and the pain would give Brett enough time to force him back. He’ll have to shimmy along the ledge until he can reach the lower part of the roof. He can hear Melissa down the hall, just barely due to the hospital’s constant noise, but he can tell that she’s on a phone call. He’ll have enough time to get to the roof without completely hurrying, though he can still only estimate that he has a minute and a half at most to get there.
He climbs on to the window’s ledge, vertigo finally kicking in, and he has to hold himself against the wall to avoid toppling. He sees stars, and not the ones in the sky, and he feels the urge to throw up from all the sudden movement. Somehow, he still makes it to the lower roof, panting heavily on the edge. He would love to stay here a moment, and watch the night sky’s true stars dance in uniform constellations and systems, but the South wind tells him that Brett will be able to scent him if he stays. He tugs on a pair of sweatpants and the orange hoodie, keys falling from the duffle bag’s pocket. He leaves the old hospital gown on the roof and takes the bag, jumping the now shorter distance from the roof to the back parking lot.
The truck is tucked away in a corner, the perfect place to park without worrying about getting a ticket. When he opens the door he finds that the truck is just as he had left it, a mixture of Corey’s scent and Brett’s still lingering. He starts the truck, warmed by the sudden heat from the vents, and drives. He’s not sure where he’s going, but he knows it has to be somewhere that he won’t be found.
-
Three months pass. Three months. Theo still sleeps in his car, he still barely gets by, but now he goes to school, too.
He has a light course load compared to the other seniors, since he did manage to get some of his credits the previous year. He manages to eat a little more from the school’s free breakfast program in the mornings, and he’s found a hidden path in the preserve where he can park his car and sleep without getting caught.
During the war, Theo spent a lot of time with Scott’s pack. He played the role of the trusty outsider, he followed and never strayed. During the worst of it, he would fall asleep wherever the pack could manage, usually scattered across the McCall living room or on the floor of Derek’s loft. He came to pack meetings and listened, he ate pack dinner with them while they plotted, but he was still an outsider. He only spoke when spoken to, even if he had better ideas, and he tried not to get too close to anyone in case Stiles went into full guard-dog mode.
When the war ends, and he finds himself alive, Brett tries to contact him. So does Corey. Theo manages to go missing for an entire month, he doesn’t contact anyone and he lives off a diet of cheap energy drinks and trail mix in a small town close to Beacon Hills, but it doesn’t give him any clarity. Everything feels blurry in his mind, nothing ever in focus.
He comes back and decides that he should finish high school, and Beacon Hills is one of the few towns in the area that will accept registration forms from someone who was legally dead.
Every day Theo sits alone in a cafeteria corner, or hidden in the bookshelves of the library, hoping not to be noticed, like maybe he’ll blend in. He catches Mason staring, sometimes, but he tries to ignore it. He understands that they probably hate him, and he would probably hate himself if he was in their position too. Theo keeps his distance, he watches from the shadows.
Liam becomes more interesting to Theo the longer he watches. Theo has lived a life of spite, anger, and revenge. He has only ever manipulated and hurt others, and forgiveness has always been out of his reach. Liam, though, is so different.
Theo was raised by three doctors whose only goals were power and hierarchy. They taught him to lie, steal, and cheat, but most of all, they did the same to him. The Doctors never valued him, he had always just been their pawn. If he hadn’t been the first successful chimera, he would have been dead just like all the other experiments, he’d probably be rotting in a sewer somewhere. Some part of Theo will never forgive the Doctors, but another part of him believes that what they did to him was just. His pain and trauma were just revenge for everything he would go on to do, and all the people he would live to hurt. Theo is the lowest of lows, a true villain in most definitions of the word, and even he can’t bring himself to forgive the Doctors.
Liam is a beacon compared to Theo’s darkness. He makes people laugh and successfully leads the school’s lacrosse team, and on the weekends he volunteers at a local daycare, teaching little kids how to play lacrosse. Before Liam was a wolf, he was just a normal teenage boy with a normal family, and all the times he’s ever hurt someone he’s apologized. Liam would never purposely inflict pain on someone else, and he has been trying with everything in him to get his powers under control so that it never happens. Liam, someone who has every right in the world to refuse an apology, finds it in him to forgive Nolan the second he apologizes. Nolan sits with Liam and his friends every day at lunch, and from afar nobody would ever be able to guess that Nolan had once tried to kill the rest of them. Theo, ever observant, sees the way that Liam flinches whenever Nolan reaches for a pen, or ducks whenever Nolan holds up a fist. Despite all the pain and the trauma, Liam has chosen to forgive.
Liam has always forgiven the punishers, and Theo is one in his own right. It’s a twisted fairy tale and a blurry photo, and it shows that the line between good and evil has always been a dotted one.
-
Aimlessly roaming around 24-hour drug stores has become a religious act to Theo. Isolation has never been pretty, and neither are the indents where his ribs have started to show. There’s something peacefully ominous about being in a dimly-lit store at 4am, like time doesn’t exist. Not the construct of time, but the actual act of it passing. The ritualistic visits feel sacred and holy, until one day Theo stumbles in, dizzy from not eating, and smells nothing but Liam.
He has only taken a single step through the door, he’s not even deep enough into the store to see the cash register, but he turns around and leaves again. The final ringing of the bell above the door feels cruel and mocking, echoing in the halls of Theo’s mind.
Old religions don’t develop new rituals, but Theo decides to find a new store.
-
It’s only a month from graduation when Theo notices the irregularity in his heartbeat. He’s sitting in a corner of the cafeteria, the one with the light broken from some stupid food fight, when he hears it beat twice in the span of a second. It beats twice, speeds up, and repeats until he feels like he had run a marathon. It goes away just as fast as it had appeared, back to ticking at a normal pace.
He hasn’t eaten in days, and the last time he did eat it had just been an apple. He puts his head down in his hands and takes a shaky breath in. He starts with two seconds: breathe in for two, hold for two, breathe out for two, and hold for two, until he has made it up to fifteen. His heart feels normal now, but his chest still aches, heartbeat too loud in his ears.
Werewolf, chimera, or human, starvation takes a toll on the body. Superhealing doesn’t matter if your body has nothing to heal it with, and Theo’s tank has been running on empty for weeks. The irregular heartbeat is just another symptom of his living conditions, at this point. It gets to join the club with vertigo, cold sweats, and constant head and stomach pain.
Theo just goes back to his biology homework, writing on autopilot with the tact of someone who was bred to be in a laboratory. He doesn’t bother reading any of the words in the word bank, he’s been able to recite the stages of cell replication since his second month with the doctors.
Their lessons had always been more painful than necessary.
-
Later that night, when he finally manages to sleep, someone drops three bags of groceries in the back of the truck. It’s good stuff like TV meals that he can put on his hot plate, and pre-cooked ravioli, but there’s also junk like sour skittles and licorice. His favourites.
-
The day after Theo made his escape from the hospital, Liam lost his shit. He had thought he made it obvious that Theo was his anchor, almost painfully so, but apparently not everybody knew. At least, Liam hopes Theo doesn’t know, because it hurts less than thinking Theo left despite being Liam’s anchor.
Liam hasn’t been without an anchor since Hayden left, and even then it had only been for a few weeks. Theo had been quick to swoop in, with his charisma and his eerie ability to pretend he’s calm.
Nobody knew where Theo had gone, and the Puppy Pack, along with Derek’s help, had managed to search the entirety of Beacon Hills within the first week. Theo had been asleep for two entire weeks after the war, and that had been hard for Liam, but it was nothing compared to this. Theo left no clues, and with how serious his condition had been, none of them even knew if he was alive or not. He just vanished without saying anything, and Brett wasn’t able to follow his scent on the first night.
Liam has to learn control all over again, for when he sees Nolan in the hallway, or he catches a glimpse of the guidance counselor's office on his way to class. Liam feels like Bruce Banner when he’d much rather be Peter Parker. He remembers watching The Avengers with Mason, and he remembers Bruce telling Steve that the secret to controlling his anger is the fact that he’s always angry. Liam tries that for a while, but he just ends up with shattered mirrors in his room and smashed lockers in the boys’ changing room.
Liam tries meditation, but that just makes him angrier. He can’t sit still for long enough to reach ‘zen’.
He tries listening to ocean noises. They just make him feel like he has to pee.
Nothing feels right, and Liam’s anger just gets worse and worse, until one day he sees a familiar face in the corner of the cafeteria, and suddenly he feels calm again. That same day, Liam works up the nerve to ask Nolan to be his practice partner. A week later, he invites Nolan to sit at the Puppy Pack table in the cafeteria.
Liam’s mom once told him that having a kid is like having your heart outside of your body, and he thinks that maybe, just maybe, having a soulmate is like having your courage on the outside of your body.
-
Liam is not anything if not extremely, insufferably stubborn. Brett keeps telling him to lay off, give Theo some space, but Liam can’t bring himself to give any more space than seven cafeteria tables. He’d be ashamed to admit to anyone but Mason that he keeps tabs on Theo’s vitals when he’s around. He feels ashamed until the day that they’re off, no-doubt from the visible weight loss that Theo has endured.
He texts Brett, starting the message out with an ‘SOS’, and ending it with loads of exclamation points. Liam can practically feel the effort that it takes Brett not to text back some lowkey, like ’K’ or just a thumbs-up emoji, and he’s satisfied when the born-wolf tells him that Derek will fix it.
Even when it’s beating wrong, too many beats and then too little, Theo’s heartbeat is like music to his ears. His heartbeat means that he’s here, but more importantly, it means that he’s alive, which is an outcome that didn’t seem very likely only a few months ago.
-
Liam is going to UCLA with Mason and Corey come summer. Brett is staying back to do community college, since Beacon Hills will need more protection than just Nolan and Alec could provide. The Puppy Pack has this conversation loudly and excitedly in the middle of the school’s cafeteria. It’s so loud that anyone could overhear it, so it’s no coincidence that Theo hears it all.
Theo was accepted to every university he applied for, even in spite of his unexplained absence of a semester and a half. It’s a miracle that he got in, especially since they’re all pre-med programs, but he hasn’t heard any news about scholarships. On a good day, Theo barely has a dollar to his name, so paying for school is out of the question.
Theo gets all excited at first, because he got into UCLA too, and in the fantasies that his mind makes up when he’s on autopilot, he’s a normal teenager just like the rest of them, excited to go off to college with all of his best friends.
“Aria got into UCLA too!” Liam announces excitedly, quickly shushed by Mason. Theo has to strain his ears a little to continue his eavesdropping. It feels like something worthy of one of the Twilight movies, creepy in a way that toes the line between cute and obsessive.
“Isn’t it cool? I think she’s doing cooking or fine arts or something!”
Corey laughs, “shouldn’t you at least know what she’s going for?”
“I kind of zone out, honestly,” Liam shrugs sheepishly.
“Well,” Mason starts, a teasing smile on his face, “I’m pretty sure the fine arts classes and the ancient civilizations classes are close to each other.”
“Yeah,” Corey confirms, “Mason and I got a full tour when we visited the campus.
Liam nods, bouncing his leg in the way he does when he gets too excited to sit still. “It would be so cool if we could walk to class together,” He starts, hand on his chin, “do you think they’d let us dorm together?”
“Absolutely not,” Mason laughs, “but Corey and I are planning on renting an apartment, maybe we could look for a bigger one that would fit us all?”
“Awesome!” Liam shouts, nodding rapidly.
“Alright, alright,” Nolan laughs, wide-eyed as he watches the group interact, “wanna go to the field to shake off some of that energy?”
“You know it.”
Theo deflates, disappointed about a future that was never his to begin with. A future filled with partying, and friends, and fun has never belonged to him. Fairytales are meant for people like Liam.
-
The orange sweater doesn’t smell like Liam anymore. It’s been too long, and Theo wore it too often when he first got it for it to retain any of its original scent.
Theo’s parents weren’t in love, and the Doctors weren’t ones for love either, so Theo never really believed that love could actually happen. Theo never thought that breathing in someone’s scent, sweet like candy and spicy like cinnamon, could bring a smile to his face, yet here he is.
Feeling something so pure and unfiltered, so raw and overwhelming, makes Theo feel like he’s an imposter. People like him don’t get love stories, they get to live in their cars and search Google Maps for 24-hour convenience stores.
-
Liam met Aria during that weird in-between period when Theo was gone. She was new to the school, but there was something off about her scent. Everyone has a particular scent, but there’s something about supernaturals that’s just different. Aria was that different, and Liam was worried that it meant something bad was looming on the horizon.
Not every 17-year-old has been to war, so Liam thinks it’s fair to want a break before the Puppy Pack has to fight their next monster of the week.
Luckily, Aria goes out of her way to disarm him, leaving a note in his locker: ’I’m a witch, dude. Now please calm down with all the werewolf weirdness, it’s freaking me out.’ Liam laughed, and when he looked up she was standing just down the hallway, waving enthusiastically.
The two of them quickly hit it off, becoming thick as thieves. Aria is a lesbian that was born into a family of witches. They recently moved to Beacon Hills to be closer to the Nemeton, because the old tree is apparently an important part of holiday rituals for ancient witches. It took Liam some caution and a little paranoia before he was certain that Aria and her family wouldn’t kill him, but her hyperactive, sarcastic energy matches perfectly to Liam’s whole angry golden retriever thing.
Aria was different to Liam’s other friends, and Liam could never quite put his finger on why. He always tries to include her in things, and he tries to get her opinion when he’s making hard decisions. Something like this would feel weirdly ominous, on any other day, but Liam has finally decided that he’s going to let himself relax for a change. If he wants to put his trust in the town’s new spunky witch, then he’s going to let it happen.
Theo has never met Aria, and he doesn’t hear anything about her until the UCLA conversation, but after that, it seems like it’s all he hears.
-
Sports aren’t Theo’s thing, and he’s more than willing to admit it. Any attempt that he’s ever made at sports has just ended up with him looking like Danny Zuko in his red gym shorts. It was embarrassing, but he’s not afraid to admit it anymore. He’s good at other things, after all. Today, despite his unwillingness to play a sport, Theo decides to go to a lacrosse game. It's the playoffs, and apparently that’s a big deal, so maybe it’ll be fun. Maybe.
-
The lacrosse game is not fun, not even a little bit, and Theo watches from the sidelines as Liam tries to help Nolan ice a broken finger, discreetly syphoning his pain. Liam is so painfully gentle, and it’s even visible from all the way at the top of the bleachers, where Theo watches on in awe.
Nolan once held a crossbow to Liam’s head and told him that he wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. Nolan spit in his face and called him a monster, he plotted against him to kill all of Liam’s friends, and now, in the middle of the season’s most important lacrosse game, Liam has taken himself out to nurse Nolan. He is tender even though he is traumatised.
What Theo feels, bubbling deep down in his chest, is something different from what he usually feels. The fluttery, warm feeling is still there, reminding him that he would sacrifice everything if it meant that Liam would never experience another trauma, but there’s something more sinister too. In its most raw, Shakespearean form, Theo feels envy.
Theo has never deserved anything good from the world, because he has only ever put out bad, but he has never tried to repay those debts. Even though he wakes up in a cold sweat on most nights, guilt choking him like a cruel hand, he has never tried to repair all of the broken, he has never tried to fix his mess.
Theo looks at Liam and holds his breath, because he doesn’t even think that he could muster up that sort of tenderness if he tried. There is no hidden gentleness, and there is no patience for those who have done wrong by the innocent, Theo is exactly the same on the inside and the outside.
How can Liam, innocent and wide-eyed, still manage such tenderness after being damned to a life of being hunted? How can the victim turn around and forgive the culprit?
-
The food bags in the back of the truck become a regular thing. It scares Theo, just a little bit. He had never told anyone that he was out here, and he has never been able to stay awake for long enough to see the food dropped off. Some nights there’s even fresh takeout, still hot if Theo wakes up soon enough.
He suspects it’s Brett, though he seems to have his hands full with Lori according to his overheard cafeteria conversations.
One night, a bag jingles, metallic and loud compared to the contents of the bag. He reaches in for it, hands shaking and cold, and pulls out a normal-looking key attached to a note.
“Did you want me to find you?”
Underneath, there’s a barely legible address written in familiar chicken scratch, and Theo decides that maybe tonight he should be more like Liam.
-
The address leads to the house of the boy that Theo has allowed himself to love from afar. It’s late, but there’s an open window on the second floor and a night light glows in the window. Theo stands at the bottom, duffle bag over his shoulder, the orange hoodie tucked into its side pocket. He stares for a minute, then two, then five, just watching the soft glow of the light from the window.
“Are you going to come up?” Liam asks softly, like Theo is a wounded animal and Liam is scared to startle him.
Theo nods, even though Liam isn’t looking out the window, and he starts to scale the side of the house, careful not to step on anything delicate. He lands in Liam’s room gracelessly, too tired to worry about his landing, and he instinctively sinks to the floor, bringing his knees to his chest.
Liam is on the other side of the room, his body movements matching with the way he had called out. He walks slowly, arms spread out like he’s afraid that Theo might run away if he moves too quickly.
“Are you okay?” Liam whispers, sitting down criss-cross in front of Theo.
Theo just looks back, eyes-wide and movements sluggish. He can’t decipher if he’s really here, in the room of the boy that he’s loved for months, or if this is just a very vivid dream from a particularly bad night in the preserve.
Liam nods as if he can hear Theo’s thoughts, and Theo almost hates how understanding it all feels. How can Liam just look at him like this, with such care and kindness, after all that he’s done, all the sins that he’s committed?
Liam frowns, again behaving as if he can hear Theo’s internal monologue, and it starts to freak him out. Maybe this really is just a lucid dream or something.
“Are you hungry?” Liam asks.
Theo shakes his head, ashamed of his sudden inability to speak up.
“Alright, then let’s go to bed.” Liam stands up, trusting that Theo is following behind him, and he opens the door to a room across the hallway. The bed is made and the room is very standard, clinical in the same way that Martha Stewart’s cooking show is. It’s impersonal, but it’s still a nice room.
Liam catches him looking, and he offers a soft smile, just one corner of his mouth quirking up. “If you decide to stay, we’ll make it look less like a stock photo of a bedroom.”
Theo laughs softly at that, a timid smile coming to his face. Liam motions to the bed, and while it does look generic, it looks softer than anything Theo has slept on in years.
Liam smiles again, dropping Theo’s duffle bag on a beanbag chair in the corner. Theo hadn’t even realized that he had left it, and his legs are starting to feel like jelly just thinking about sleeping. Liam nods once again before leaving, tiptoeing against the hardwood and softly pulling the door shut.
Despite his overwhelming exhaustion, it feels weird to fall asleep. Theo has only been to Liam’s house a handful of times, and he wouldn’t have considered himself a welcomed guest. It’s both too quiet and too loud: three heartbeats sounding very different compared to the usual nature sounds that Theo falls asleep to. He is hot and cold at the same time, and it just doesn’t feel right. He doesn’t know how long he spends like that: his mind whirling a mile a minute, his body overwhelmed and underwhelmed.
He hears the small click of the bedroom door reopening before closing again, and he hears the soft pitter of Liam’s footsteps across the floor. Theo tries to keep his breathing steady, but his heartbeat still gives away the fact that he’s awake.
The comforter lifts, and a warm body slides in behind him, plastering Theo’s back against Liam’s chest. Liam wraps his arms around Theo’s waist, getting as close as they possibly can. Liam’s heartbeat is much louder now, it should be more overwhelming than it was before, and his warmth should be causing Theo to overheat. Despite everything that should be happening, Theo manages to fall asleep in seconds.