Chapter Text
Liam snaps his locker closed. The sound of the shoes scuffing the tile floor, classroom doors being flung open, and voices rising in excited discussion of weekend plans engulf him. Crashing back to reality and out of his post-algebra-class daze, he mumbles, "this day feels like it's been going on for literally six years."
Scott looks up from his phone, still leaning against the adjacent lockers, and adds just loud enough to be heard over Friday afternoon din, "Yeah. You zoned out somewhere between the science wing and here.” He snickers before resuming scrolling through Instagram.
Liam rests his head on the closed locker in front of him for a second, the cool metal helping to clear his head. After a moment, he starts again on his way to the locker room to get ready for practice. Scott straightens and catches up to retake his position beside Liam.
“So what’re you doing this weekend?” Liam asks, trying to make up for the lackluster conversation from the science wing to his locker.
“Probably a lot of studying,” Scott replies. “I can’t fall behind on my assignments or coach will start threatening to pull me from the starting lineup.” A brief grimace flashes across his face before he forces a smile and asks, “what about you?”
Liam dodges around a knot of people waiting to enter a classroom for an afterschool club meeting, briefly separating from Scott, before answering, “Just some homework too I guess. Mason is meeting some guy at Jungle, and I don’t have a fake ID to get in with him, so I’ll be home alone all weekend.” His voice trails off and his attention centers on the floor tiles a few feet in front of him.
The pair walks surrounded in a quiet bubble through the busy hallway past several classrooms, the sea of students slipping around them. As they start down the stairs to the locker room, Scott’s face brightens and he whips towards Liam, exclaiming, “Why don’t we study together? There’s this great coffee shop downtown. I’ve been going there for years. I’ll be studying obviously but-” Scott continues on about how it would be great to see Liam even if he’ll be preoccupied with school work.
Meanwhile, after getting over the whiplash of Scott’s outburst, Liam is trying to piece together if Scott McCall, his alpha and not-to-be-spoken-about-kinda-sorta-maybe-crush, just asked him out for coffee. Before today, neither Scott, nor the pack for that matter, had shown much interest in being around Liam any more than they have had to be. A casual invitation to coffee is something Liam only thought possible when he was in between waking and dreaming- when the thought of him being a werewolf was more outlandish than him liking another guy.
Liam thinks back to the night before. Scott had found his way into Liam’s room during the night, acting as both his protector and his charge. Their unspoken relationship only existed out of necessity when the things that bump in the night take on the shape of their shared memories, and it is supposed to be just that: unspoken and unacknowledged by neither party. To mention their shared pocket of mutual protection in the reality that brought about their terrors would shatter the momentary illusion it would all be okay; mentioning the thing he loved about those moments would also mean acknowledging what he feared outside of them.
Realizing he’d been staring at Scott without actually answering, Liam stumbles over the words, “yeahthatwouldbegreatI’ddreallylikethatwhendoyouwanttdothat,” and silently berates himself, thinking, “Yeah great, Liam, good job winning over your alpha.”
Scott bounces back immediately with, “Great! It’ll be nice to hangout and not deal with werewolf stuff. I’ll text you the address and we’ll meet at 10:00 on Saturday then.” He then trots down the stairs and into the chaos of the boys’ locker room. In that moment, Scott’s ability to steamroll through Liam’s lack of coherent thought after being asked out on a coffee study date was more impressive than any of his actual alpha abilities.
Still dumbfounded, Liam floats down the stairs and joins the chaos that is the Beacon Hills Boys’ Lacrosse team getting ready for practice. Even after Greenburg’s blunders snowball enough to get the whole team running laps, Liam can hardly believe the audacity of whatever higher power is responsible for his life: he has a date with Scott McCall.
Liam returns home after practice to find a note from his parents on the kitchen table. They would be out working late again, but there was frozen lasagna in the refrigerator for him. After forcing a plate of the questionable pasta concoction, Liam trudges up the stairs to his room and rolls into his bed, tossing his backpack and lacrosse bag into an unceremonious heap on the floor at the foot of his bed. The routine of unpacking and showering before getting into bed and sitting on his phone sounds comforting, but after a week of barely sleeping, exhaustion creeps up and drags Liam into the abyss of his nightmares once again.
Cold water bites into Liam’s skin, and, forcing his eyes open, he recognizes the now all too familiar scene of the well. He makes an attempt to scrabble up the wall. Half way up the wall, the air around him chills his wet skin and penetrates deeper into his tortured body. Liam can barely move his arms to the next stone, and his fingers fight against the numbness to find purchase on the slime covered cobblestone. He hears Scott’s voice above him in the distance, his voice echoing down the shaft of the well carrying his cries of, “Liam, I’m coming! Stay with me.” The sound of his voice carries with it the implied promise of safety, a warm hug, and laughing together. Frustrated tears speckle Liam’s face, mixing with the droplets of water he’s carried from the bottom of the well.
Liam tries to force out the words, “I can’t do it, Scott. I can’t hold on much longer. Please-” The last traces of warmth in his body are consumed by the cold and, losing what sensation had remained in his limbs, Liam sees his world tip as he falls backwards. The circle of light at the top of the well gets further and further away as he plummets to the bottom of the well. The words, “Please don’t leave me like this,” echo in his head, unspoken, before the water swallows its prey.
Still unmoving, Liam sees the water extend in every direction unlimited by what should have been the walls of the well. The unending emptiness of blue water fading to black nothing at the edges of his vision invites in the whispers of long buried fears. Screaming into the watery void to drown out the whispers does nothing but encourage more voices to join the chorus. His frozen hand still extended, Liam reaches up towards his would be savior as the well becomes no more than a point of light in the distance and the water pulls him deeper and deeper into the dark below.
Liam blinks and bright fluorescent overhead lights greet him with a high pitched whine. He lifts his head from the desk in front of him to find a math class well underway. “I guess Mr. Cranston didn’t notice me this time,” he thinks to himself. Before he can begin taking notes on the blurry, far away board, the bell signaling the end of class rings, instigating students into sudden action. In their rush, the other students jostle past Liam and bump into him with more than their usual unfamiliar roughness.
Exiting the classroom, Liam sees Scott and Stiles walking by and runs after them. Approaching them, he says, “Hey guys. Ready for practice?”
“-makes no sense. The online debate over bleached and un-bleached soil substitutes really should be a non-issue,” Stiles explains to Scott before continuing, “and don’t even start on the model train enthusiast Facebook group.” The pair brushes past Liam without a glance. Dumbfounded, Liam pushes forward and positions himself directly in the path of the two older boys. As they get closer, Stiles continues to rant, saying, “-mention your vintage, first edition, 1945 Thomas the Train model and they will kick you from the page without moderator approval. I still don’t know how they-” They both walk straight into the increasingly flustered and annoyed beta and stumble back, Stiles falling to the floor.
Unnatural color dances on the edge of his eyes, and Liam shouts, “What’s your problem? Did I piss you off or something?” Both Stiles and Scott stand up and keep walking past Liam before resuming their conversation and disappearing into the crowd of students. Liam screams after them, “If you don’t tell me what I did wrong I can’t fix it.” The other students continue flowing around the fuming boy.
Feeling a shift building in him, Liam leans into his heightening senses to track down the pair by scent. He can’t find them. There are no familiar scents; he can’t find Stiles’ scent of sun soaked library books or Scott and his smell of warm cookies on a rainy day among the alien, not-school smells that surround him. Panic starts to replace the building rage.
Liam dives after his alpha, chasing the scent he knew he would not find. Faces whip past him, none of them showing any sign of recognition. Mason, Malia, Lydia, and other members of the lacrosse team cross his path on his mad dash through the school. None of them call out to him, none of them acknowledge the now fully shifted werewolf careening through the halls, and none of them see Liam.
Without warning, the building’s fire sprinklers go off. The halls are overflowing with the sounds of shuffling feet and flowing conversations unbothered by the freezing water jetting from the ceiling above. The cold grabbing at his body stops Liam in his tracks. Students continue to press in from every side, but all of them look past him, attempting to move through him as if he were only a ghost visiting a world in which he no longer belongs. The waves of students threaten to drown Liam, and the cold water leaves him powerless and immovable, sensation draining out of his limbs. Before he can sink deeper into a new dreamscape, pain sprouts out of Liam’s palms.
It’s a little after midnight when Liam hears the quiet scrape of his window opening. Turning towards the sound he sees Scott crawling over the sill and landing silently on the floor in a practiced motion. Liam asks from within the pile of blankets mounded on the bed on the opposite side of the room, “Can you close the window behind you? It’s been getting too cold at night to leave them open.” Even after changing the sheets on his bed to clean them of the blood from his palms, a coppery scent still hangs in the air for both wolves to detect.
Scott doesn’t move from the window. “I’m sorry I didn’t get here in time,” he says without any motion to close the gap between the two boys, “I had a feeling something was wrong so I got here as fast as I could.” Scott tries his best to cover up what Liam can only understand as disappointment on his face which leaves Liam thinking to himself, “The entire rest of the pack has had their own near death experiences, but I’m the one that can’t deal with it. I’m just the needy beta that can’t keep up with the pack. No wonder they don’t want me.” He curls in on himself trying to hide away from the feeling he has failed.
Scott cuts through the needling thoughts saying, “Do you want me to stay?” His tone drips in concern, and his voice hints it is close to cracking.
Liam turns to Scott. He notices how Scott is balanced on the balls of his feet, ready to leap forward to his beta’s side. Liam flicks up the edge of the blankets, inviting the older boy to join him.
In an instant, the space Liam offered is filled. Scott is a polite few inches away but still close enough the younger beta can feel comforting warmth roll off his alpha. He slides closer and leans his body into Scott’s, pressing his face to the firm chest next to him. Scott wraps his arms Liam, no longer frantic to be near the other boy, and pulls him into a comforting embrace.
Neither can tell how long they sat together, some sniffles the only break in the blanketing silence, before Liam mumbles in apology, “I’m sorry.”
Scott pulls away to look at him incredulously. “What for?” he asks.
Liam stares back at him. He thought the reason was obvious, and coming up with the words to explain it creates a tight pit in his stomach. All the thoughts Liam has been holding in all week explode out of him in a torrent as he says, “For needing your help to exist right now. For asking you to stay here even when it’s obvious you haven’t been getting any sleep either. I don’t know. What else? Maybe for being the weak link in a pack that hates me because I can’t handle one week of what they’ve been dealing with for years.” The look on the face of the boy opposite him cuts short any further retort.
He sees tears coming from Scott’s eyes that mirror the dried tracks on his own face. Wiping his face, Scott pulls away and sits up on the side of the bed. “I should be apologizing to you, Liam,” he forces out, “I got you wrapped up in this mess as soon as I bit you. You shouldn’t have to be going through this with the rest of us.” His face hardens and he presses, “Don’t you dare ever blame yourself.”
Liam sits up, staying on the opposite side of the bed from Scott, saying, “I’m a part of this world whether we want it or not.” He pauses before adding, “I thought werewolves had a pack, people that care about them and I thought I finally wouldn’t be alone. Now that I’m supposedly in a pack it’s nothing like that. They all hate me.”
Scott starts to choke up a little, and he looks at the floor before replying, “The less you had to do with this world the better. It was supposed to be safer that way.”
Liam snaps, “Besides you and Mason, the pack are the only people that really talk to me -- and that’s only because I know their secret and they tolerate me. You want me to believe it’s for my own protection you’re the only one in the pack that willingly talks to me?” He turns over as he lays back down into the bed, looking away from Scott. Glancing at the clock, Liam sees it is 4:07 AM now.
He feels the weight on the other side of the bed lift and hears the whisper of the window opening. Night time noises tumble into the room carrying the sounds of distant birds chirping, a gentle breeze swishing through the trees outside, and what Liam imagines to be stars twinkling.
After a minute of the sounds washing over the pair, almost to himself Scott whispers, “I should have done more to show you that you are one of us, and I’m sorry. You deserve a happy fairytale ending for putting up with the world I’ve thrown you into.”
Scott turns his back to the window to look at Liam, his eyes glowing the distinct red of an alpha. “Garrett proved to us we can’t push you away,” Scott spits out, biting into each syllable as if it were the would have been killer, “It doesn’t solve anything and just gets people hurt.” He scoffs at himself then continues, “We almost lost you, and I’d never forgive myself if that happened.” He pauses, thinking about what would have happened if he hadn’t made it in time to the well or if a hunter had gotten to Liam first. “I wish I could tell you it’ll all go away tomorrow, and we can go on living normal lives, but I just don’t know what’s out there anymore,” he finishes.
The room quickly fills with scent of Liam’s fear. The thought Scott and the rest of the pack has been in the thick of things longer than Liam could imagine and still not know how to manage themselves terrifies him.
“Don’t worry I’ll be here with you through all of it- I can promise that,” Scott says as he climbs through the window onto the roof. Once it is secured, he looks back to Liam, still in bed, and flashes him a wink and lopsided smirk before dropping into the night.
Whatever Liam was feeling from his alpha winking at him was definitely not what betas normally feel towards their alphas.