Chapter Text
“Okay, hold on for a sec-”
“No, wait! Don’t let go-”
“I just got to-”
Liam let the feet of the man he was carrying slip so they’d rest against his bent knees. On the other side of the unconscious man, Theo grunted a strangled curse and stumbled back as most of the weight came to bear down on him.
In his half crouched, half bent over position, Liam twisted his head to look up and waved his left arm around so he could make a grab for the rope dangling just out of range.
He gritted his teeth and shot a glance at Theo, who was struggling to keep a hold of the man under his armpits. The head of the unconscious man lolled against his neck, almost a tender tableau to the distracted glance.
“Hold on,” Liam told him.
“What?!”
In a balancing feat that would have made even the most talented acrobats sweat if Liam said so himself, he let the unconscious man’s feet slip further and bent his own right leg so they’d get trapped in the loop of the P he created by resting his right foot against his left knee.
“You okay?” he looked up at Theo.
“Sure!” Theo wheezed, his eyes bulging out as even more weight fell onto him. “Remind me again why you’re not the one on this end? You’re the one with actual supernatural strength, I’m just a tribute.”
Now that he had a couple more inches of reach he managed to grab the rope. “Hah!” He almost lost his balance but managed not to let the guy fall at the last moment. “Because you didn’t know where to go?”
“Right,” Theo looked up at the rope coiled around Liam’s hand. “Now what?”
“Push him towards me.”
They spent a good thirty minutes - ten of which were wasted because Theo couldn’t manage to stop sniggering long enough to help Liam when he got trapped between the unconscious behemoth of a man and the wall - to maneuver the knocked out hunter upright so they could tie the rope under his armpits as a sort of makeshift harness. They climbed the metals rungs to emerge from the manhole at the edge of the school parking lot - away from the cameras, Liam had made sure - and then hauled the man up by the rope.
Theo grabbed the man’s ankle and tugged until all of him was finally lying on the ground, while Liam put the manhole cover back.
They lay down for a couple of minutes, catching their breath as they leaned back against the unconscious hunter, using him as a pillow. Liam frowned down at the man’s face, its features lax, but still somehow sporting a frown. He was almost 100% sure that this was the giant he’d fought at Eichen House back when they’d gone with Scott to free Lydia. Either that, or that guy had a twin as scary and as tough to bring down as him.
Theo’s foot nudging his ankle broke him out of his reverie. He stood up and brushed his pants to try and get rid of the dirt, the mud, the blood and who knows what else they’d gathered in the tunnels. He didn’t have much luck, though, and now his hands were dirty too. With a grimace, he wiped them on his considerably less gross t-shirt.
He offered a hand to Theo and then tugged with perhaps too much force, since he stumbled upright and then right into Liam. Theo gave him an unimpressed look and, while he let go of his hand and took a half step back, he remained standing close in Liam’s personal space. So close he could feel the warmth of his skin.
“So, now what?” Theo asked, staring down at the unconscious hunter.
Liam shrugged, bumping their shoulders together. “We put him with the others.”
He heard Theo heartbeat spike for a second and he felt his body go rigid. Theo slowly turned to look at him. “There are others?!” he hissed.
Liam turned and pointed at Stiles’ Jeep, parked about fifty yards or so away. “Three of them,” he said. “But the other two were, you know, normal human size, so I managed on my own.”
He watched as Theo narrowed his eyes, focusing nowhere in particular, and tilted his head to the side. He was checking their heartbeats, but Liam had been doing that since they got out of the tunnels while carrying André the Giant and he was pretty sure they were still unconscious. He had hit them quite hard, after all. Too hard, some might say, but they’d had guns and they’d pointed them at Liam with the intent to kill, they were lucky he hadn’t slashed them to ribbons.
Seemingly satisfied with their continued state of senselessness, Theo focussed back on Liam. He smirked. “So you called me at two in the morning to literally get rid of bodies.”
“They’re not dead, they’re just very… knocked out.”
“Right. You owe me.”
“I’ll buy you breakfast.”
“I meant money.”
Liam rolled his eyes and thumped Theo’s chest with the back of his hand. “Come on, Raeken,” he nodded at the man still lying on the ground. “The faster we get this done, the faster you can have those pancakes.”
“I think I slipped a disc back there moving André the Giant, you’re buying me lunch at the very least.”
It took another thirty minutes to get André to the car and to secure him with duct tape next to the others. Liam had to slam the door shut a total of five times before it actually cooperated and remained shut, because this was still Stiles’ Jeep. Theo watched on, silently amused, while leaning against the passenger door, arms crossed over his chest.
He glared at him. “What?”
“Now what, fearless leader?”
Theo had taken to calling him that, once Scott had actually left for good to go to college and left Liam in charge. He also had other nicknames, like ‘off-brand Alpha’ and ‘Alpha cub’, all of them never failing to irritate Liam to the point of almost wolfing out in public. Weirdly enough, though, Theo always ended up doing whatever Liam asked.
He tossed the roll of duct tape to Theo, who caught it easily. “Now we drive to the edge of the preserve and we duct tape them to a tree.”
Theo gave him an unimpressed look. “That’s it. That’s your plan.”
Liam shrugged, but he was also digging into his pockets for the Jeep keys at the same time, and the move became an awkward, full body shuffle. “Well, I’m gonna call the Sheriff at some point,” he said. “I mean, it’s not like I’m going to kill them, but they did try to kill me and our Pack, so I feel like I’m allowed to duct tape them to a tree if I want to.”
He probably would have missed it if he hadn’t been listening for it, when Theo drew a sharp breath as he said ‘our Pack’. It had been almost a year since the hospital and things were still quite rocky between Theo and everyone, except Alec who was new and didn’t have a history with him and Liam himself - who even though he should’ve probably known better, he’d promised himself to give Theo a second chance. It was getting better though, Liam’s plan of the Pack’s gradual exposure to Theo and vice versa working slowly, but surely.
Theo snorted and shook his head, but he was smiling fondly. Liam grinned back at him.
And then Theo said it .
“You’re lucky I’ve got this hopeless crush on you,” he shook his head and then pushed himself off of the side of the car and got inside.
Or at least, that’s what Liam presumed had happened: he’d heard steps, the car door open then slam close after a moment. There was a long silence as Liam stood frozen, as he stared at the empty spot Theo had been and just
The car door opened again. “Liam?”
Liam felt his mouth open, then click shut and then open again. He was gaping like a fish out of water, he knew, but he felt the comparing appropriate. Theo had a
What .
“What?”
Quick steps again, but this time Theo came around the car, eyes wide and staring at him. “You okay?”
Oh yeah, he must have heard Liam’s heart beat furiously in an attempt to make its way out of his chest. Also, he didn’t know when he’d last taken a breath.
“I-” he squeaked. “You- What ?!”
Theo blinked uncomprehendingly at him. “Yeah?” It then seemed to dawn on him. “Oh, yeah. I mean- Wait. You didn’t know?”
Right. Of course. Theo’d just dropped the Tsar Bomba of all revelations, almost gave Liam a heart attack in the process, and then it was somehow Liam’s fault for not knowing that Theo Raeken had a crush on him?!
Who even used the word ‘crush’ past 13?!
“No, I didn’t!” He felt the growl tearing at his throat.
“Huh.”
Huh. Huh . As if Theo had been the one to be seriously stumped by this revelation.
“Huh?!”
Theo frowned at him, and that was the thing. He looked genuinely taken aback by Liam somehow not knowing. “Ah. I thought with the chemo signals and all,” he shrugged. “I figured you knew and were just ignoring it.”
“I’m really, really bad at chemo signals,” he said, slowly. So Theo could grasp the implications in their entirety. “ Really bad.”
“Ah.”
“Yep.”
The silence stretched out, unbearably so. Theo now was pretty obviously uncomfortable too after having unwittingly admitted to his ‘hopeless crush’.
“I can’t believe you used the word ‘crush’.”
“That’s your hangup?”
Liam shrugged and looked up at Theo. He appeared fine, but Liam could see the way he stood, tense, knees barely bent as if he was preparing to bolt and sprint away at the first notice. Liam took an experimental step closer. Theo stared at him and his body swayed backwards slightly, but he didn’t move otherwise. Liam took another step.
They were standing pretty close, now. As close as they had been just a few minutes earlier, when Theo was just a guy who was kind of Liam’s friend and not a guy with a crush on Liam. Theo smelled of sweat and the tunnels, of the unconscious hunter and of Liam himself, faintly. Underneath it all, Theo’s own scent, with which Liam had gotten pretty familiar over the past several months.
“What are you doing?” Theo asked, his voice tight.
“Nothing.”
A moment of silence, then, “are you sniffing me?”
Liam drew back. “No?” he tried, sheepishly. When Theo leveled his gaze at him, he gave up the pretense and shrugged. “You just smell like you. Under all the tunnel smell and the André smell, I mean. You smell like usual you, nothing weird.”
He heard it, then, even before looking up and finding Theo’s slightly alarmed look: a sharp intake of breath, a stutter in the heartbeat.
Had Theo always smelled like this? Certainly not when he was evil and manipulating? Liam tried to remember, tried to go back to the zoo, the hospital - both times - but couldn’t come up with Theo’s scent then. They’d spent so much time together lately - some days he saw him even more than Mason - that he couldn’t remember Theo’s scent never being in some way mixed with his.
Oh.
Oh .
“Oh.”
Theo cleared his voice and looked away. He shifted on his feet awkwardly, but he didn’t look like he wanted to run away and keep running until he was miles away from Beacon Hills anymore, so Liam counted it as progress.
“Well, I guess now that we cleared that up, we can go back to the status quo and get rid of these-”
“Dinner,” Liam blurted.
Theo frowned. Tilted his head. “What?”
“Dinner, tomorrow. Well, today, technically,” Liam said, words coming out in a rush. He felt like he was on the edge of a precipice, staring down at it, terrified and elated at the same time.
Theo sighed and shook his head. “I know I said you owe me, but you really don’t,” he stared straight into Liam’s eyes, appearing deceivingly calm on the outside, but the heart hammering in his chest couldn’t lie to Liam’s werewolf ears. He smirked, then. “I’ll always be there for you when you need to hide bodies at 2 in the morning.”
“But I want to,” Liam said. He smiled and then laughter bubbled out of him, light and clear, taking him by surprise. He reached out with his left hand, fingers barely brushing the skin of Theo’s forearm. Even without actual touching, he felt the full-body shudder Theo gave in reaction, the way his heartbeat spiked. It was exhilarating. It left him breathless . “I want to.”
Theo was staring at him, eyes wild and terrified, but he nodded.
Liam laughed again, happy, and leaned back against the Jeep, eyes closed.
“We should strip them,” came Theo’s voice, after a moment.
Liam shook his head and frowned up at him. “Huh?”
“The hunters,” Theo explained, pointing at the three unconscious men in the back of Stiles’ Jeep, as if there were other hunters they needed to get rid of lying around. “We should strip them before taping them to the tree.”
Liam grinned.