Chapter Text
Liam punched him in the face. Again.
Really, Theo should be used to it by now. It wasn't like Liam being the alpha was going to change anything, after all, which was why he felt stupid that he was surprised when it happened for the now fifth time.
It had been about a year after the battle with the Anuk-ite and hunters, which, admittedly, was a pretty impressive amount of time for Liam to hold off on the needless violence (there had been another punching about two months after Scott and the rest went off to college), so Theo was used to not having his nose broken. It was kind of nice, actually, not having to reset his nose every four seconds. Last time he did it it came back a little crooked, and he had to break it again himself so he could fix it. That hadn't been a fun day.
He sighed as he stared at himself in his bathroom mirror, a half-bloody tissue hanging from his nose while his hands were occupied gripping the corners of his white pedestal sink. His bathroom wasn't terribly nice or anything, decent, since it was hard to afford living on his own with scarcely a high school education, but he wasn't at home very often anyway. He usually crashed on someone's couch or drove to some random spot to fall asleep. This was exactly the type of day that Theo would be at home: when he was cleaning himself up from yet another pack-related injury.
His green eyes looked tired, but he was used to that. Being a pack ally wasn't the easiest job in the world, especially when he was pretty sure that the three others (excluding Liam) who were in it still hated him. Corey didn't pay much attention to him or seemed kind of on edge around the other chimera, Mason simply preferred everyone else over him, and Alec, the new werewolf Scott had rather foolishly taken in and then left with Liam, was for whatever reason just rude to him. Theo couldn't blame them, anyway. Maybe he deserved a couple punches in the face. They kept him from getting his hopes up too high and letting feelings resurface.
He shut his eyes for a second and pulled the tissue out, not bothering to look at it since he knew what to expect already. He tilted his head up to make sure he wasn't bleeding anymore and breathed out again, relieved he wasn't.
Theo wiped the small drop of blood left on the sink and tossed the tissue in the small wastebasket, only looking at it to make sure it had made it in. The tissue sat in the bottom of the bin, but Theo had to look twice.
His eyes were fixated on a small silver stain on it, and he squinted, tired, to try and see if it was just a shadow. He couldn't tell, so in his exhaustion of that day, Theo wrote it off as just being his imagination. It generally didn't work in his favor anyway, after all.
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The metallic taste in his mouth was different when he accidentally bit the side of his mouth a little too hard while chewing gum and trying to listen to whatever Liam was saying at their regularly scheduled pack meeting. The beta-turned-sitting alpha insisted that they held these meetings every two weeks at least, even if it was just to get together. It was one of the things that Scott hadn't done; every official meeting they had was only because of an impending threat, and if they wanted to talk to each other outside of that, they had to actually work at it. It made forming relationships kind of difficult between pack members.
Not that Theo was a pack member, but he found that Liam's method wasn't really working all that well. Alec was still leveling him with an unimpressed and skeptical gaze from next to him that Theo didn't know how to work with, and Mason and Corey were pretty absorbed in each other and didn't make much of an effort to start a conversation. At least it gave Theo the impression that Liam didn't completely despise him, since he was the only one to really talk to him throughout the days they spent together.
Alec raised his eyebrow when he winced and held the side of his mouth, but Theo ignored him. He didn't care much about what the beta werewolf thought of him, and he definitely wasn't about to explain the concept of pain to him. He pressed his tongue against the inside of his cheek to try and soothe the pain of the bite, but all it did was spread a terrible taste into his mouth that made him nervous.
"I'm just going to the bathroom, chill out," was all Theo said as Alec shot him a look when he got up from the couch and headed to the bathroom off Liam's kitchen. He shut and locked the door behind him in case someone tried to check on him, turned on the light, and opened his mouth into the mirror.
A tiny amount of red blood was on his tongue, but deep down, Theo knew it didn't taste the same and knew exactly why. Little swirls of silvery liquid could be seen in it when he spat it into the bottom of the sink as quietly as possible, muffling the sound with a cough to make sure no one was suspicious of him.
He knew what mercury meant in chimeras, but he didn't want to think about it. Back when the Dread Doctors were still around, he had been able to hide the mercury leaks when they happened, since they were pretty much next to nothing. He wasn't about to start losing limbs or completely purging like the others ones had. It would stop soon enough.
He made sure to rinse out the sink and go back to the living room with everyone else, ignoring the taste running through his mouth.
"You okay?" Liam asked curiously when he sat back down near him. "I heard you coughing."
"Yeah, a bug flew into my mouth," Theo lied again. Liam rolled his eyes lightheartedly and the other three laughed, bringing Theo back to the surface.
The rarity of that nice moment stung almost as much as the feeling of blood and mercury in the back of his throat.
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Theo's truck had broken down, because of course the world couldn't give him a break with all it's cosmic "fuck yous" thrown his way. He had walked home, a few blocks away from where the old blue truck broke down by the river. If he were lucky, he could go back and get it later, but for now, he had to sleep, and even Theo wasn't confident enough to think that Riverside Drive was a good place to drift off.
He fell through the door of his house and trudged upstairs, yanking off his boots as soon as he got into the upstairs hallway and leaving them there, too tired to pick them up. Completely zapped for energy, Theo shut his eyes and fell asleep almost immediately for once. He didn't have time to wonder if that was odd or not.
Of course, no good things, or good sleep, rather, could last with him, so he found himself sitting straight up in bed with a gasp, expecting to hit his head on the metal ceiling of a morgue freezer. "Fuck," he whispered, his hand fumbling over his stomach and sides until he found his heartbeat in his chest. It was still beating, still there, and Theo relaxed and let the tears waiting to come fall.
All he could do at times like these was remind himself that Tara wasn't real. His stolen heart was still beating and keeping him alive. There was no Hell tonight.
Sometimes he wondered if what he saw in Hell was real or not. It felt so, so real, the feeling of Tara's hands gripping him like a vice and breaking his ribs with no remorse. He guessed that the real question was her. Was Tara's being just something engineered to torture him, or was that actually his sister? Was she at rest like she should be, or forced to kill him over and over?
That made him feel worse, and he wiped tears away from where they were falling from the corners of his eyes and sniffed. Theo looked at the clock that read four AM and knew he needed to get back to sleep so he could go to class the next day (college courses from the applications Liam helped/forced him to fill out), so he laid back down and shut his eyes.
This time, sleep didn't come to him so easily. Instead, he caught the scent of something all too familiar, metallic and sharp.
His eyes opened to his hand, placed under his head for comfort, to find that the fingers that had wiped away his tears were slick with the shiny substance that had haunted so many before.
Failure played through his head in the same voice from before.
Failure was all that he could think about no matter how hard he tried to ignore it. Failure followed him into sleep when he shut his eyes tight.
He took a deep breath and pushed it back.
No one cared about a failure anyway.