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“She’s Scott’s first-born child,” Liam says, flat on his stomach on their bed so that he can watch Theo inside their attached bathroom and half-hidden by the doorway. “You can’t just not meet her.”
“Watch me,” Theo mutters, his face mostly obscured by the towel he’s rubbing over his damp hair.
Liam squints at him for a few seconds longer, and then rolls over onto his back at the same time that he slides a hand down to pull his phone out of his pocket. “At this point I’m just going to assume this is some kind of elaborate joke, and ask Scott when we should stop by the hospital. Tonight, you think? Or would tomorrow work?”
Liam briefly stops tapping away at his text message to Scott to give this some real thought.
“If we go tomorrow we could like, stop by somewhere and pick up a baby gift first.” He looks back down at his phone as he continues to absently rattle off: “A brown paper bag for Scott to breathe into. An entire six-pack of aconite-laced booze for Malia now that she can drink agai—”
He doesn’t get to finish: a hand comes down over the top of both of his, and yanks his phone away. Liam jolts and then tips his head back to glare at Theo as Theo, in quick succession: apparently checks to make sure Liam hadn’t actually sent any texts yet, and then—with deliberate, vicious purpose—deletes everything that Liam had managed to write.
He keeps Liam’s phone when he’s done, brandishing it at Liam as he insists, “It’s not a joke. I’m not meeting her.”
Liam flips back over onto his stomach to squint at him again. “Malia will literally kill you.” He points out, not particularly worried because there’s no way this is real. “Scott will cry actual, puppy-dog tears of despair.”
“Better than the alternative,” Theo replies darkly, and starts to walk away. He still has Liam’s phone, but that’s only like, a tenth of the reason why Liam vaults off the bed to hurry after him.
“Okay, enough,” he declares, catching Theo before Theo can exit their bedroom and dragging him to a stop. “This isn’t funny anymore. What—”
“—it was never funny—“
“—the hell is wrong with you?” Liam concludes, getting louder as he goes to talk right over Theo’s entirely irrelevant peanut-gallery commentary.
Theo doesn’t answer right away. He also doesn’t look at Liam, his eyes fixed somewhere to the left of Liam’s right shoulder, and that’s how Liam really knows some epic bullshit is about to spill out of his mouth, because Theo only ever won’t look at him when he knows he’s got a losing argument.
And, lo and behold: “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Theo finally mutters.
“You don’t think it’s a good idea,” Liam repeats, still staring directly at him regardless of the fact that Theo still hasn’t looked at him.
Theo’s expression twists with annoyance. “That’s what I just sa—”
“And it’s as big of bullshit now as it was thirty seconds ago!” Liam interrupts, glaring at him. “Theo!”
Theo just snaps his jaw shut, and glares mulishly back. Liam searches his face. Theo’s wearing the exact expression that he gets when he’s decided to be stubborn about something, but his shoulders are also hunched up around his ears. His eyes keep cutting away from Liam’s own.
His scent, when Liam actually remembers to use his brain and check it, is a rioting mess so choked with conflicting emotions that Liam actually recoils a little, blinking. But then he makes up all his lost ground, eyes narrowing.
“This,” he realizes flatly, “has to do with the Dread Doctors.”
Theo instantly tries to wheel away. Losing-argument-defense number two: just refuse to participate in the conversation. Otherwise known as the Raeken Dramatic Exit. Liam doesn’t let him get far, darting into their bedroom doorway to block him bodily.
“I’m not doing this with you right now,” Theo snaps at him, though he does at least stop. Losing-argument-defense number three: act overly reasonable.
“Right now or ever?” Liam retorts, and shoves Theo back a step, and then another. Theo glares at him in absolute outrage, but his knees also hit the edge of their mattress before he can plant his feet, and so he ends up sitting on their bed regardless, which is exactly what Liam had wanted. Liam stands over him, arms folded. “Talk.”
“Liam—” Theo tries, and even more problematically, he tries to stand. Liam shoves him back down. “Liam,” he bitches.
“Theo,” Liam replies, just as forcefully. But he also leans down and plants his palms on Theo’s knees, so that they’re eye-to-eye and Theo actually has to lean back a little to make room. “Why don’t you want to go meet Scott’s and Malia’s daughter?”
“I didn’t say that,” Theo protests. “I never said I didn’t want—” Almost immediately he seems to realize what he’d started to give away, and he clamps his mouth shut. Liam’s eyes narrow.
“No,” he agrees. “You just said that you ‘didn’t think it’d be a good idea.’” He searches Theo’s face. He repeats: “This is about the Dread Doctors.”
Theo makes a face, and shoves Liam’s hands off his knees as he goes to stand again. This time Liam gives up on all traces of subtlety and just flat-out tackles him onto the bed.
They spend a few seconds scuffling—Theo even goes so far as to flare his eyes and snap a mouthful of fangs at him—but Liam just keeps shifting and grappling and pinning him, and eventually Theo relents with a huff, and goes limp underneath him. Both of their legs are dangling awkwardly off the bed, and in any other circumstance Liam would find their undignified position immensely funny. Right now he just braces himself on his palms, and stares down at Theo.
“Theo,” he repeats, more quietly—more gently—this time.
Theo’s expression screws up, and then all at once he bursts out with: “You all got the choice.”
Liam’s brow furrows. He demands, “What?”
“You all got the choice,” Theo just insists, and just as incomprehensibly. He seems to realize that he isn’t making any sense, at least, because he jerks his head to the side so that he isn’t looking up at Liam anymore, his eyes fixed somewhere else. “About—about being around me. About knowing me.”
About loving me, he doesn’t say, but Liam hears anyway. Liam feels his mouth drop softly open as he stares down at Theo, stunned.
But Theo just says, “It’s not about the Doctors. It’s about me. About who I am. What I am. You all made the choice to be around me when you let me stay. She—”
“—can’t because she’s a baby?” Liam fills in.
Theo scowls. “Don’t be a dick.”
Liam scowls right back. “I’ll stop being a dick when you start making sense!”
Theo keeps right on glaring at him. “You wanted to know my reason,” he points out, a little pissily.
Liam’s not really pinning him down anymore. If Theo wanted he could push Liam off of himself and finally make the dramatic exit he’d been angling for, earlier. He doesn’t move, and his heart—his sister’s heart, and isn’t that just a kick in the balls of a reminder, Theo insisting: it’s about who I am; it’s about what I’ve done—keeps pounding against Liam’s chest, pressed up against Theo’s own. Liam frowns down at him.
“So, what? You’re just never going to meet her?” He wonders, and yeah, he could probably work on stripping out the absolute derision from his voice, but come on. “You’ll just be the absentee uncle that we all talk around at pack holidays?”
Theo doesn’t answer, but Liam can see him thinking: sure. Can see him thinking: why not?
Liam tells him: “You’re insane.”
Theo scowls again, and this time does shove Liam off of himself. Liam should let him go, probably—he probably shouldn’t have been quite so much an ass with that last comment in the first place—but he doesn’t. But he can’t, something painful and twisted up in his own chest. He tackles Theo right back down, only this time he ends up pressed to Theo’s back with Theo flat on his stomach thanks to Theo’s attempt to stand.
They scuffle again for another few heartbeats, but Theo puts no real actual effort behind it. He winds up burying his face in the comforter below him once he’s stilled, though it doesn’t stop Liam from being able to feel the way his latest breath shudders loose of his chest, harsh and shaky. His own eyes squeezing shut, Liam buries his face in the back of Theo’s neck.
“You want to go as a wolf?” He wonders after a half-minute or so, pressing his offer into the thin skin covering the very top of Theo’s spine.
Theo makes an unhappy noise and tries to shrug him off. “I told you to stop being such a—”
“I’m serious!” Liam insists, cutting him off. He lifts up just enough that he can get a hand on Theo’s shoulder, and encourage him to roll over. Theo only acquiesces to go partway before he refuses to go any further. Liam doesn’t push the issue, just tells him, low and quiet and sincere: “I’m serious. You want to go as a wolf, I’ll—call Melissa. Figure the whole thing out.”
Now it’s Theo who searches his face. But he must see that Liam means it, because his expression spasms. His tense frame relaxes a bit; enough that Liam can encourage him that last bit over, so he’s flat on his back in between Liam’s bracing arms. He stares up at Liam, his bottom pulling between his teeth.
He says, “Yeah, because I’m sure that’s exactly what Melissa, and Scott, and Malia need right now. Figuring out how to sneak a wolf into the hospital.”
Liam just grins, because Theo’s response may have been a lot of things—mocking, disbelieving, clearly judgmental of Liam’s mental acuity—but the one thing it hadn’t been was a no.
“We’ll get you one of those therapy vests, or something,” he retorts, and leans to swallow the outraged noise Theo makes with a kiss.
---
For all Theo’s skepticism, sneaking a wolf into the hospital winds up being way less logistically complicated than Liam had anticipated.
For one thing, Melissa hadn’t even demanded an explanation. Liam had just called her and said, Theo wants to come as a wolf, and the only thing Melissa had asked was whether or not Liam had a leash.
“He won’t have to wear it,” she’d assured the poleaxed silence on Liam’s end of the call. “People will just need to be able to see it. They’ll draw their own conclusions from there.”
Liam had nodded and stuttered out some kind of vaguely assenting response, and then he’d hung up. At first he’d been dreading telling Theo, but Theo had just looked at him for a hard second, and then he’d shrugged.
“We’ll pick one up on the way,” he’d said, and Liam had let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He’d watched the place where Theo’s retreating back had disappeared for a long time.
And then the next day they show up at the hospital freight entrance as instructed—the thick leather leash looped around Liam’s neck—and wait. Theo is a warm, comforting weight all along Liam’s right side, and it’s only as he’s leaning back into Theo’s lupine bulk sat next to him that Liam for the first time realizes how nervous he is. He drops a hand to Theo’s head, grateful beyond words when Theo noses up into it, the chilly damp of his nose and the solidity of his lupine skull somehow grounding. Liam strokes his fingers back along Theo’s muzzle, between his eyes and then his ears, and buries them deep in Theo’s ruff.
Theo leans harder against him.
The freight elevator door pings open. Melissa gives them a quirked smile, and then her head tilts, her expression softening, as she looks down at Theo. She offers out her hands. “Hey, Theo,” she murmurs. “Glad you could make it.”
Liam holds his breath. If ever there was a point where Theo was going to balk it’d probably be now, with Melissa so clearly cottoned on to his plight and so clearly sympathetic to it, but instead—
Instead Theo just steps his big body forward, once and then again until he has his muzzle pressed up against Melissa’s hands. One step further carries him into her stomach, though he’s gentle about it; he barely rocks her with the pressure. Liam has to swallow back a helpless, hiccuping sound, watching it.
Melissa must catch it anyway. She shoots him a knowing, small-smiled look from her half-bent position, her hands working and working down Theo’s big sides. She tilts her chin at him, beckoning him into the elevator with her and Theo.
“C’mon,” she calls softly.
Liam gets on the elevator.
Theo immediately twists around so that he’s positioned between them, Melissa with one of her hands still stroking lightly at his head, Liam with one of his automatically reaching out to grip a firm—though not tight—fistful of Theo’s ruff. Theo touches the tip of his nose to first Melissa’s wrist and then to Liam’s, and then he twists his head the rest of the way around so that he can hide his face against Liam’s thigh. Melissa shoots Liam a curious look, but Liam just smiles, slightly; the rabbit-fast beat of Theo’s pulse isn’t anxiety. The quiver of his muscles isn’t fear.
It’s excitement.
Melissa smiles back, her eyes crinkling with the force of her relief, and then she leads them out of the slowly-opening doors as they reach their floor.
She’d been right about the leash. A few startled bystanders give Theo long looks, but almost immediately their eyes snap up to Liam—Liam’s fingers still buried in the fur by Theo’s neck—and then snag on the leash. Their expressions soften. Their lips quirk, even. Liam makes sure to smile back.
Melissa had managed to get Malia a suite at the very end of the hallway, not just because it’s one of the biggest rooms that the hospital has, but because the specialized staff who’d needed to come in to assist with the unique aspects of a supernatural birth needed room to work.
Not to mention, from what Liam had heard: Malia had roared her way through her labor, Scott’s and Derek’s pain-draining be damned.
Everything’s quiet when they get into the room, though; quiet enough that Liam starts to worry they’d caught Scott and Malia and their newest addition sleeping, or something. But when they step inside, it’s to find Scott squeezed into the hospital bed alongside Malia, the two of them with their foreheads pressed together and a tiny wrapped bundle in between them.
Liam sucks in a sharp breath as he catches, for the first time, the new scent in the room.
“Hey!” Scott greets, quiet but no less genuine for it, his eyes crinkling with the force of his smile. He carefully swings his legs over so that he can stand, and come to meet Liam halfway across the room for a tight, nearly bone-crushing hug.
“God, Scott,” Liam breathes against his shoulder. “Congratulations, man.”
Scott just squeezes him harder, laughing a little—breathy and disbelieving—as he does. “Thanks. Hey, thanks.” He pulls back, and claps Liam right in the middle of the shoulder blades, half as a final element of their hug and half to propel him towards the bed, and Malia and the tiny wrapped bundle inside it. Liam goes, bending over to hug Malia as she reaches up for him, careful of the tiny figure between them.
“You made it,” Malia says, when he’s pulled back. She’s grinning wide and happy at him.
“Yeah,” Liam agrees, his eyes flicking to where Scott and kneeled down to get his hands around Theo’s muzzle and look him right in the eye. There’s a steady thrum of something in the air that means Scott’s eyes are flared. Liam would have known it even if there wasn’t, because Theo’s are, too. “We did.”
Scott releases Theo with one last stroke over his head, and stands. He gets a hand in the back of Theo’s ruff, and starts encouraging him closer to the bed, too. Theo picks his way over, though once he’s by the bed he presses himself up against Liam’s side hard enough that Liam actually has to lean back into him to stay upright. They both look down—Theo peering over the edge of the bed—at the little wrapped bundle that Malia carefully lifts into her arms, and presents to them.
“This,” she introduces, her eyes flicking briefly to Scott stood behind them, “is Allison.”
Liam’s breath leaves him in an explosive rush. He looks back at Scott, who’s smiling softly at the set of them, and then looks back at Malia, and the tiny wrapped bundle—Allison—in her arms. He can feel the goofy, helpless grin taking over his own face.
“Hey, Allison,” he tells her quietly. “It’s so nice to meet you.”
Malia offers her over, so Liam sits one hip on the edge of the bed and carefully takes Allison into his arms when Malia passes her over. She barely weighs anything, feels like, but when she blinks open sleepy eyes at him, they glow briefly gold. Liam feels wonder overtake him, one hand reaching up to trace a light fingertip over her chin, her cheek.
He looks down, but Theo has backed up a step. Multiple steps, in fact: he’s still nearby, but there’s probably a good foot-and-a-half of distance between them. Liam feels his expression fall, but before he can say anything, Scott’s stepped forward, one hand reaching out to cradle the top of Theo’s lupine head, one to cradle his daughter’s. He asks Malia something. He solicits Liam’s opinion.
Liam traces his eyes up the connecting thread of Scott’s hand on Theo’s head, over Scott’s shoulders, to his other hand carefully tracing a thumb over his daughter’s brow. He lets Scott draw him into the conversation, his arms tightening around Allison in her tiny bundle of blankets in his arms.
The thing is, Scott’s Scott, and good enough at what he does—good enough at being a True Alpha—that Liam forgets his own worry, and the twisting anxious thing in his gut hyper-focused on the distance between Theo and Allison still in Liam’s arms. He gets caught up in the conversation Scott coaxes him into, enough so that when Malia leans forward with an easy request to reclaim her daughter, Liam passes Allison over without thought, and keeps right on talking to Scott; he and Malia were thinking of adding a screened-in porch to the farmhouse, and what did Liam think? He barely registers it when Malia climbs carefully down off the bed.
But he certainly notices it when she sits cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the room, and softly calls Theo’s name.
Liam gets a split-second of looking over, stunned, before Scott is snapping out a hand, and encouraging his chin back around. He gives Liam a pointed look, holding his eyes.
Holding his eyes so that Liam won’t look back over as Theo slowly, hesitantly slinks out from behind Scott’s legs, and starts padding over to Malia, and the little nest of blankets she’d made in between her crossed knees for Allison. Liam stares back at Scott, wide-eyed and with his neck muscles so tense from him fighting the urge to turn that they’re starting to ache, a little.
“It’s just, the bugs, you know,” Scott says, picking up on their conversation about the farmhouse’s potential porch.
“We’re werewolves,” Liam points out, and if his voice comes out a little strangled, well. No one could really blame him. “It’s not like the bites last.”
“They’re still annoying,” Scott murmurs, but absently. To himself, really, because he’d released Liam’s chin and Liam had whipped his head right back around to look at Theo.
At where Theo had finished slinking his way over, and had laid down flat on his belly in front of Malia, and Allison. But even as Liam watches he stretches out his nose a little, and then a little more, until it’s just touching the edge of Allison’s wrapped arm. Allison makes a noise, a wordless baby murmur, and Theo startles back hard enough that Liam can hear his claws scrabble on the tile.
But Allison just settles, and more to the point: she squirms a tiny hand free of her bundle of blankets, and reaches out, out towards Theo half-frozen a few inches away.
Liam holds his breath again. He doesn’t let it back out until Theo stretches his muzzle slowly, achingly slowly, back forward to meet Allison’s seeking fingers. They touch. Theo jumps a little at the sensation, but when Allison doesn’t pull her chubby fingers back, and in fact just reaches more insistently out, he stretches his muzzle forward even more.
He crawls a little closer forward on his belly
Malia’s grinning down at them, the curve of it soft and sincere and pleased. Liam doesn’t know what Scott’s doing because he refuses to look away from it as Theo noses his muzzle up under Allison’s arm, so that she can wrap it around the curve of it, and he can press the tip of it to her chest, his big sides heaving as he huffs; scenting her. His tail flicks, just slightly. He gives just the slightest lupine whine, low and soft and helpless.
“You okay, there?” Scott finally asks dryly, and Liam jumps, rudely jolted out of his thoughts. Scott just grins unrepentantly when Liam turns to glare at him. “You seemed like you were having a moment.”
“Yeah,” Liam agrees, hissing it out. “A moment that you just interrupted.”
Scott just laughs. And then he laughs harder when he realizes that Theo had turned his big lupine head around to glower at them both, his eyes flaring with his displeasure. It’s a look that clearly says: I can hear you both talking about me. Liam makes a face right back at him.
Theo’s jaw just opens, after a second and he starts to pant, just for a second, until he turns back to Allison still set in the cradle of Malia’s legs. Allison immediately reaches for him, both her hands grasping now and running around and over his face, Theo squinting one eye and then the other shut as she explores. Malia reaches down to stroke over the top of Theo’s head as Theo rests his muzzle half on her shin, and half on one of Allison’s legs.
Liam has to quickly look away and press the heels of both of his hands briefly to his eyes as he swallows, his throat thick. Scott just wraps an arm around his shoulders and shakes him a little, then pulls Liam in against his chest in a one-armed hug and holds him there.
Liam just leans more heavily against him, and lets his eyes fix back on Theo.
On Theo, and Allison, and all the places they’ve come together; that they’re connected.
---
They stay for a few more hours, until Malia and Allison get final clearance to head home.
Liam offers to help Scott get everything packed up, and down to Scott’s Jeep in the parking lot, but Malia—who’s a little wild-eyed from being stuck in the hospital for the past day and a half—assures them they’ve got it. Liam grins and gets out of her way. He pokes his head out of the room and gestures for Melissa, who nods and holds up a finger to indicate one minute.
He gives Scott and Malia each final hugs—and they kneel down to give the same to Theo, their arms wrapping around his planted forelegs—and then he leans over Allison held in the crook of Malia’s arm to press a gentle kiss to her cheek. Allison huffs and squirms and pats at his nose, but when he tries to pull away she grabs it. Liam laughs a little right along with Scott and Malia, and gently disentangles himself.
Theo presses his nose up to Allison’s side, stretching up to his full height on his forelegs as he does.
Allison tries to turn towards him. Malia relents and crouches down so that Theo can press his nose to Allison’s cheek instead, and Allison can grab at his ears, his furred cheeks.
“Alright, big guy,” Liam murmurs, as Melissa appears in the doorway. “Time to go.”
Melissa escorts them out the same way that they’d come in. This time Theo doesn’t sit between them, but instead collapses down flat on his belly, his legs sprawling gracelessly out. His eyes close. He exhales out a long, rough, lupine breath, and then gives a jaw-cracking yawn.
Liam can’t help it: he crouches down to scrub one hand roughly through Theo’s fur, over his back and sides. When Theo lifts his head to look up and back at him, Liam just leans forward and presses his face against the side of Theo’s muzzle.
Melissa just keeps her eyes on the elevator doors, though her lips are curled up in a soft smile.
Liam had brought Theo a set of sweats and a t-shirt in case he wanted to change once they got back into Liam’s beat-up old SUV, and it turns out Theo does. Liam hops into the driver’s seat after he’s shut Theo into the back, absently listening to the sounds of Theo quickly shifting back to human and sliding into the clothes Liam had brought him. The whole process takes maybe fifteen seconds; the ease of long practice. Liam gets the car started and his phone plugged in as he starts looking for something to play for the drive back to his and Theo’s place while he waits.
Soon enough the passenger door opens, and Theo slips inside. Liam looks at him and quirks him a smile, and then gets the car in reverse, and starts backing out. Beacon Hills Memorial’s parking lot is always kind of a nightmare so they don’t talk while Liam navigates his way through it, and they keep on not talking for a few while after that.
Liam doesn’t mind the silence. When he looks over, he can spot the soft, contented look on Theo’s face in the reflection of the window, and that’s all he needs.
He turns back to the road, and grins himself.
But a few miles after Liam’s exited onto the relatively quiet rural highway that’ll get them back to their tiny ranch house on the outskirts of town, Theo suddenly tips over, so that his head lands in Liam’s lap. He’d never put on his seatbelt so it’s easy for him to turn his face into Liam’s thigh, hiding it for a few long, dragging seconds. Liam just waits, one hand on the wheel and one hand falling to thread through Theo’s hair, stroking and stroking.
Finally Theo turns his face back up towards Liam’s. He says, very clearly, when Liam looks down at him: “Thank you.”
Liam feels his expression spasm, and settle into something cracked-open and raw. He traces his thumb over the nearest of Theo’s brows, and tells him: “Anytime.”
Tells him: “Anything.”