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“I need a favor,” Scott says first thing when Liam picks up his phone.
“What kind of favor?” Liam asks suspiciously, because with Scott it’s always important to get that information up front, before he’s managed to guilt you into saying yes without having all the necessary information to hand.
“I need you to come watch Allison for an unspecified amount of time,” Scott answers, cutting right to the chase; so this is no joke, Liam immediately concludes.
He frowns. “What’s wrong?”
“Hopefully nothing,” Scott sighs, long and drawn out and exhausted. “But there’s been another confrontation between members of the Lakeview and Storo packs, and—”
“Oh, christ,” Liam interrupts, because seriously: oh, christ. “At what point does Quentin Storo get his like, alpha card or whatever revoked?”
“If I have anything to say about it…” Scott mutters darkly, then: “But seriously. Malia and I needed to have left about twenty minutes ago already. And Liam, I swear I wouldn’t ask, but—”
But everyone else is gone, or unavailable. Derek and Stiles are with Lydia in D.C. to beam moonily at her as she accepts her award for her latest baffling mathematical achievement. Nolan and Argent are off—somewhere, spiriting away one of the Council’s fugitives that Scott definitely doesn’t know about, and definitely didn’t help them smuggle out. Mason and Corey are with the Harbron pack negotiating theirs and Scott’s latest treaty. Melissa and Noah are off keeping the erstwhile citizens of Beacon Hills alive and relatively unbothered, respectively.
Liam makes a face.
“He’s going to kill me,” he announces.
---
“This seems excessive,” Theo points out, but toothlessly. He’s curious but not all that bothered. Liam hides a grimace. “Why can’t Scott just tell the contractors building the back porch to take a week off, or whatever?”
“He said something about extra fees for delay,” Liam replies vaguely: the key with lying to Theo is always to stick to the broad strokes. He’d sniff out any inconsistencies in the details in a heartbeat.
Theo snorts—probably less than impressed with Scott’s business acumen—but lets it go. He’s driving with one wrist resting easy on the wheel of his truck, his fingers dangling idly down as he steers. Beside him in the passenger seat, Liam experiences a single brief flash of Theo wrapping those same fingers around Liam’s throat when he figures out what’s actually waiting for them. That Theo hasn’t caught him out based on his scent, or his stop-and-start racing pulse, or even his nervously tapping foot, is some kind of small miracle.
It is, in fact, more likely a complete abuse of Theo’s nearly unquestioning faith in him. Liam feels like the worst kind of asshole.
Maybe he won’t be that mad, Liam reasons with himself.
Theo is that mad.
Liam grimaces at him even as he’s accepting Allison from Scott, Malia already halfway down the front steps with hers and Scott’s bags slung over her shoulder as she jogs towards their crossover parked a little ways in front of the farmhouse. “Thank you,” Scott is saying, purposefully or not oblivious to all this. “Seriously, you two are lifesavers.”
“Sure,” Liam tells him, more out of reflex than anything else. “Happy to help.”
Theo scowls harder, and then—Liam’s chest locking up as he sees it—his expression smooths completely out. His face might as well be cast in marble for all the emotion it’s revealing.
Against Liam’s neck, Allison whines slightly, subvocal and high-pitched; canine puppy-ish distressed. Liam reflexively cradles her closer.
Theo reflexively recoils, his neutral expression briefly cracking.
“Theo—” Liam starts to say, but Theo doesn’t give him the chance to finish.
“We didn’t get to eat before you called,” he tells Scott; a flimsy explanation. “I’ll start something.” He gets about halfway through a step towards the house before he hesitates, reluctance just pouring out of every inch of him. “Does she…?”
“We fed her,” Scott assures him. “She’ll be good for a few hours.”
His eyes are bright with sympathy. If Theo notices he doesn’t indicate it, but then again—he keeps his eyes glued somewhere else as he finishes his flight into the house. He hasn’t looked at any of them head-on since he realized he’d been bamboozled.
That he’d been lied to, really. Liam winces again. Allison burrows a little further into his neck.
Scott reaches forward, immediate and instinctive, and cups a hand around the back of his daughter’s skull. She’s still so tiny that Scott’s palm literally covers it; Liam feels Scott’s skin brush his on either side of Allison’s head, and honestly—he relaxes as much as Allison does. The breath he blows out feels like it’s carrying with it all of the tension that’d jammed itself right into his spine when he’d followed Theo up the front steps, and had seen the way Theo had gone instantly rigid when Scott had opened the door, Allison in one arm and a harried look on his face.
“You going to be okay?” Scott murmurs, his eyes sharp on Liam’s own. His ‘you’ encompasses more than Liam.
Liam straightens up out of his helpless slump. He nods firmly at Scott, and slides his own palm up to replace Scott’s around the back of Allison’s skull as Scott lets his hand fall away. “We’ll be fine,” he tells—promises—Scott. “Go stop a pack war, huh?”
“I’m not sure whether I’m driving towards or away from the greater possibility of bloodshed,” Scott returns drily, but he pulls Liam in one-handed regardless. He presses his lips to Liam’s forehead, and then to the crown of his daughter’s head, before stepping back. “I’ll call you when we get there.”
“Sure,” Liam agrees inanely. “Sounds good.”
He stands still on the porch with Allison cradled in his arms while Malia rushes back up the steps to press her own careful kiss to Allison’s head, and punch Liam—lovingly!—in the shoulder. He stays there, his fingers wrapping carefully around one of Allison’s wrists as he helps her wave goodbye to her parents as their car disappears from sight.
He sighs after, and looks down at Allison, who gazes silently back up at him, her eyes huge and round in her face. He sets her tiny wrist carefully back down, and then brings the hand he’d been using to hold it over so that he can stroke a thumb gently across the curve of her cheek, right underneath her gold-flaring gaze.
“It’s me your Uncle Theo is unhappy with,” he assures her. “You, he loves more than he can say.”
Even if he doesn’t know how to show it, Liam thinks, turning for the door to head into the farmhouse.
Even if he thought he was already showing it.
---
Allison is the first pack baby, but Liam has cousins, alright—he knows from babysitting. Diana and her wife had declared Liam first among familial free labor pretty much from the time they’d returned with their first child from the hospital.
He gets Allison settled fast in her crib up in Scott’s and Malia’s room, and then silently picks his way back out. He eases the door shut and then spends a few seconds with his back pressed to it, palms flat on the wood and his latest exhale leaving him in a slow, steady rush that he keeps going, and going, until his lungs are as empty as he can get them. He tips his head back against the door and stares up at the ceiling for a few sightless seconds, and then he sighs, and pushes off the wood, and goes to head back down to the main floor.
Theo is in the kitchen, exactly where he’d told Scott he’d be, doing exactly what he’d told Scott he’d be doing. Liam leans against the entryway and watches him as he carefully tends to a panful of eggs, a couple of slices of toasted bread off to the side.
He doesn’t look at Liam.
“Theo—” Liam tries.
“You lied to me,” Theo interrupts him. It’s not an accusation; he’s just stating a fact. He still doesn’t look over.
Liam winces. “Technically we are going to be here to supervise construction. We’re just also here to…” The muscles between Theo’s shoulder blades are visibly winching tighter underneath the thin cotton of his shirt as Liam speaks. He trails off.
Now Theo looks over at him. He braces his palms wide on either side of the stove, his head dropping low on his neck, and then he twists it sideways to meet Liam’s guilty gaze. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
Liam fidgets under the attention. He says, “You would have made me come alone.”
Theo doesn’t answer right away. Or he doesn’t say anything, but he gives a humorless snort, and straightens up, and clicks off the burner he’d been using as he reaches for the spatula with his other hand. He lifts the eggs he’d been cooking out of the pan, and onto the plate with the toast. The plate he picks up and brings with him as he walks towards Liam, and he all but shoves it into Liam’s arms when he’s close enough. Liam oofs slightly, a little winded as the edge of the plate impacts his chest, and then lifts his hands automatically up to hold it.
“You should have come alone,” Theo finally replies.
Scott’s and Malia’s farmhouse has baby monitors for when non-supernaturally-sensed friends and family watch Allison, but half of the time they just sit around gathering dust; Liam’s and Theo’s ears are the baby monitors, and they catch the low breathy mumble Allison gives as Theo finishes speaking. When Liam manages to drag his eyes down from the ceiling, he catches the stricken look on Theo’s face, Theo’s eyes still fixed upwards.
“Theo,” he tries, and christ—he used to have a larger vocabulary. He wonders what the hell happened to it.
“I checked the fridge,” Theo just informs him as he drops his gaze back down to Liam’s, his tone giving nothing away even if Liam can hear the slight pounding of his heart; can smell the slight souring of his scent. “They’re running low on pretty much everything, and if we’re going to be staying here—” the corners of his mouth turn down, “—for a few days, then we should stock up.”
He sidesteps around Liam, heading straight for the front door.
“Theo!” Liam yells after him, and then immediately winces when Allison hiccups and then gives a long, rising whine.
“Text me if you think of anything,” Theo adds without slowing, or acknowledging either Liam’s protest or Allison’s distress, but still: he doesn’t slam the front door on his way through it. He eases it carefully shut after himself, nearly soundless.
Liam stares after him for a long few seconds, and then he looks down at the plate of food that Theo had made him. He sighs, and squeezes his eyes shut, and then about-faces for the dining room table.
He sits down alone in one of the massive table’s dozen empty chairs, and starts to eat.
---
The farmhouse being a fair bit away from any of the closest towns isn’t an accident, but it does mean that Theo’s gone for a while.
Not to mention, Liam thinks to himself, grimacing, he probably isn’t hurrying back.
Scott had warned him that the contractors usually show around mid-morning, but the sky looks liable to split open at any time; he gets a message from Scott, who’d gotten a message from the contractors, that they aren’t coming due to likely weather. Liam doesn’t mind. He’s out-of-sorts enough in Theo’s pointed absence that he’s actually grateful for it; the idea of letting strangers—even welcome ones—into the farmhouse with Scott and Malia out of town, and the rest of the pack—and Theo—scattered across the country, had been making his skin crawl.
He heads up and retrieves Allison once he’s cleaned up his plate and the dishes Theo had used to cook. She’s still slitted-eyed sleepy but she immediately latches onto him when he picks her up, the tips of her tiny fingers briefly lengthening into prickling claws that dig into his shirt; his skin when she wraps one of her chubby hands around his collar.
“Hey, Miss Allison,” he croons softly to her, soothing, his body already carefully bouncing as he rocks her. “You’re okay, aren’t you?” He gives her his finger to wrap her own around instead, and hums quietly to her as he carries her back downstairs, and into the wide, open living room.
He’s laying on the couch idly watching a movie, Allison sound asleep on his chest with her cheek pressed to the bare skin of his collarbone revealed by his shirt, when Theo finally returns. Liam thinks about getting up, or calling out, but in the end he stays exactly where he is, and waits. After a few minutes or so, the various creaks and clinks as Theo puts away the groceries he had actually apparently bought cease.
A half-minute or so after that, there’s a sudden series of rough noises that Liam recognizes, and then the click, click, click of claws on first the tile of the kitchen, and then the hardwood of the living room, as Theo slinks his way over in his full-shift form. Liam gives himself exactly two seconds to squeeze his eyes shut, and then he opens them back up, and stretches out a hand.
Theo noses at the very tips of his fingers. His ears when Liam spots them are pinned almost flat on top of his head.
“Hey,” Liam burrs, his voice rough from the half-doze he’d fallen into. “Hey, none of that.” He shifts up, some—careful of Allison on his chest—and gets his fingers wound deep and grounding in Theo’s ruff. He starts encouraging him gently, but firmly, forward.
Theo goes, after a few initial seconds of locked-knee hesitation. Almost immediately once he does he buries his muzzle in the side of Liam’s neck. You don’t have to apologize, Liam thinks helplessly, even as he’s lifting his opposite hand to wrap it tightly around Theo’s head, and hugging him close. Why are you apologizing? He wonders, frustration burning at his eyes.
Theo just pulls back, after a second, and presses the tip of his nose to Liam’s cheek. Then his eyes flick down. He lets loose a low, low whine.
Liam bites his tongue nearly bloody to keep from telling him it’s okay. He has to keep both of his hands firmly where they are to stop them from dropping to Theo’s muzzle, and pushing him towards where Theo already so clearly wants to go. He waits, impatient and with anxiety starting to eat away at him, acidic, because a small panicked voice in his head worries what if she doesn’t—
But Allison does, like she was always, always going to: she makes a soft querying sound and stretches out her own tiny hand, seeking.
C’mon, big guy, Liam thinks, watching Theo. Even in his wolf-form Liam can read the indecision, and the apprehension, in Theo’s frame, even if he can’t read it on Theo’s face. But after a moment, Theo takes a tiny half-step to the side. He stretches out the tip of his muzzle to meet Allison’s seeking fingers.
Allison immediately makes a soft sound, but before Theo can even think about misinterpreting it—and Liam can almost see him thinking about misinterpreting it—she’s stretching out her fingers the rest of the way and wrapping them around the top of Theo’s muzzle. It must barely be any pressure but Theo goes still like he’s caught in a trap.
When Allison pulls, uncoordinated but insistent, he goes where she guides. He winds up with his nose pressed to her cheek, Allison’s hand rising and falling to land on Theo’s own cheek; Liam watches as she curls her tiny fingers inward, trying to grasp at the short fur there.
He strokes a hand over the top of Theo’s head, down between his ears.
But Theo just whines again, frustrated. Liam instantly understands why, when he looks harder: Allison is still pulling at him, trying to get him closer, but there’s nowhere for Theo to go. With Allison laid-out on Liam’s chest and Liam himself laid-out on the couch, there’s no place for Theo to go to. Liam considers.
“Alright, big guy,” he soothes Theo, winding his fingers in the back of Theo’s ruff and this time encouraging him back. Allison whimpers, unhappy, which causes Theo to try and dart immediately back forward, but Liam just holds him fast, and sits up, one arm wrapping around Allison to secure her. “It’s okay,” he assures them both. “It’s okay, c’mon. Upstairs,” he instructs Theo, jerking his chin that way.
He absently orders the TV to turn itself off, and follows after Theo as Theo leads the way, his claws once again clacking on the wood floors and tile. As they pass the impeccably folded pile of Theo’s clothes on one of the kitchen counters, Liam winces. Someday, he thinks, his eyes drifting back to the curve of Theo’s lupine back.
Theo leads them towards his and Liam’s designated room, and at first Liam follows after, but partway there he stops. “Theo,” he calls softly, and tips his head towards Scott’s and Malia’s room at the end of the hallway.
Theo stops, and looks over his shoulder at him, his ears flicking back and forth inquisitively. But Liam just holds his ground, and after a second Theo changes direction, and starts padding down the hallway instead.
Liam had left the door partially closed when he’d retrieved Allison earlier; Theo noses it open, and eels inside as Liam follows after.
The sheets and comforter on the bed are rumpled—Scott had gotten the call about the confrontation between the Storo and Lakeview packs early that morning, and he and Malia hadn’t bothered to do much else other than get ready to go, and call Liam to ask him and Theo to come watch Allison. Theo hesitates at the edge, his ears flicking back and forth again, but after one more quick look at Liam—which Liam returns with a single, encouraging nod—he lifts first one paw and then the other up, onto the mattress, until he can hop his back legs up.
He snuffles some at the bedding as he goes, but when he reaches the opposite side of the mattress, he drops flat on his belly, his head on his paws as he watches Liam climb up carefully after him, Allison still held fast to Liam’s chest. His eyes are bright—not quite flared, but focused—and his ears this time are flicked straight-up, and are quivering a little, besides. He fidgets a little as Liam gets one knee on the bed, and then his free hand planted down.
He fidgets even more when Liam carefully sets Allison down between them, and then shifts so that he’s lying on his side, Allison in the middle of their cupped-parentheses bodies.
Now Theo can get as close as he wants to Allison; as close as Allison wants him to get. She reaches out first one hand and then another, practically pulling herself over onto her side with her grips wound tightly around Theo’s fur. She winds up with her face half-buried against his nearest foreleg, her hands lifting and grasping, lifting and grasping at nearly any part of Theo that she can reach.
Theo just closes his eyes, and twists his head around so that the side of his muzzle is resting against the top of Allison’s head.
Liam just closes his eyes, and scoots a little closer to them both, so that his chin is touching the top of Theo’s muzzle, and his shins rest against Theo’s own sprawled out back legs. It leaves Allison pressed up against his stomach, which lets him hold her up against Theo’s side so that she doesn’t have to struggle to keep herself there.
“Hey, TV,” Liam calls softly once he’s settled, “play what I was watching downstairs.”
The TV clicks on but Liam barely pays attention to it, beyond ordering it to keep the volume low. Instead he takes in deliberately deep breaths for the way that they’re thick with Allison’s scent, with Theo’s; with the both of theirs together all wrapped up in the scent of Scott and Malia and the pack surrounding them. Theo lets loose a big, huffing exhale of his own, but it’s a contented sound; it seems to leak every bit of tension out of Theo’s big frame as it leaves it.
Liam lifts a hand, and cards it gently through the fur covering the side of Theo’s lupine face. Theo squints his eye shut, but lifts his muzzle after to nose it up under Liam’s chin in a damp press before he sets it right back down against the top of Allison’s head.
Allison burrows a little more tightly against Theo’s side. Theo burrows a little more tightly against her.
Liam just wraps himself around them both, and closes his eyes.
---
He wakes up with a jolt some time later his phone vibrating insistently against his thigh.
Theo flinches and grumbles out a complaint when Liam’s reflexively flailing arm smacks him in the side. Liam winces and mumbles out an apology, the offending hand already turning to stroke away the hurt instead even as he’s reaching down with his other hand to wrestle his phone out of his pocket. Between them, Allison echoes Theo’s complaint with a mumble of her own, and buries her face a little more tightly against Theo’s side.
Theo flicks his eyes down to her face, and then back up to Liam’s, as Liam finally manages to yank his phone free of his jeans pocket, and bring it up to his face.
“Scott?” Liam greets, vague memories of Scott promising to call him filtering into his cottony thoughts.
“Sorry, no,” Noah immediately answers, then: “Were you asleep? It’s like five o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Hey,” Liam defends himself croakily, rolling over onto his back and running a hand through his severely disheveled hair, “Allison sleeps all the time. I was just—following her lead.”
He reaches out an absent hand as he speaks to find Theo’s side, and start scratching his fingers through the fur there. Theo rumbles happily and shifts to give him better access, his back bowing a little as he gives a huge, lupine stretch and then collapses back flat, his mouth opening and his tongue lolling out as he pants. It leaves Allison pressed more up against Theo’s belly than his side, which she seems to like: she wiggles her way impossibly closer.
“Well, sorry to interrupt,” Noah tells him, and to his credit he does really sound sorry, which sends a shot of adrenaline out through Liam’s veins; his fingers slow to a stop on Theo’s side and he frowns at the ceiling, “but I need you to come to the station.”
“What?” Liam returns, his body crunching upwards so that he’s sitting without his conscious say-so. “Why?”
Allison whimpers as she’s jostled and Theo whines in turn, squirming so that he’s back on his side and he can nudge his nose against her cheek. She settles some but her eyes blink open, and her fingers grasp at Theo’s fur. Liam winces, and tries to get a handle on his heartbeat; tries to bring it down.
But his efforts are rendered completely wasted a second later when Noah replies, “Because there are five very agitated Thurow hunters in my lobby, and one very desperate werewolf in my office, the latter of whom is trying to claim asylum with the true alpha. Only the true alpha is—”
“—off trying to prevent a completely different political calamity,” Liam finishes for him, and rubs a tired hand over his face. “Christ. Okay. Hold on.”
He swings his legs over the side of the bed, and stands. That he wobbles when he hits his feet isn’t the greatest sign; he still feels groggy and slow. Grimacing, he takes his phone away from his face so that he can tap the speakerphone button and then drop it on Scott’s and Malia’s bed, and then he reaches for Allison. She squawks when he picks her up, her fingers tangled in Theo’s fur—Liam mouths an apology as Theo silently winces—and then starts to cry, confused and startled and unhappy about all of those things.
“Baby girl, I’m sorry,” Liam murmurs to her, rocking her best he can as he carries her back over to her crib. “I’m the worst, I know, I’m sorry.”
She continues to snuffle a bit as he gets her laid down, but luckily her crying peters out fast. By the time Liam has turned back around, Theo has not only shifted back but has scooted over to the side of the bed and then leaned forward to hook several fingers around the handle of one of the drawers of Scott’s and Malia’s big dresser. He yanks out a pair of Scott’s sweatpants and pulls them on as Liam leans over, and retrieves his phone.
“You’re on speaker,” Liam tells Noah, once he has. “Theo’s here.”
“Shocking,” Noah opines dryly, but gets straight down to business after. Liam leaves Theo pumping him for more details on the refugee werewolf, the Thurow hunters, and the apparent disagreement between the two, and goes to shower, partly because he’s a mess but mostly because he needs to wake the rest of the way the hell up.
Theo has hung up with Noah by the time Liam comes back out of Scott’s and Malia’s bathroom a handful of minutes later. “How bad?” Liam asks, his eyes searching Theo’s face even as he’s rubbing a towel over his wet hair.
“Noah described the werewolf as ‘Nolan if he’d been bitten circa his senior year of high school,’ so I think you’re in the clear there,” Theo reports dryly. Liam’s lips flicker, amused, but the look on Theo’s face sobers fast as he quietly warns, “It’s the Thurows you’re going to have to worry about. You know they think that Scott—”
“—is alarmingly progressive at best, and the harbinger of the downfall of supernatural society at worst?” Liam interrupts wryly. “Yeah, I know.” He drops the towel and gets his hands around Theo’s face, and kisses him hard and thoroughly and deep. Even once he pulls back he doesn’t go far, just drops his forehead against Theo’s own, and squeezes his eyes shut. “I’m sorry. I’m really—god, what a perfect goddamn shitstorm of circumstances.”
He hesitates, not even sure he wants to risk bringing it up, but.
“I could call Scott. See about, I don’t know. Non-pack babysit—”
“No,” Theo immediately cuts him off. He yanks back from Liam enough that he can catch Liam’s eyes, and search them. His expression isn’t particularly pleased. “What? No. Are you kidding me? Why would you—”
But Liam just gives a look—pointed, knowing, more than a little sad—and he stops himself. His gaze drops away from Liam’s, his eyelashes fluttering a little as he swallows, his throat clicking. Liam just takes advantage to lean forward, and plant the tip of his nose right into Theo’s cheek.
Across the room, Allison makes a soft, distraught noise.
Theo winces. Liam feels it with his whole body, practically. He flinches in turn.
But Theo just turns back into him, Liam’s face still close enough to his that their mouths brush when he does. “It’s okay. I’ll—we’ll,” he corrects quickly, and with a flicker of a smile that Liam feels more than sees, “be okay.”
This time it’s Theo who pulls Liam in with hands on either side of his face, and kisses him hard and thoroughly and deep. “Go save the day, huh?” Theo murmurs against his mouth, and then pulls back enough that this time when he smiles, Liam can see it.
“I love you,” Liam tells him, not because it’s particularly relevant to any of the situations at hand, but just because it’s true.
Theo snorts a little and reaches up to cover Liam’s face with his palm as he pushes his head away, a silent instruction: get going. Liam knocks his hand gently away—and in enough time that he catches the slight dusting of color across Theo’s cheeks—and darts in to kiss him one last time.
He gets going.
---
He doesn’t manage to break away from the continued détente at the station—complete with the charmingly shit coffee that Liam is convinced Noah keeps around solely because it is charmingly shit—until several hours later. He sucks down a paper cupful of the stuff as his phone is ringing, sequestered away in the station’s evidence locker because the Thurow hunters are still in the conference room and the werewolf is still in Noah’s office, and never—hopefully—the twain shall meet.
His first call rings through to voicemail. Liam hangs up, and immediately retries, because he’s pretty sure: “Hey,” Theo croaks on the second ring of Liam’s second call. His voice sounds rough, disused, and Liam could chalk that up to Theo having been asleep—it is past midnight—except that he knows that Theo wasn’t.
He knows that what Theo had been, was shifted. It always takes his vocal chords a little while to adjust when he’s spent several hours in his wolf-form. Squeezing his eyes shut, Liam presses his cup of lukewarm coffee to his forehead like it’s going to in some way relieve the way it feels like all his organs tangle themselves up in his chest.
“Hey,” he croaks back, instead of giving voice to any of that. “How are things?”
Theo hums. There’s a series of creaks and groans on his end; the mattress in Scott’s and Malia’s room, maybe? “I feel like I should be asking you that,” he murmurs.
Liam attempts to wave a dismissive hand through the air, but because he’s holding his phone with one hand and a coffee cup with his other, all he really manages to do is nearly slop lukewarm coffee all over the floor. He grimaces and quickly licks up the side of his own hand, and the cup, to catch the overflow.
“Fine,” he replies as he does so. He probably should have waited; it comes out sounding garbled and absurd. “Fine,” he repeats, more strongly, and swallows. “The Thurows have so many broomsticks shoved up their collective asses that you could shut ‘em in a room together and call them a broom closet, but they’ve backed off from demanding we immediately hand over the werewolf to demanding that we hand over the werewolf after Shohreh’s people have a chance to confirm there was no ‘second omega.’”
“Second omega?” Theo echoes, then: “Shohreh’s people?”
“The werewolf killed someone,” Liam explains quietly. “Or so the Thurows are claiming. The werewolf—”
“—is swearing up and down that it was a different omega,” Theo realizes. “Ah.”
“Shohreh’s people,” Liam continues, answering Theo’s second question, “agreed to go see if they could pick up any trace of them.”
Theo’s quiet for a few seconds. “You believe the werewolf.”
His voice is soft, sure; Liam closes his eyes. He’d spent the whole night assuring the Thurows that they’d see, alright, no one’s jumping to any conclusions until we have some goddamn facts, but Theo’s right: he believes the werewolf.
He doesn’t say it aloud; doesn’t need to. Instead he closes his eyes and listens to the steady sounds of Theo breathing, for a while; tries to match his rhythm, best he can. Theo doesn’t push him, just slows his breathing further; holds his inhales for longer counts, and lets his exhales leave him in equally-long streams.
If he concentrates, Liam can hear Theo’s heart beating even through the crappy call quality. He concentrates.
“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he eventually says, after the tense muscles between his shoulder blades have unwound and he feels like his lungs finally have room to fully expand between his ribs. “McPherson and three of Shohreh’s other betas are out looking, but if it turns out I’m wrong—” if the werewolf’s lying, “—it’ll be hard to prove a negative.”
Theo doesn’t say you won’t be wrong. He doesn’t even say it’ll be okay, or even I’ll be okay, since that’s what Liam really called to ask, and they both know it. Instead he just says, “I’ll be here,” because that’s the one promise Theo had made him; the only promise Theo has ever made him.
That he’d always be where Liam could find him, wherever that might be.
“I love you,” Liam tells him, voice rougher than he’d meant it to be.
“I know,” Theo assures him, and then he takes his phone away from his mouth, and settles it over his chest, and leaves it there.
Liam listens to his heartbeat for a while, no concentration needed, and then he sucks in a deep breath, and hangs up, and throws his empty coffee cup away as he heads back out into the belly of the station.
---
It’s coming up on four in the morning when Liam finally gets back to the farmhouse. He’s so tired he’s practically cross-eyed, and he’s so focused on unlocking the door quietly, and then closing it quietly, and finally heeling off his shoes and setting his jacket down quietly, that he doesn’t actually bother to stop and check for signs of life until he’s standing at the base of the stairs in his socked feet.
But Theo’s where Liam expected him to be, if not how Liam had expected him to be: his heartbeat is sleep-slow and easy, but quieter than Liam was prepared for.
Human, not wolf.
Liam climbs the stairs as silently as possible, and makes a beeline for Scott’s and Malia’s room. Theo had left the door cracked the last time he’d touched it, apparently, so Liam is able to slip through with ease. He comes to a stop at the foot of the bed, staring.
Allison snuffles—her instincts disturbed, maybe—and knuckles at her closed eyes before settling right back down. Before settling right back down against Theo, who’s laid-out on his side with Allison tucked into the curve of his body, one arm folded underneath the pillow he’s using and his other draped loosely over the blanket-wrapped lump of Allison, his fingers twitching against the mattress on her other side.
His nose wrinkles up, after a second, and then his eyes blink slowly open. He glances around, and then up at Liam.
“Hey,” he rasps, and this time his voice really is rough with sleep, and not from the shift. He lifts the arm he’d had resting over Allison and rakes it back through his hair.
It’s only then that he seems to fully clock his circumstances. “Shit,” he says, his eyes going wide as he startles and looks back down at Allison beside him. “I didn’t mean to—”
He looks back up at Liam, and grimaces.
“She started fussing, earlier tonight, and I—” He cuts himself off, and then concludes more quietly, “I meant to shift back, but I guess I…”
He swallows. He starts to move away, and then almost instantly freezes.
He glances back down at the tiny fist that Allison has closed around the hem of his shirt.
She pulls at it, best she can, and makes a dissatisfied grunt of a noise when it doesn’t work; when Theo doesn’t move. Theo looks up at Liam for guidance, his eyes still panic wide, but Liam just—shakes himself out of his stupor, and starts knee-walking his way onto the mattress of Allison’s other side.
He overlays his hand over Allison’s on Theo’s shirt, and pulls a little harder.
“Can we,” he asks, “worry about it in the morning? I am,” he concludes, resisting the urge to flop down on his belly only because he doesn’t want to disturb Allison next to him, “so tired.”
He can’t exactly see Theo as he lowers himself carefully down instead, but he can feel Theo’s burning stare against the side of his face. He keeps his eyes closed and pretends he can’t.
“But,” Theo tries, whispering it out. Liam had let go of Allison’s hand, and therefore Theo’s shirt, but he can still feel it through the mattress when she shifts and wiggles around to wiggle herself right back up against Theo’s side. Liam slits his eyes open then, desperately curious, and sees that she has both hands clutched in Theo’s shirt now, and her face pressed to his chest.
Theo’s heartbeat is fast and frantic in Liam’s ears. Allison doesn’t seem to care, though she must be feeling it against her skin; pounding in her ears. She settles against Theo’s side and huffs out a little explosion of air, and then her breathing starts to even out; her heartbeat starts to slow.
“Mooorning,” Liam just drawls, beseeching.
Theo blows out a rough breath, but then he—relaxes back down against the mattress; Liam can feel it shift. He can feel Theo’s breath skate over his face when Theo turns to look at him.
Liam just lifts a hand, and flails it through the air until he finds what he was looking for; he cups the side of Theo’s jaw, and squeezes.
Theo just cups his own hand over Liam’s, and uses it to slide Liam’s palm down, and over, until he can press his lips to the center of it. He keeps hold of it, after. He draws it down so that it’s resting on Theo’s chest—Theo still laying on his back—right over his heart.
They sleep.
---
For a few hours, anyway, and then Allison decides she’s had enough of it.
Liam groans and tries to drag himself back to wakefulness, but he hasn’t gotten very far before there’s a series of creaks and groans and then the mattress is shifting underneath him, and Theo is leaning over him and murmuring, “I’ve got her, don’t worry about it. Go back to sleep.”
He presses a quick kiss to Liam’s mouth, and then he straightens up, and is gone. Liam can hear him talking softly to Allison for the few brief seconds that he manages to follow their progress before he falls right back asleep.
He wakes up for good another few hours later, partially because the morning sun is streaming in through the cracks in the curtains and partially because he can hear a series of trucks rumbling their way up the drive towards the farmhouse. He frowns—adrenaline bolting through him—but when he reflexively checks Theo’s heartbeat one floor below, it’s easy; unconcerned.
Contractors, Liam remembers. He groans and scrubs the heels of his palms over his face.
When he gets downstairs, the contractors have made it from their vehicles back around to the half-finished back porch, and have restarted work. Theo is standing in the kitchen, absently watching them.
Allison is perched on his hip.
She’s wearing a new outfit from the one she’d had on yesterday, and she smells like baby powder and the unscented wipes Malia prefers; Theo had changed her, clearly. He’s also in the process of feeding her, which Liam realizes when Theo lets his gaze drift easily away from the contractors so that he can pivot back to the counter he’d been standing next to, where—a half-eaten jar of baby food is sat, a spoon sticking out of its top. As Liam watches, Theo collects a spoonful of puréed something—apples, Liam’s pretty sure it’s apples, based on its scent—from the jar, and offers it to Allison.
She studies the spoon for a second, and then Theo, and then she tilts forward and wraps her lips around the spoon. Theo huffs a near-silent laugh, and retrieves it with a small wet sound.
“Your mom wasn’t lying about your love of apples, huh?” He comments to her, and starts to prepare another spoonful.
Of course, that’s about the time that he clocks Liam. His eyes widen, a little. He freezes, reloaded spoon halfway to Allison’s mouth.
“Morning,” he greets, blank and automatic.
“Morning,” Liam returns, just as mechanically.
Theo’s heartbeat had picked up and his scent had soured, just slightly, and he must realize both of those things because he grimaces, and drops the spoon back into the jar. He starts to head towards Liam, his hands already shifting on Allison’s back to move from holding her to him, to preparing to lift her up, off of his hip. Liam feels his heart fall into his stomach, even as he’s already shifting to accept Allison from him.
But Allison won’t go.
She clenches her hands in Theo’s shirt, and locks—Liam can see her muscles shifting through the fabric of the soft pants Theo had changed her into—her legs around Theo’s ribs. Neither of these things are actually strong enough to stop Theo, of course, but he still freezes. Allison whimpers out an unhappy noise, and tugs at her fistfuls of fabric, trying to pull herself back to Theo’s side.
Theo doesn’t seem to know what to do. He’s locked up like a computer fed bad instructions; Liam can practically see the does not compute flashing across his forehead. His heartbeat kicks up faster and his scent bitters further, and Liam knows exactly the vicious cycle that’s about to start up—Theo’s reactions setting off Allison’s reactions setting off Theo’s—but this time Allison won’t seem to cooperate with Theo’s determined self-sabotage.
She won’t let go of him.
“Liam,” Theo tries desperately, but Liam—makes a split-second decision. He shrugs.
“I don’t know, Theo,” he says, and makes sure to grin easy and wide and with no sharp edges. “Seems like the queen has spoken.”
“Liam,” Theo hisses, eyes narrowing.
He’d still been holding Allison half off his hip. He winces suddenly as Allison’s grasping fingers become claw-tipped—she’d lost patience with the stalemate, apparently—and glances down at her. Her eyes flare as he does and she pulls at his shirt again, clenches her tiny legs around his ribs and tries to lever herself back forward, onto his hip.
Theo—relents, and settles her back down. Allison not only goes, but wiggles her way around so that she’s more centered to his chest, rather than his side.
She lays her head down right over his quickly-beating heart, and leaves it there.
“Oh,” Theo breathes after a few moments, soft and stunned. His eyes flick up to Liam’s, his whole expression just slack with his surprise.
Liam stares back. He’s not in much better shape.
Theo’s expression reverses direction and crumples up the next second. His heartbeat—which had slowed some in his shock—kicks right back up. But instead of defaulting to his usual and trying to hand off Allison like he had before, he shifts her a little closer. He drops his head down, so that his mouth is pressed to the top of her head as he whispers, “Sorry, baby girl. I’m okay. I’m okay, I didn’t mean to worry you,” to her.
Allison wiggles a little closer to him. She doesn’t lift her head from right over his heart.
Theo flicks his eyes back up to Liam’s. He swallows. “So, uh. About the Thurows, and the refugee werewolf,” he prompts, clearly casting around for a distraction like someone drowning for a liferaft.
If you blow this, Liam warns himself viciously, his eyes darting up from where he’d been staring at Allison’s tiny hand clenched in the fabric of Theo’s shirt right by where she’d laid her head. “The werewolf was telling the truth,” Liam manages to blurt out; victory!, that little voice in his head shrieks. “McPherson and his, uh, his people. They managed to find the other omega.”
Some of the directionless panic on Theo’s face clears. He tightens his grip a little more firmly around Allison, and takes a deep, steadying breath, and then twists around to head back to the counter he’d been standing in front of before. “Well,” he says, as he’s walking, “don’t keep us in suspense here.”
He picks up the spoon he’d dropped before when he gets there, and after only a second’s hesitation, retrieves another spoonful of apple purée and offers it to Allison. She looks up at him for a few long seconds, and then raises her head just slightly to accept it. Her eyes crinkle and her mouth curves around the spoon, both only getting deeper and wider when Theo pulls it back.
The corners of Theo’s eyes crinkle up in turn.
He raises them to Liam. He probes, “So? What happened?”
Liam can’t help grinning back, automatic and helpless, and then he makes a beeline for the coffee pot—a little refillable single-use coffee pod already left out for him, a mug beside it—as he answers, “Well, I dropped off the werewolf at Derek’s building to wait for Scott to get back, but the Thurows agreed—”
He gets his coffee. He keeps telling his story. And the whole time he does it, Theo keeps Allison cradled firmly against his chest.
Allison keeps Theo held firmly to hers.
---
Scott and Malia get back a few days later. They’ve got purpled bruises sunk deep beneath their eyes that even their healing isn’t erasing, but their shoulders are light as they carry their bags back through the door, and their voices are easy as they call their hello’s; pack war avoided.
Liam pokes his head around the entryway to the kitchen so that he can see them as they appear in it from down the hallway. “Hey!” He greets.
Scott grins at him, and then squints slightly. “Allison sleeping?” He asks.
Liam’s confused for a second before he realizes why Scott is asking; Liam’s arms are empty. He has to hide the wide, helpless smile that’ll give the whole game away as he replies, “Uh, no. She’s, um. She’s—” He gives up, and jerks his head silently sideways, beckoning Scott and Malia towards him.
Scott frowns and exchanges a confused look with Malia, but they both make their way forward, and then poke their heads around the doorway to see into the living room where Liam is gesturing.
Theo just rolls his eyes, and doesn’t look away from his phone, which he’s holding over his face as he lays flat on on his back on the living room couch, Allison laying on his chest as she gums contentedly at a plastic ring of giant, multi-colored keys. “You are,” he tells them all, “the least subtle.”
Scott’s face just splits in an enormous grin; it’s possibly wider than Liam’s. Even as Malia is rolling her eyes and straightening up so she can walk past them, and go to retrieve her daughter, Scott is grabbing Liam by both biceps and silently shaking him; his excitement just bleeding out of him, apparently. Liam grins back, just as helpless.
“Finally got over yourself, did you,” Malia just comments dryly to Theo, swooping Allison off of his chest as Allison squeals in delight. Theo drops his phone to his now-vacated sternum, and makes a face at her back.
He doesn’t deny it, though.
Still, Malia pauses as she straightens up, Allison in hand, and then reaches down and punches him in the shoulder. Her smile isn’t as wide as Scott’s, but it’s there, and genuine. Theo flushes, some.
“So the Thurows tried to invade while I was gone, huh?” Scott asks, clearly trying to forcefully drag himself back to the matter at hand, and away from potentially drawing too much attention to Theo, and the way that he’s now idly playing with Allison’s abandoned key ring, his cheeks still a little pink. He grins at his daughter as Malia brings her back over, and then pulls a funny face as Allison laughs in delight.
“Yeah,” Liam answers, his voice helpless and fond and his whole chest just feeling full to bursting, somehow. “Yeah, but, y’know. Me and Theo—” he says, and glances over to lock eyes with Theo as Theo looks up at his name, “we divided and conquered.”
Theo’s lips purse as he tries not to smile.
“Is that so?” Scott returns, but he’s not actually speaking to them; he’s saying it in a playful tone while he reaches forward and tickles his fingers up under Allison’s side, Allison still cradled in Malia’s arms. Allison shrieks with laughter. “Did your uncles divide and conquer, huh, baby girl?”
Theo had rolled to his feet while Scott had been talking, and come to join their little circle. He stops by Liam’s side, but it also puts him at Malia’s side, and it enables Allison—once she realizes he’s there—to crack open a wide, toothless grin, and stretch out a hand towards him.
Theo offers her a finger, and smiles when she takes it, and squeezes.
“Yeah,” he says, answering Scott’s not-question anyway. He looks back up at Liam, and smiles wider, as he concludes, “Yeah, we did.”