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Theo smells like Liam.
Corey doesn’t make it a habit to memorize what Liam smells like, but it’s difficult not to recognize the peach soda and fresh grass scent of the werewolf when there are traces of it clinging to Mason after all the years he’s spent with his best friend, and when the smell assaults Corey’s nostrils at full force now as he clambers onto the front bench of Theo’s truck.
Neither of them had planned on Corey’s house being Theo’s first stop on the way to their little pre-Christmas gathering. There is an order to things: Theo picks up Liam first, then Mason, then Corey. Sometimes, if they’re hanging out at Liam’s place, it’ll be Mason first, then Corey, then the three of them double back to Liam’s painfully monotone and white-picketed suburban neighborhood.
There is an order to things. Corey is never first in that order, and it is for good reason.
Corey’s about to suck it up and be the first to speak, when Theo beats him to it. He flings an entire pad of post-it notes in Corey’s general direction, and it lands in his lap, right side up, so Corey can recognize the other chimera’s font-like handwriting.
“Liam gave me the list of shit we have to buy on our way over there,” Theo breaks the silence.
“Couldn’t he have texted it like a normal person?” Corey complains. The gloss-over is painful--the lack of eye contact even more so, but it’s not like Corey could have climbed into the back seat without highlighting all the unspoken things between him and Theo with the glare of a neon sign--but this is the most comfortable he can manage to make their first one-on-one conversation in over a year.
“He was already on the phone with me,” Theo says neutrally. He flicks on his signal light and cuts the corner of his turn at the first intersection. Corey surmises they’re taking the shortcut to the little Stop & Shop on the south side of Beacon Hills. Not the cheapest, but not drugstore-ripoff prices, either. He vaguely appreciates the avoidance of the teeming crowds of yelling kids and irritable middle-aged shoppers on the north side of town.
Getting out of the truck when they park is an awkward dance of uncertain chivalry and barely masked annoyance. Theo’s probably waiting for him to get out first, some twisted kind of display of respect in contrast to how he always used to stalk ahead of the chimera pack when he was their self-declared alpha. Corey fumbles with the door handle because he may be seventeen and used to living virtually alone, but he’s still seventeen. They both eventually tumble out after Theo rolls his eyes and undoes the child locks. They cram in simultaneously through the sliding doors, and it’s more than wide enough to accommodate them both with more than a foot-long berth between them, but somehow it still feels like thrusting the end of a rope through the eye of a needle.
“Caramel popcorn, 65% cacao chocolate bar, walnuts, sliced almonds, uh...salt? Why on earth do we need salt?”
Theo turns around from the stack of shopping baskets by the front entrance, disinfecting the handles of one with a disposable wipe, and leans over to squint at the post-it pad in Corey’s hand. He shrugs. “Mason yelled ‘salt’ in the background. I didn’t question it, just wrote it down.”
Corey snorts a little to himself at the mention of his boyfriend’s antics. He could probably text Mase and find out exactly what sort of fairy-banishing ritual he expects their gang to get up to on this fine night to require salt, of all things, but then again it’s usually more fun to just do as Mason says and then sit back and watch the chaos happen with Liam involved in the kitchen.
They work down the aisles efficiently, grabbing the packages of things they need, with Corey throwing them down haphazardly into the basket on the floor and Theo reaching over on reflex to rearrange them in fastidious patterns. At some point, Corey fixes Theo’s hands with a stare as he goes on redistributing the weight of their items, and if Theo notices the sharpness of his gaze--which Corey does not doubt--he’s careful enough to give no indication or acknowledgment.
They end on the dairy section, a meandering row of freezers that wraps around the rear corner of the store with confusing divisions between the mozzarella cheese and the deli packs. Corey finds the final item they’re searching for--a specific brand of whipping cream, neither heavy nor light, and thank G-d Corey knows exactly what type Mason always uses, or he would have been confused thrice over by Mason’s less than crystal instructions to Theo and Theo’s subsequent over-enthusiastic note-taking on the post-it pad.
As Corey turns around with a small, triumphant sound with the whipping cream in hand, his line of sight falls on the pack of mozzarella sticks shoved against the corner of the freezer that stirs an uncomfortable knot of familiarity in his gut.
Theo is closer to his side than he originally estimated. Corey realizes this, because when he opens his mouth to address him, he finds he doesn’t have to lift his voice much.
“That was Tracy’s favorite,” Corey hears his voice say.
Theo doesn’t turn or nod. An arrow of stiffness passes through the muscles at the back of his shoulders, peaking them upward like hollow coat hangers under too-worn jackets from the thrift store. If Theo were to turn now, Corey is pretty sure, all of a sudden, that he could read threadbare vulnerability in his face.
He’s not sure how to feel about this.
Neither of them know how much time passes before Theo finally says, “I know.”
His arm reaches out, disjointed, uncertain, to snag the package from the front end of the shelf in the freezer and lay it down carefully over the stacks of other items in their basket.
At long last, Theo straightens and turns. It’s inevitable that his body will shift to face Corey, as loath as either of them might be to the blinding taste of something raw in their mouths that it will bring them.
Theo speaks, more to Corey’s chest than to his eyes: “He--liked those peanut butter crackers too, remember?”
Josh did. Corey remembers.
Corey wonders what Theo wants him to do with this information. Not the memory of their dead packmates’ favorite snacks--their murdered packmates’ favorite snacks--but the fact that Theo remembers them, too.
He also wonders when Theo learned to be able to look everyone in the eye, even Scott McCall, even Lydia Martin, even the mother of the very alpha he’d tried to gut on the library floor, but never learned to look directly at Corey.
“I think those are in aisle six,” Corey says. Because he’s tired and he’s angry, but unforgiveness has never been appealing to him, and he’s growing tired, too, of this untenable dance between them when he could reach out and close the distance with the other half of the olive branch and just end this awkwardness.
Theo slips off and disappears down the aisle Corey indicated. He catches up with Corey at the registers, helping him lay the things down onto the faded little conveyor belt that lurches forward in little jolts, and Corey watches him from the corner of his eye as Theo sticks one hand in his pocket to glance unseeing at the racks of gum by the till and with his other hand rakes through the poor gel job on his hair.
That’s another thing about him, these days. He smells like Liam all the time, and he never looks quite so perfect anymore. Overgrown hair, half-gelled bangs, always something falling in his eyes and just as often something fidgeting in his hands. Corey is hit with the distinct sense memory of the innumerable times Theo filled a doorway with his frame when he arrived and faced his little pack--Josh, Tracy, Corey, all waiting for his next direction--and he crossed his arms over his chest and hid his hands in his armpits with a rakish smile.
Corey wonders, on the heels of that, how many times he might have seen Theo’s hands actually shake back then if he had allowed them to be out in the open all the time.
Or if this is a post-hell thing. A sort of fucked-up reset on the Ken Doll job that the Doctors did on Theo Raeken, and now here he stands in the checkout lane behind Corey Bryant, looking anywhere but straight at him, his shirt rumpled to all hell and his corduroy jacket reeking of smoke and pine when Corey knows for a fact that Theo’s never smoked a cigarette.
They’re back in the truck after an exchange of pleasantries with the cashier. Corey grabs the bags from Theo’s hands and hoards them on his lap, tenses his toes to pull up his legs and balance the lighter bags by their loops around his knees. He fishes for the packs of peanut butter crackers and mozzarella sticks from the bag closest to him and squeezes them open. The air bends and fills with the sound of plastic crinkling, crumbs scattering, too loud and too domestic for the thickness of everything that still sits between them in the console of this truck.
Theo takes the food that Corey offers him even if it makes him look like he’s swallowed a stone to do so.
Maybe he wants to ask Corey if they should get going already or Liam and Mason will start wondering what’s taking them so long.
Maybe Theo realizes that asking that kind of question is irrelevant.
“I paid attention, you know,” Theo says at last. The rasp of his tone shrouds his syllables in care.
Honesty, then. And a small dash of surprises. Corey can match that. He bites into his cheese stick, gets through the pasty awfulness of it. Says, “A lot of times I almost wished you didn’t.”
Theo hums and turns the key in the ignition to start the engine, but doesn’t move again beyond resting his hands at the top of the steering wheel. “How’d you figure that?”
“Might have been easier to accept everything if we were all just pawns to you,” Corey says. “You didn’t have to memorize what my go-to Happy Meal was or whatever.”
“I couldn’t help it.”
“A part of me doesn’t want to believe you,” Corey says, a little sharply, right on the beat.
“Believe it or not, I remember things about everyone. Every...every single one of them,” Theo says. He pitches forward and lays his forehead against the hills and valleys of his knuckles, like an afterthought. “I talked to them whenever they came back from the operations. We played games and shit. And twenty questions. G-d, fucking twenty questions.”
Corey swallows and rearranges the tacky plastic around his half-eaten cheese stick to close it up and balance it on his jean-clad thigh. He remembers the day Theo picked him up from school and they sat idling in the truck outside Hayden’s place, waiting for her to join them. A day that feels like a lifetime, no, a century ago. An entire orbit of the earth away. On that day, they played twenty questions, and Theo looked supremely annoyed as they did it, even though he’d been the one to suggest it in the first place.
Corey learned that Theo doesn’t have a favorite color. Theo learned that Corey doesn’t have a favorite movie. Two bland kids making some life for themselves with powers they never directly asked for.
“Guess even the psychopathic killers gotta have a way of remembering their victims,” Corey bites out. He knows before the sentence has been fully formed that it’s not fair. But they’re them, and they’ve never played fair.
“Not everyone has to be psychopathic to be a killer,” says Theo.
“Yeah. Maybe that makes them worse,” says Corey.
“I guess so,” Theo says, and the silence then drops like a sledgehammer.
A silence like why do I have to share the memory of Josh and Tracy with you? Silence like I hope you never forget them, hope you never forget what they liked and what made them laugh so you remember you ripped the life of two human beings out of them. But mostly, a silence that sounds like how on earth did we end up being tortured by the shades of the same two people?
Corey picks at the tear in the knee of his jeans. He picks, too, around the taste of his next few words, and holds them up to the light of the memory of getting high and a little stupid with Josh, and laughing over horror podcasts with Tracy. “I wasn’t blind,” Corey concedes, glancing out the passenger window now. “I knew our pack wouldn’t work, deep down inside.”
“So why’d you come along?” Theo asks. He seems like he has an inkling of the answer, but wants to hear it anyway.
“I don’t know, I just--” Corey balls up the rest of his cheese stick and flings it into the plastic bag, shoving it off his lap. He crosses his arms over his stomach. “I never had a brother. Or a sister. Grew up in that big house…” He moves his head to indicate the direction of the cushy neighborhood where Theo picked him up from. “And it was okay, you know? Most of the time I could live and breathe and think there was nothing wrong with me growing up alone. And then...I saw you guys, and.” He shakes his head. “I suddenly realized there was something--wrong in that empty house. It felt...”
So many words to say one thing.
“Felt like you’d just woken up from a dream and there was a gaping hole in your chest?” Theo finishes quietly for him.
Corey doesn’t like thinking about the fact that Theo sounds exactly like he knows what he’s talking about. Except that they are more alike than either of them care to admit, and one way or another, Corey will have to get around this.
“I never had a brother,” Corey says, and it sounds apropos of nothing. Except it isn’t.
Theo chuckles, slow and sad, and finally he rolls his head on the steering wheel to look at Corey. “I never was a good brother to begin with.”
“Yeah.” Corey shrugs. He looks back at Theo. He’s not the one between them who has a problem with eye contact. “And what about a friend?”
“Hard to be friends if one hates the other,” Theo says softly.
“I don’t hate you,” Corey says. Sighs. “I just never thought enough of you to care what happened to you.”
Theo flinches, just like Corey thought he would. He knows what his own voice sounds like, soft and unassuming, as it delivers the point of a dagger.
Some part of Theo must have grown up brave after coming back up out of the ground, because he swallows and he asks, “Do you care now?”
“Yeah,” Corey laughs. It sounds like shards. “Yeah, fuck, I care. It kinda swings wildly between I wanna see your guilty ass every day around Beacon Hills and I think you’ve suffered enough. But I care.”
“Sounds like a start,” is Theo’s answer. Small.
He doesn’t say sorry. Neither does Corey. Apologies like that are disrespectful: more so than biting through the ashen taste of the shitty crackers and cheese between them, and thinking back on wilder times when they played poker on the floor or smoked on the open tailgate of Theo’s truck or lurked under the bleachers in the wee hours of the morning because none of them, none, were wanted at home the way Liam and Mason and Scott and all the rest have open arms to go home to.
Well, maybe that isn’t quite so true anymore. Corey’s phone dings and lights up with a text, right on time, and it’s a double text from Mason--the first a horridly offbeat photo of Liam’s face, barely recognizable through the dusting of flour over it; the other a checkup message in his characteristic humor: You good babe? Any murders we gotta scrape off the wall?
“We should get going,” Corey says, as he types out a reassuring reply to his boyfriend and forwards Liam’s new profile picture for the foreseeable future to the group chat.
Theo complies with a nod and pulls out of the parking lot. He keeps glancing over at the device in Corey’s hands, like he’s not allowed anymore to ask what sort of new hilarious drama is going down in the group chat, in light of the conversation they just had.
“Your boyfriend doesn’t know how to fucking measure flour,” Corey offers him.
The breath of relief leaves Theo like a pin deflating all the tension left inside. He barks out a soft laugh. The truck slows and they pull up to the curb: they’re here now at the Dunbar-Geyer residence.
Liam bounds out of the house the minute Theo’s tires scrape against the cement, not a second later, shameless in his somehow still powdery face and hair and shoulders and--well, almost everything. Mason follows at a more sedate pace, a look of smug satisfaction plastered over his face like he must have wrestled Liam into a headlock to wipe most of the evidence of their baking disaster off his best friend, but Liam is Liam and most things are futile with him.
Mason takes the plastic bags from Corey’s hands, but Corey moots the effectiveness of the gesture by swinging him up into his grip in a piggyback, taking on the weight of the groceries anyway. “Thought you were busy strangling Theo there for a second,” Mason whispers to him, lips brushing against the shell of his ear.
Corey cranes his head around to serve Mason a skeptical look. “Why would you assume it’s me doing the strangling and not Theo?”
“Because he’d be too busy, like, wallowing in his guilt complex to even realize you were cutting off his circulation,” Mason points out with a grimace.
“Fair point.” Corey darts his head forward to peck Mason on the lips at this awkward angle and then hefts his boyfriend higher on his back, ignoring the human’s squawking protests with a giggle, and marches them inside Liam’s house.
But not before he catches sight of Theo from the corner of his eye, holding a flailing Liam at arm’s length as he uses the hem of his corduroy jacket to brush the remaining layers of flour off the werewolf.
“It’s hopeless, just accept your fate and kiss me,” Liam snaps.
“I am not kissing the raw taste of flour, you neanderthal,” Theo grumbles. But his mouth lifts in a lopsided grin anyway as Liam breaks away from his hold, ducks under Theo’s swinging arm and grabs at the front of Theo’s jacket to reel him in.
The kiss looks a bit rough and clumsy from where Corey’s standing, but he’s not one to judge. Those can sometimes be the best kind. What he does take note of is the way those strands of hair flop free from Theo’s terrible gel job, all mussed up and scruffy the way he’d never be caught dead before. And more than that, Corey sees how Theo doesn’t see it, only has eyes for Liam and their stupid crazy kiss, his arms wrapped around Liam’s middle and Liam’s locked around Theo’s neck, and Theo’s body looks more at home and more at peace than Corey’s ever seen it.
As Theo and Liam pull away from each other from the pesky human need to breathe, Theo’s eyes flicker up briefly over his boyfriend’s shoulder to catch Corey’s gaze at the doorway. Mason has dismounted from Corey’s back now. In that split second between the driveway and the interior of the house, one foot on the porch and the other over the threshold, Corey looks at Theo and Theo learns to look straight back at him. And Corey thinks:
Not quite a brother yet. Something of a friend, maybe. Who would have thought that Theo Raeken would find his place first as a lover, of all things?