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Sometimes, when Theo looks at Liam, he sees blood in his mouth and death in his eyes.
It’s not by memory or choice. Sometimes he will look up from the table at the pack around him—Scott, Malia, Stiles, Lydia, Alec, Mason and Corey; all the rest—and he will see them with their throats slashed and their ribs split open. The guise of youth and the truth of war spilling out of them.
It’s been this way since he came back from underground. The shade of Tara, never quite as clawed as she was with him in the morgue, will fill the lane before him as he speeds toward the highway out of Beacon Hills, trying and trying and failing to leave the town that cursed him with the fate of eternal bloodstains in the cracks between his fingers. She’s waterlogged and rotted down, alive in the most hideous way possible with hope still in her eyes the way he remembers her from that night on the bridge.
She follows him to the gas station and to the convenience store and to the library and to the school lockers where he sits under the showers for an hour while no one else breathes in the building.
The hallucinations take up residence in the forms of Liam and Jenna and David, too, as they worm their way into his heart with their simple stay with us, you don’t have anywhere else to go. The blood grows on them over time like mold. He’ll stand with Jenna at his side in the garage, paint roller in hand and speaker system blasting her favorite Stevie Nicks album, and he’ll smell the stench of an old wound on her. Blood in her hair, blood in her eyes. Sometimes crimson like it’s fresh, like he just dealt her the fatal blow; other times the slick blackened out of her like it was already too late to save her.
David bending over the trunk of his car to retrieve his coat, and the skin concealed beneath the rumples of his button-up blooming with red in the shape of betrayal.
Mason, with his wrists cracked and his thorax surgically split wide open.
Corey, with his teeth knocked out and his neck bent at an unholy angle.
The images flit through his consciousness like scrolling through a filter. He’s long learned that the images never go away. Sometimes they fade to the background, and the life and youth of his pack shines through, or the warmth of Liam’s hand on his elbow in a too-competitive squeeze reminds him that sometimes this half of his brain from hell doesn’t have to be in charge.
But then he blinks slowly into wakefulness in the middle of the blue-washed night with his arm wrapped around Liam and tucked up against his boyfriend’s chest, and from the corner of his eye his sister will greet him across the room with another poignant smile, and he’ll look back down on the beautiful boy in his embrace and see the flow of blood from his neck the way he’d imagined it years ago when he’d meant to kill Scott McCall’s beta.
A lifetime of unseen scars and dry, shaking hands away.
“Hey,” Liam greets Theo as he steps out of the gas station store to rejoin him at the truck. Theo still stands there with his fingers squeezed around the trigger of the nozzle as Liam steps back into his space. Hasn’t moved an inch since he first watched Liam go up and disappear behind the glass door with a three-belled tingle to prepay for their fillup.
Theo looks at him once, fleetingly. Liam is covered in blood. Both literally and metaphorically: the blood of the hunter he’d cracked across the head no more than a second before he would have disemboweled Theo with a shotgun; the blood of an eighteen-year-old werewolf beta, second to Scott, first in Theo’s schemes from a lifetime ago, gushing from behind his teeth and out between his lips.
Theo’s eyes fix on the hallucination of the crimson stream pouring down Liam’s chin. He looks away.
“Hey,” he greets Liam back just as softly. Easing up just a little on the trigger of the pump.
“Close call,” Liam says, like this is all he’s needed for the floodgates of nervous energy to open up again. They haven’t talked once in the two hours it’s taken them driving eighty-five on the highway to get away from the scene of the ambush. Theo heard Liam’s voice as though through a glass partition, muttering updates and assurances over the phone to Scott and Stilinski, but not a word was uttered between them.
“Yeah,” Theo agrees with his teeth sunk into his bottom lip. “Always is, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” says Liam. He shifts closer and fills Theo’s consciousness with warmth at his side, wraps his left hand around Theo’s on the pump. “You’ve got blood on your hands.”
“Yeah,” says Theo. A vocabulary stunted by the enormity of things that could be said about his violence.
“Could go wash up inside while I take over.”
Theo hums. Swallows. Two nonsensical, noncommittal sounds.
Liam understands him anyway. He always does.
“You could’ve died,” Liam says softly. “I would’ve seen it in slow motion.”
They’re doing this, then. The neverending exhale, the tortuous look over the shoulder at the what ifs after the fact. Feels in a dozen ways worse than an actual burial, because Theo knows they’ll be back at it again next time, and the next, and the next, if and when there’s another next time for them to reminisce all the diverse ways in which they could have met their earthly ends in front of each other’s eyes.
Theo doesn’t say anything now. Before, he’d say, well, I didn’t, or you could’ve died, too, or that’s just a bit of the pot calling the kettle black. But they don’t do that now. Not anymore.
Liam’s fingers curl in a fierce and sudden squeeze around Theo’s on the trigger. “That’s why I say every day that I lo—”
“I see you with blood all the time,” Theo blurts out. The vomit of his tightened throat suddenly unclenching.
Liam’s heartbeat falters once. “What?”
“All the time,” Theo repeats. “I see you with blood. I have a—it’s been this way since…” He steels himself with a breath and looks away, thinks how do I fix this, how do I backtrack from this—how do I go forward.
“Hey,” Liam whispers. “I’m here. I’m alive.”
“I know. That’s not why I see you with blood.” Another swallow. “Ever since… I see you, when you’re safe and healthy and there’s not a scratch on you, and I…there’s a wound in your chest and your heart is missing. Or sometimes it’s different, and—there’s something else ripped out of you, but—”
Theo shrugs. He’s pretty sure if not for Liam’s grip over his hand, his own fingers will be shaking. He leans forward and braces his other hand, sticky, tacky with blood, a broken five-fingered print on the dusty surface of his truck.
“But what, Theo?”
“It’s not because of them,” he says. It’s because of me.
“You’d never hurt me,” is Liam’s reply of quiet conviction.
I know. That doesn’t mean it never crosses my mind.
He takes another breath.
“I was twelve when I first killed.”
Liam stares at him. He smells like muted horror. Theo’s fingertips ache to give birth to their claws against the paint job of the truck.
“The doctors gave me a cheeseburger afterwards. I always wondered why I couldn’t throw it up. It felt like I should. I don’t know. I was just tired and my head hurt and…the blood kept getting smeared all over the wrapper and…I ended up licking it up together with the cheese and the mayonnaise, I guess.” Washing it down with a peach-flavored Snapple, he adds in his head. Another rare treat from his keepers.
The trigger jumps as the gas finishes pumping. Neither of them move just yet to replace the nozzle in its holster.
“Every day,” Theo says, “I look at people who are whole and healthy and I see them gutted and bleeding.”
Liam makes an unconscious noise like he doesn’t understand. A part of Theo doesn’t want him to understand.
“Violence was never the alternative. It was the solution.” The other part of Theo begs Liam to understand this. “The day I didn’t kill the chimera they asked me to dispose of, they never found out. But I came home and I went to lie down and I couldn’t sleep. It was—I could hear it, I could just feel it, how I should have had her guts dripping down my fingers.” Theo squeezes his eyes shut and tips his brow forward against his forearm braced against the truck. “I could smell it. I wasn’t done. I wasn’t complete. I was—she’d—I was a failure. And there’d be screaming in my head, and I’d pound my skull against the wall and I’d try to make it stop but it wouldn’t fucking stop until the next time they sent me on my assignment and this time I—followed through with it all the way to the end.”
The sound of Liam’s teeth grinds. His lungs are rattling, or maybe it’s Theo’s own.
Theo’s throat is wet and stopped up as the seconds drag on and he finally speaks again. “There is something wrong with me, Liam. I thought that coming back and working to regain everyone’s trust and earn my place in the pack would fix me. Hell, I thought therapy would fix me.” A mirthless laugh. “But I think there’s something about me that can never be fixed. I can’t be rehabilitated to the way I was before, no matter how much you love me.” A shuddering breath. “No matter how much I love you back.”
“Theo,” says Liam.
Theo looks at him now. Liam’s eyes are red-ringed and shining.
“There’s a part of me that will always remember what it was like to kill,” whispers Theo. “There’s a part of me that will always want to kill.”
“I know,” says Liam. “I’ve known for a long time.”
That, of all things, punches the breath straight from Theo’s chest.
“I want it to be enough,” Theo says like a gasp. “The fact that I love you. Even though you can’t change me.”
“I never tried to,” says Liam like a quiet thunderclap. “You’ll never be the same as you were before. Neither will I. That’s because the war lives in all of us, Theo. The war just came to you earlier than the rest of us.”
Theo wants to look away, like a knee-jerk reaction, but the wide and wet pools of Liam’s eyes, so blue like flower-stained fingertips in contrast with the imaginary stream of blood from his mouth, keep Theo rooted to the ground and unable to look anywhere else at all.
“I’m sorry I’m this way,” he says.
“Sorry isn’t the point,” says Liam.
Theo grudgingly offers him a half-smile at that. “I guess it’s not.”
“What do you see?” Liam asks after a beat. “Right now, when you’re looking at me, what do you see?”
For a moment Theo’s tempted to lie: to put his boyfriend at ease that his words of assurance did something to heal a fraction of Theo’s heart. But he doesn’t.
“I see blood on you now,” Theo murmurs. “Sometimes I don’t. But I see it on you now.”
“Okay,” Liam murmurs back. His fingers loosen and tighten again around Theo’s, stroking the back of his hand. “Okay. Thanks for telling me.”
“And you?” Theo dares to ask. “What do you see when you look at me?”
The words leave Liam like a prayer. “Sometimes I see your were face. Your face from that—that night in the library.”
Somehow, in some way, that confession is far more comforting than anything else Theo might have heard from Liam’s lips today.
The breeze lifts and tugs at Liam’s bangs, flattening them across his eyes in the same way they make the matted strands at the back of Theo’s hand stand up. The rest of their bodies remain still.
“I also see Theo,” Liam adds. “I see you, Theo. Every part of you.”
Theo’s heart lurches inside of him. “Yeah,” he says. “You too. All of you.”
The youth, the death, the pretty and the ugly truth.
The war in both of them.
Moments after this, they’ll finally disentangle their hands from the pump and slip back into the cabin of the truck. Liam will be the one to wrap his fingers around the steering wheel while Theo opens up the white paper bag of food that Liam bought them from inside. Theo will unwrap the soggy sandwich for Liam with careful drifts of his trembling fingers, tucking first one corner of the waxed paper and then the other into his fist, and then he’ll see Liam leaning sideways over the console with his eyes fixed on the road ahead and Theo will gently slot the bread between his teeth for him.
He’ll crack open a drink for him, too, and press the mouth of the cool glass bottle to Liam’s lips and tip it back for him. Watch the blood and the day and the rest of it all wash down with the slow contractions of Liam’s throat.
And they’ll find a place to stay the night, somewhere in a beaten-down town half-dead like their hopes are right now. And they might fall into bed and make tired love to each other, or they might simply curl up inhaling each other’s scent of desperation and youth gone too soon.
Either way, they’ll wake in the morning to the light spilling through the blinds they forgot to close during the night, and they’ll see each other in the daylight. All of Theo, all of Liam. Both the war and the love between them.