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All the streetlights down Beacon Hills are lit, strung out across the county like Christmas lights on a pine tree, sparkling and glowing soft and bright in the gathering dusk.
Malia feels it in her spine, she woke up this morning with Theo’s hand splayed across her bare stomach, dipped under her shirt and pressed against her skin, low low low , and she wanted lower, she wanted more, she wanted , and that's always been her trouble.
She rolled away, tucked herself up in a tight ball, pulled her shirt back down and the covers more over to her side because she doesn't have to accept the fact that Theo’s bigger and stronger and faster than her, he's still Theo .
He'd woken up half an hour after her, stirred in tiny increments, and of the two of them he's always been the lighter sleeper and she doesn't want to think about what that means when he wakes up slow and easy next to her.
She'd been sitting up, by then, covers wrapped around her waist like she could hide the imprint of his touch on her skin, like she needed a barrier, something physical to guard against his ruinous touch.
He's ruining her, and he has been for months.
They've gone past Beacon Hills, trailed the county and come back, skirted round it like a gap in a conversation she still doesn't know how to have, and they're back again, motel beds and broken springs and waking up tangled together like a ball of yarn.
Theo hates being back here, she knows, sees it in his eyes and his carefully relaxed shoulders and the way he never quite manages to drop that fake smile of his, the one that pops out every time there's a gas station or a convenience store or a hunter with too much to prove.
He hates it here and she - doesn't. Doesn't know how to feel about this place, about the graves out behind the old Hale house and the weight of two families that she's never quite been able to quantify, never been able to wrap her head around in a way that makes sense to her.
Malia loves with her whole body, she always has; speaks with it, too, no subtle signals or subliminal designs with her. She watches his perfect falsehoods play out in impeccable array and she doesn't say no, she doesn't say stop believing you can't be honest without getting a fist in your gut, she lets him fold over six layers of topsoil defences because she knows him.
More to the point, she knows herself, and Malia has never needed anyone else's permission to be anything other than herself.
Theo thinks it's risky, thinks it's dangerous, keeps wanting her to dye her hair or stop wearing the same neat little suede ankle boots he'd bought her in Maine with the heels that’re nearly worn down to flats by now, but (apart from one incident in involving a pair of scissors and too many bottles of celebratory beer after a finished case) it never happens.
She's not going to change, for him. For anyone, ever.
She just wishes she didn't want to so much.
'There's a case, east of Beacon County,' he says, folding and refolding the map in his hands til it's a tiny square of coloured paper.
She squints at the tabletop til her eyes cross, the lines of spilled salt and breadcrumbs and scratches gouged into the wood, she's always been so curious of the way the other world lives.
'Not vampires,' she says. It's her only real stipulation for any case, because of that one time in Utah with the fangs and blood and weird creepy anesthetic saliva, she hates vampires.
Theo'd found her, drunk off her mind on the poison the vampire inserted into her veins when he drank her blood in its place, collapsed behind a pile of rocks on the outskirts of town; he'd hauled her up to her feet, dragged her back to the car and force-fed her saline whilst the drug left her system. He'd stayed up all night. In the morning the sun was harsh in her eyes and they both pretended they hadn't seen his hands shaking.
Now, today, it’s a diner on the side of the road past the highway, early morning, truckers eating silent and morose nearby. Theo takes the black coffee the waitress slides onto the table, downs it in two scalded gulps, grimaces at the charred taste. Malia takes hers with two sugars and more milk than coffee.
‘Obviously,’ Theo says, mutters half under his breath, he hates vampires almost as much as she does, more even - he took a shotgun and a spade and went back to those rocks, to that clan, and he wiped out every last one of them hiding up there in the hills and dragged their bodies to the bottom of the rise where they’d parked the car, where Malia was sitting in the passenger seat still shaky and litmus-wrong, under orders not to fucking move, okay.
Malia’d break all the bones in her own body willingly before she followed orders from anyone, but she was half-dead and half-alive and she wanted - like a fool - to feel safe for a little while, and - well. There he’d been. There he always is, like some ominous protection, she loves him and it’s been years.
‘Sirens,’ he says, like that makes sense, and she says ‘Oh, yeah, of course, why didn’t I think of that,’ and he says ‘Shut up’ and she pelts him with a fry until he catches her wrist in his hand, grips it tight, looks into her eyes, it’s getting tight in here.
‘We’re not going back,’ he says, something glimmering in his eyes, fixed strong and warm on her face.
‘Nah,’ she says. ‘Not with that attitude we’re not,’ and he releases her hand with a sigh that’s half-laugh and half something else, and she feels - wrong-footed, off-guard, stumbling out of position, she’s never felt like that with him before.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s go.’
They go.
The case is a doozy, sticky with complications and bad blood, and Malia gets three jagged slashes dug into her side from a siren’s talons, bleeding sluggishly onto the fabric of the passenger seat when they drive away, roaring into the night.
‘One night,’ Theo tells the woman behind the rickety desk in the motel they find by the side of the road, and smiles his smile that’s too full of teeth and danger to let anyone refuse him anything. Malia’s a long line of pain by his side, tucked under his shoulder and swaying a little on her feet, with any luck the woman’ll think they’re just drunk and horny, they need a bed.
‘Sure thing, honey,’ the woman says, gives him the key, gives Malia a sympathetic smile.
‘Shirt,’ Theo says, strict, but Malia can see his hands shaking, so she goes along, sits on the edge of the bed and rucks the hem of her shirt up so he can see the gashes gouged into her side, curving to fit her ribs.
He sews them up, she gets three neat lines of his stitching instead of sympathy, but he’s old news, he’s always been there. She loves him, he loves her, it’s a deal they made years ago and he’s upholding his side more than she is here.
‘Thanks,’ she says when he’s done, cranes her neck to eye the lines of stitches, nudges his side with her elbow, ‘you missed a spot,’ but he jerks back to check like he thinks she’s being serious and the joke falls flat and dead between them like a body.
‘I know,’ he says, staring at her side, eyes dark like there’s another angle to this she’s not seeing. ‘I - we should. You should get some sleep.’
She bats his shoulder with her hand. ‘Well I’m not sleeping here on my own, dipshit,’ and he says ‘Shut up’, and they dissolve into laughter tinged with hysteria because they’re riding the high of a hard job well done and when she says ‘don’t make me laugh it hurts’ he grins.
‘If your pain threshold wasn’t so fucking low -’ it’s all he gets out before she tackles him, stitches tugging in her side, she ignores that, it’s not important, see what she means about pain, what’s important is getting him flat on his back on the bed and snarling about high pain thresholds into his face.
‘Told you,’ she crows, triumphant.
He stares up at her, eyes a dark void she’s not seeing into anymore.
‘Never doubted it,’ he says, breathes, half-exhales into her hair, and she believes him.
It’s not like they’ve never had sex, because they have - one time when she was seventeen and he was something around there, half a mile out of high school and before the world went to shit, or maybe it was always like that, maybe she just didn’t notice.
They don’t talk about it, except they kind of do, when they’re on a long case and in the car at night in a graveyard and they’ve exhausted everything else they have to argue with, then it comes out again, all sharp edges and little cutting corners like they’re kids again.
‘What, like that time we -’ and then it comes along, all the ways in which she’s known and been known for years now, all the little points he knows, all the buttons he knows how to press and the way he knows exactly where to push on to make it all hurt for her again, they know each other too long.
‘Oh, you mean the time when you -’ and she’s back, she’s good too, she can give as good as she gets and she gets a fucking lot from him, all his stupid instincts to maim everyone in the world because he’s been maimed before, she’s been trying.
‘You know, we could give it all up,’ she doesn’t say, but it’s close sometimes; they’re in the car or on a case or in bed at night and she wants to say, what about a place of our own, but the words don’t come out right.
He likes to keep moving, Theo, he likes to keep himself unknowable and unknown, and she’s never sure why she’s the one who knows that about him, except it’s true.
There’s a bar in Texas, old timers’ and saloons like it’s the 1800s again, she’s never met a walking anachronism but the man behind the counter sure as hell looks like one.
‘Case uptown,’ Theo says, and so they go, piling their shotguns on the backseat and blasting the radio loud enough to wake the dead.
It’s a good one, all dead people and blowing things up, and she wipes the blood off her face, leaves a smear she can see in the wing mirror, grins at him when he rubs his hand over her neck, the blood’s on his skin now. They’re always sharing things.
‘Stay for a while,’ the man behind the counter says, and so they stay, Malia likes the place, likes the dry heat and the anachronism of the town slap-bang in the middle of the desert, likes the people, likes -
‘You gonna come out of there anytime soon?’ Theo hollers from the bedroom, already half-asleep on the bed they’re sharing because people take one look at them and think things , Malia’s in the shower, been there a while, she’s always getting lost in her own mind.
‘Shut up,’ she yells back, through the barrier of one rickety wooden door, and yeah, yeah, she likes it here.
‘Finally,’ he mutters when she comes out eventually, hair wet and already drying in tangles halfway down her back, she can smell the same soap she used on him. She gets into bed, curls into the space he’s made for her with his arm, slots her back along his side, and his hand comes up to curve securely round her waist.
‘Good now?’ he asks, belligerent, but she knows he’s faking, always knows when he’s faking. He likes it here too.
‘Yeah,’ she says into the safety net of his skin.
They stay.