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Liam likes to think he’s not a terrible person. Mostly. Usually.
But when he backs up out of the corner spot in front of the Walmart and stomps on the gas—swerving to avoid the pesky edge of the curb and slamming with a sickening crunch into the rear of the pickup truck parked behind him—he thinks there’s a slim possibility he’s going to hell of mundane sins and offenses for what he’s about to do next.
He can’t be late to practice. He’s already skipped two consecutive practices on legitimate excuses (one would think new baddie in town and the Nemeton nearly blowing up as a consequence would sound like a legitimate enough excuse to Coach), and Finstock has threatened not only to strip him of his co-captain title if he is late to a third, but also to boot him off the team entirely. And with today being filled with pack meetings and stakeouts and skipping first and last period to check out the digs of the strange new mythical creatures in Beacon Hills, it’s all he can do to squeeze in a grocery run for the team snacks he’s supposed to pick up for the week before racing over to the field for lacrosse practice.
And so he grits his teeth, rips a diagonal piece of paper from his misery-mangled chemistry notebook, and scribbles his best approximation of an apology under the circumstances. He hops down from his wheezing SUV and tucks the note folded up under the wiper of the truck where the owner should see it. And then he throws himself back into his car, hoping against hope the new scrape across the rear bumper isn’t so noticeable amidst the rest of the wreckage it’s borne over the years, and he floors it out of there.
—
Liam, according to Theo’s highly objective and not at all emotional opinion, is a terrible person.
He is, in fact, a cretin of a human being. A cowardly excuse for a werewolf, if you will.
Theo turns these insults and other variations thereof over and over in his mind as he grabs onto the gutter of the Dunbar-Geyer house and vaults himself up onto the overhang in the roof that undercuts the gabled window of Liam’s bedroom. He peeps in, and sure enough, the faint beat of Liam’s heart has led him to the beta himself sprawled face down on his bedspread, earbuds plugged in and music pumping out a playlist of some of Imagine Dragons’ lesser known hits.
Theo pushes up the window pane none too gently. The rasp of the plastic across the old tracks does nothing to stir Liam from his woebegone position or alert his supernatural senses. Theo finds a sigh blowing out of him in a reluctant combination of half-forgiveness and resignation. If this is Liam on a normal day with his wits supposedly about him, then he supposes the sheer lack of situational awareness would indeed be a driving hazard for the little beta in a parking lot.
Theo tires of watching Liam wallow in whatever mire of self-pity warrants such an extensive playlist and decides to pick up one of the penguin-shaped erasers littered across the top of his nightstand by the window. He flicks it at Liam’s head with a little more force than usual—look, he deserves some slack for his foul mood today—and the rubber bounces off the corner of Liam’s ear with a solid thwack.
Liam scrambles upright, the picture of comical teenage disarray.
“What? I’m up. I’m up!” he mumbles around the edge of a sheet of looseleaf which has decided to stick to the corner of his drool-sticky mouth, just to add further insult to injury.
Liam frowns, peeling the now useless half-finished Spanish notes from his face, and lets the sheet drift to his carpet. His fingers are busy scrubbing the sleep from his eyes when he seems to fully unthaw and register what’s going on. “Oh,” he mumbles, yawning. “’S just you, Theo. What’d you need?”
“For starters, for you to stand up so I can figure out which of your limbs would be the most efficient yet satisfying to start amputating.” Theo swings his legs over the windowsill and perches on the nightstand, his arms crossed over his chest.
“I mean”—another yawn, another adorably drowsy shake of his disheveled head—“they say tha’ there’s too many arteries in the thighs, so—wait, what?”
Theo barely wrangles his mouth under control before it can visibly twitch in amusement at Liam’s eyes widening to the size of saucers. “Took you long enough to catch up.”
“Why—why are you threatening me with Texas Chainsaw Massacre-type violence again? I seriously thought we were past that stage in our relationship.”
“Well, seeing as you don’t appear to have actual money to pay for the shit you did, I figured I’d come collect a pound of flesh instead.”
“A pound of what?” The little shit even has the nerve to give a flabbergasted gasp.
“A pound of flesh. For this.” Theo rolls off the nightstand onto the balls of his feet and stalks forward, only extending one arm to shove a crumpled-up piece of rain-logged paper in Liam’s direction and slap it with a palm against his chest. The beta stumbles back on reflex with a little oof and takes yet another eternal second to register what he’s looking at. When he finally does, his heart rate ratchets up to such a worrisome velocity that Theo is torn between making one of his classic jackrabbit jokes and slapping some sense into the beta with the palm of his hand.
“How did you know—? I mean. What is this?”
Theo rolls his eyes. He’s trying to be more mature these days and not offer such juvenile reactions at every minor inconvenience, but come on. It’s Liam.
“Read it.”
“Um.” Liam wets his lips nervously. “Okay… I hit your car but I’m pretending to write my info because people are watching me. Hope you can fix it. Good luck!”
Theo watches his expression with a grim sort of smugness as Liam deflates. “Ring any bells now, Dunbar?”
Liam attempts a grimace of confusion and, to his credit, stays in character for a full five seconds. “...No?”
“You would’ve been eaten alive by the Doctors if they were teaching you how to lie,” Theo sighs. “G-d have mercy on whoever decides to kidnap and torture you and gets his time wasted on your atrocious deception skills.”
“Hey!” Liam protests. “I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be a compliment!”
Theo doesn’t even deign to respond to the beta’s nonsensical defense. Instead, he pointedly lowers his gaze at the half-crumpled note still clutched to Liam’s chest. “Well? You have anything to say for yourself?”
Liam’s scent tanks and turns cloying with despair. “How’d you find out?” he mumbles at the carpet, suddenly invested in the patch of pilling polyester on the near of his sweatpants.
Theo fixes him with a droll stare. “Really? Where do you want me to start—the scent, the handwriting, or the bit of my own penmanship on the back of the page where I helped you with your chemistry problem set last week?”
“Wha—?” Liam splutters in protest, but sure enough, a second glance down at the other side of the note proves Theo right. There, in the chimera’s unmistakable font-like handwriting, are the accursed lines of balanced equations that had previously borne Liam’s scrawls and scratch-outs of teenage werewolf frustration.
“I’m sorry,” says Liam. “I was rushing, and I know better than to just back up without looking, but I was gonna be late and I’ve already been using up my unexcused absences from practice because of that stupid basilisk-creature-thingamajig that was in town this past week, and I was worried about Mason becoming basilisk food or whatever and I had had a really vivid dream the night before about him and my mom and dad being swallowed whole by giant serpents and—”
Theo moves forward unconsciously throughout Liam’s breathless rant. As the younger boy wheezes to the end of his lung capacity, chest heaving and eyes prickling with moisture, Theo finds himself doing the unthinkable: raising his hands, hovering them tentatively over Liam’s shoulders, and then—horror of horrors—bringing them down with gentle pressure over the warmth of Liam’s skin through his rumpled cotton shirt.
“Um.” Liam snaps his mouth shut, nonplussed.
Theo’s right with him. He’s frankly confused as fuck, too.
“Breathe,” he tells Liam, a little harshly, but cut him some slack. He’s new at this comforting business. “Literally, just—take a breath and stop stressing.”
“I’m not stressed!” says Liam. Obviously lying. “I’m just—thinking of a lot of different things right now, and add on top of the normal worry of the Nemeton freaking out and cutting off supernatural power to the town because of the biweekly baddie we have showing up in Beacon Hills, there’s the extra worry of my friends and family getting freaking eaten by giant lizards—”
“—pretty sure it was a basilisk.”
“—and then now you’re threatening to cut off my limbs, which, like, fair, but also I kinda need my thighs and kneecaps for lacrosse, y’know? If I don’t get a lacrosse scholarship to get into college, and literally everyone else in the pack including you and Malia manage to get in, I’ll never live it down. I’ll be the one stuck forever in Beacon Hills dealing with witches and sphinxes and selkies and weird mythical creatures from like, Polynesia and—”
“Liam. Liam.” Theo ignores his instincts screaming at him to run far away from the scent of the beta’s distress and instead does what he knows in his gut he should have done from the start. He slips his hands up from the boy’s shoulders and slides them around his jaw, cupping his cheeks and compelling Liam with the pads of his thumbs to lift his head and make eye contact with Theo. “Breathe. I said breathe. I’m not actually coming to collect a pound of flesh, you know.”
“Oh.” Liam blinks, first once and then several times in succession in a vain attempt to conceal the traces of tears clinging to his lashes. They’re distractingly and annoyingly pretty. “Are you…gonna collect less, then?” he asks morosely.
“Jesus,” Theo swears under his breath. “I’m not collecting anything, okay? Gah. I take back everything I said about kidnappers and torturers. They wouldn’t last a minute under your crocodile tears. Seriously, where the fuck did you learn to cry on demand?”
Liam hiccups as if on cue, which only adds to the irritating tug of affection on Theo’s heart. Liam hasn’t moved an inch, submitting himself to Theo’s disgustingly gentle touch, somehow seeming to bask in the warmth of those palms on his cheeks and leaning into the subtle swipe of Theo’s thumbs under his eyes.
“I don’t,” Liam says, almost nonsensically, far too late in reply to Theo’s equally nonsensical question. “I’m sorry about your truck. I really am. I—um—don’t really have a ton of money to pay for it, but I’ll go talk to my mom and dad and own up to what I did, and they can give you the money to have the fender repaired and I’ll pick up a weekend job or something to pay them back.”
“Nah,” Theo finds himself saying before he can stop himself. Seriously, the beta’s effect on him is beyond preposterous. “No need to do that. Just wanted to climb through your window and see you piss your pants when I confronted you.”
Liam offers a skeptical frown. “Are you sure you don’t need the money?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“You always say that. I asked you last week what your place was like and if you needed any help getting set up, and you said ‘don’t worry about it.’”
“Maybe you ought to learn to leave well enough alone. If I said don’t worry about it, then I mean don’t worry about it.”
“Oh, really? So you’re just fine?”
“That’s right.”
“So where are you living?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Liam has the nerve to ostentatiously sniff the air, and then turn a deeper frown on Theo. “You’re lying.”
“Wow, and since when could you tell the difference?”
“Since it’s you, dumbass. What kind of anchor would I be if I couldn’t tell?” says Liam without missing a beat. The sincerity of his scent pulls Theo to a halt, and this time it’s his own heart that lurches from the weight of the realization of what this confession means.
It also probably lurches from his realization in the next second that he still has his hands cradling Liam’s face as if they were sharing a moment. Like boyfriends.
Revolting.
Theo has no time to contemplate how to step back from this clusterfuck, literally and metaphorically, because just then he tags the scent and heartbeat of Liam’s mother padding down the hallway. His reflexes are seriously shot, considering that he’s barely slid his hands from Liam’s face when the bedroom door swings open.
“Oh!” Jenna exclaims, far quicker on the uptake than either of the boys standing on the carpet and reeking of embarrassment.
Theo snatches his hands away from Liam’s face and attempts to stuff them into his pockets, as if that would look any less suspicious. Liam manages to snag one of his hands and grip him by the wrist, arresting his movement.
“Mom, this is Theo,” says Liam.
Jenna seems to be holding in her amusement by the slimmest of threads. “I know, baby. I’ve heard him crawling into your bedroom every other day for the past week and a half. I was just hoping to finally catch your…friend before he left in a jiffy this time.” She flicks a loaded glance at where Liam’s hand is cutting off circulation in Theo’s wrist.
“Mom!” Liam protests, vaguely and forcefully, in typical teenager fashion.
“What?” Jenna says innocently. “Is he not your friend?”
“He is my friend,” says Liam.
“I am not,” Theo says loudly at the same time.
“Well, which is it? Friends or not friends? Or more than friends?” Jenna crosses her arms in a picture of stubbornness, which under any other circumstances would be hilarious to Theo because of how much she resembles her son in that moment.
“More than friends…?” Liam suggests.
Theo decides right then and there that Liam is and always will be a little shit, and it’s time for a little payback. “I was actually just informing Liam of the bill for the fender-bender he gave me earlier.”
Jenna’s gaze whips over to her son. “Liam! What did you do to his car?”
“N-nothing! I mean—something—” Liam scrambles to start over. He shakes Theo’s wrist, letting the chimera’s hand dangle uselessly with the force of his movement, as he gathers his thoughts. “I backed up into his truck earlier at the store, and now he’s refusing payment.”
Theo wisely bites back a retort about the difference between wanting payment and wanting payback. “I have it handled,” he demurs when Jenna turns her attention to him.
Liam’s scent shifts then, from shame and anxiety to something more settled and even…mischievous. Theo is instantly on high alert.
“He always says that, but actually…” Oh, no. Theo wants to snarl at Liam, don’t you fucking dare. “Actually, evidence would suggest he doesn’t have a place to stay, so…”
“Wait, is that true, Theo?” says Jenna.
“I have. A place. To stay,” Theo grits out through his teeth, his canines just barely human as he flashes them at Liam in a warning smile.
“Sure, if Motel Toyota counts,” says Liam. “Dude, I could smell your dry shampoo all over the back seat last Monday.”
And Theo will make sure Liam can smell his own innards on his bedroom floor if he doesn’t shut up right now.
Jenna’s eyes are brimming with sympathy and determination. Liam is a problem to deal with, but it’s apparent his mother is a whole other force to be reckoned with. “You’ll stay with us until you can get back on your feet, Theo. Not a day less,” she says, with just the right amount of sternness that gives Theo pause. “It’s the least we can do while you also get your truck fixed. And Liam? You’re going to help your nice friend find a good mechanic and you’re going to drive him to and from school while his truck is in the shop. Is that understood?”
Oh, G-d. Anything but have the explosive little beta behind the wheel while Theo is strapped in and helpless. His agitation must show unwittingly through his scent, because Liam just bites his lip to conceal a little smirk and then says to his mother, the picture of innocence, “Understood, Mom!”
Jenna finally turns to make her way out of the bedroom, chirping something about how there are extra sandwiches in the fridge downstairs and how Theo should make himself at home. Theo tunes her out in favor of plotting his next dismemberment attempt on Liam in revenge. He doesn’t get very far, though, because Jenna turns at the top of the stairwell with a cheery: “Oh, and Liam? I know that hate is the other side of love and all that, but try not to murder each other before his car gets fixed!”
The grin that Liam shoots Theo is all Cheshire-like as he calls back, “No promises!”
If Theo ends up punching Liam in his stupidly pretty face before kissing him on his stupidly pretty mouth the next day, well. Jenna doesn’t need to know about it.