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Q: What makes a house a home?
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Theo felt his worth the most in the post-op. His body, newly reinvented. The Dreads looming over him, bringing together all his disparate parts stitch by meticulous stitch.
There were times without stitches, back when he’d bleed without end and wonder how a hollow thing could be so full of what makes life. Red for days. Weak for weeks. For too long he believed that his body’s biggest failure was its lack of self-sufficiency. They fixed that eventually. Mostly. Now he bleeds less but never quite figured out how to walk a path that someone else didn’t put him on. Life cycles. He bends to the curve of it.
Tries not to break.
Post-op. That’s a misnomer. Suggests that there was ever a clear beginning and end to the experiments. That there was ever a point where he wasn’t walking around with his insides on display. Eyes cut too. He learned the circulatory system by looking in the mirror.
But the sense of worth, that was a real thing. Realer than the pain he would time travel to forget. Used to stare up at the surgical light until his vision clouded over, picturing himself months ahead where that pain would be an imperceptible blip on a radar, a memory that cannibalizes itself. When he would try to project himself as far forward in his life as he could imagine, he always looked the same—suspended in time.
It is easy to mistake clinical for care when things are shifting around inside, changing. Nine years spent being made better. Nine years spent being made into something more easily loved. What is devotion if not a near-decade of investment into building something you would be proud to call your own. Hope smells like iron and feels like maybe I’ll get it right this time.
He never could have stretched his use beyond what was intended of him. This would’ve been nice to know then, but instead, he gorged himself on wishful thinking and swallowed detachment for dessert, reaching through the dark for a version of himself that wouldn’t require renovation. Call it a home. Call it his.
Who do you credit for building a house: the bricklayer or the architect? What makes a house good: the foundation or the end result?
If he tried to remember a love that wasn’t a fist in his gut everything would be coming up bloodstained. Which is to say, he only has memory to vouch for him and everything is tenuous before the surgical light, before that cool, steel table. When he pictures his parents he can only recall the faces of the actors hired to play them. Canned existence. The future self he used to imagine as an escape would only ever tell him: I’m sorry. I do not remember how I got here. I only know the scorched earth beneath my feet. He still worries his reflection might one day turn its back on him.
Theo could not believe in much outside of his own body but he asked of his makers only this: pretty fictions—God and his creation. Cut me wide open, flesh parted between rivulets of red. Look upon this expanse of skin. Say it is good.
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Liam hunches over the mess of Theo in the backseat, his brows flattening into one concerned line. He asks, “Can I...?”
In one hand, the mini butane torch he got for Christmas after claiming he needed it to make creme brûlée; cradled in the other, a pile of wolfsbane-laced gunpowder with only a creased tissue separating the purple dust from his skin. He touches so easily that which could poison him. Theo. The plant. Either. Maybe both.
He rasps, “No, leave it. The feeling of high-potency wolfsbane coursing through my veins is actually—”
Wet, hacking cough like a toxic chest cold. A chemical burn in his throat. Theo’s lips are wet. He lifts a shaky hand to wipe them and even beneath the truck’s dim interior light he can see the streaks of black painted across his wrist.
“Actually fuckin’ growing on me.”
But it’s not funny anymore. Bad timing. Poor execution, too tired. Lack of a rimshot. They are in his truck on the side of a one-lane road, not a sitcom, so Liam doesn’t laugh. Theo took a bullet so Liam wouldn’t have to, so Liam doesn’t laugh. His eyes go both panicked and resolute instead. Theo’s just droop, flutter, and shut.
This is a kind of muscle memory: to go still beneath searching hands.
He wakes up on fire. Burnt wolfsbane smoke halos Liam’s head; he torches the entry wound on his stomach like he’s caramelizing sugar and the smell will stick to the upholstery for weeks. There is no pretty, succinct way to describe how blood boils. All sensation yields to screaming. He is molten. He is blistered inside. He is always on his back, staring up at what he is powerless against.
Most of these aren’t new developments.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, this sucks, I know, I’m sorry,” Liam murmurs like a mantra more for himself than Theo, something to get him past the cresting waves of singed skin and blood wafting toward his nose. Liam knows the hurt from personal experience, not from Theo’s reaction. Because he is well-practiced, his body tenses but does not flinch. He does not yell. When he time-travels himself away, he is younger than he is now. He is still learning how to picture a future. In a week, this will be a blip. In a month, nothing.
“Okay, done. Sorry about the extra-crispy stomach,” Liam says; he tries to smile but it's all nerves. He unstraddles Theo’s legs, drops the butane torch. The hot tip of it will probably warp the rubber floor mats. “You still with me?”
Half gurgle, half grunt of acknowledgment. Liam brushes ash from Theo’s stomach but his hand lingers after the wolfsbane has gone. He spreads his fingers, takes a breath. Squeezes. Inky dark veins snake up his forearm and his face gets more pinched the higher they advance. Theo’s never been on the receiving end of this exchange; the internal pull, decade-old coils of tension releasing, letting go. Liam’s palm burns something different and it feels like the end of him.
The pain recedes in its entirety. Not just the bullet and the blowtorch, but before that. His body. Think six months of stabbing pain from the trocar left behind in his chest cavity. Think mercury poisoning headaches. Think a lifetime of scalpels. Think hurting and healing and hurting and healing and never quite putting everything back in its right place. He is made of small, well-contained messes. He doesn’t know how not to feel displaced. Like being evicted from his own ruin.
If you return to your childhood home and everything’s been shifted around, replaced, and redecorated, is it still yours?
Theo’s eyes go hot and liquid and Liam’s too close not to see it. Lassitude has his limbs weighed down and too clumsy to shove Liam away, and the coast isn’t clear enough to kick him out. The coast is never clear. They have been dodging bullets for months trying to keep people alive and the other side just reloads. Important work is never done.
Theo was never done.
Still waiting for those last few sutures, that seal of approval. Would’ve ripped himself open and let them look upon all his glistening viscera just to know his body held what they wanted.
He’s all wild vulnerability. Has a voice like broken glass when he says, “Stop.”
Liam falters. “I’m just—”
“Don’t.”
Think scar tissue.
“Don’t do that.”
The thing Liam is taking is all that he has. The product of a near-decade of dedication. A shrine to something unattainable: close, but not quite. It’s what they left him. Get rid of it and he is all loss, a void; sometimes, when people speak to him, their words echo on his insides. He’s had the word “ordinary” rattling around his ribcage for a year.
He never knew it didn’t have to hurt.
The silence inside the truck is a vacuum. Liam draws his hand back; his eyes bruise. Theo’s own water. And water. And water. And at some point maybe he’s gotta admit to himself that he’s crying over a fucking hand but then he’d have to acknowledge that the lack of it is worse than its presence was but he won’t, so instead he’s blinkingblinkingblinking through wet lashes like he’s trying to make sure his eyes are still his.
“Theo,” Liam says, slowly, measured with gentle caution, “you’re in pain.”
Last weekend Liam dragged him to trivia night at the bowling alley. Chalk it up to the lack of engagement from the crowd of competitive bowlers that show up on Sunday nights for practice and cheap beer rather than standardized test questions and Snapple cap facts, but they won. Only four rounds in, Liam said, “Dude, you know everything,” but he doesn’t.
He doesn’t. Especially not now.
Doesn’t know how to react in the way Liam wants him to or how to recover from this or how to explain that he is not crying because it hurts, but because it doesn’t. If he sleepwalked through half of his life and woke up here, he would think that everything and nothing had changed.
“I got shot,” he grunts. There’s this lump in his throat that he’ll convince himself is another glob of wolfsbane goo but he won't cough it up because he doesn’t know what sound might slip out with it. “In other non-obvious news, I need a new shirt.”
Liam watches him struggle his way upright and Theo swears to all the fucking gods he doesn’t believe in his fingers twitch at his sides like he’s gonna reach forward to protect Theo from sitting up too violently or something. He lets out one long, tired breath. Says, “I’m trying to help.”
So was he. Take a bullet for a guy and suddenly he gets all bleeding heart on you. All this assumed fragility makes him squirm. Sometimes, you see a bad thing about to happen and think, “Huh, I actually don’t want to witness that.” So you become it instead. Now Theo’s got a charred, weepy stomach, black gunk in his guts, dried tears on his face, and a guy who looks like he’s gonna implode if he can’t swaddle him in a blanket and tell him a bedtime story staring him down with those stupid, earnest eyes.
“I’m fine, Liam.”
Theo mostly does a good job of not thinking about things. The things he doesn’t want to think about, or can’t, because they flip some mental killswitch that makes him go away for a while. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Those things. He’s got these two friends, one named Avoidance, the other called Tactics.
But somewhere between the blowtorch and the palm of Liam’s hand he got all mixed up; he is thinking. About the reason he came here in the first place. Beacon Hills. And he’s thinking about Liam’s hands and the black veins cutting across his milky pale forearms. And he’s thinking about what it felt like to feel nothing. Listen, he is what Mason likes to call, “reformed,” but what Theo himself opts to believe is tired. Really tired. Wants in different ways now. Little smarter. Guilty enough to make a Catholic jealous. But he can’t stop from wondering if that’s what he lost when all his plans fell to shit: the ability to inhabit a body that isn’t overrun by welding marks and manufacturer’s labels. He shouldn’t complain. He’s healing. But, god, he’s tired of doing everything only good enough.
At the bowling alley last week he bowled almost exclusively spares. Never been good at doing things right the first time around. The last question of the fourth round of trivia night was “What is the technical term for the fear of imperfection?”
Theo said atelophobia. Liam said, “Dude, you know everything.”
Theo said no, just this. Only this.
“Really. Don’t worry about it,” he adds. His heartbeat trips over itself and regains its rhythm too late to be unnoticed. Liam’s gracious about it, at least. Pulls the silence long and sweet like taffy until he decides to say anything.
“Okay,” A shrug. He stretches his legs out, nudges the fallen blowtorch with the tip of his sneaker. “You don’t have to be, though. Just…so you know.”
He can survive the wolfsbane, but not this. Death by a thousand words of affirmation. In Theo’s blood are years of longing withheld and his hope is vestigial. Liam makes him want to pull it out of storage, dust it off, and Theo is so afraid of keeping it. Of keeping him. Being kept by him. When he pictures himself, he is always alone. This story would be so much easier to tell if his body didn’t have to be in it.
“Are you done?”
His tone has teeth, but they’re dull, and even if they weren’t, Liam knows him too well to be afraid of a bite. He asks, “Does it still hurt?”
Theo feels itchy, half-hysterical. Kinda wants to laugh, kinda wants to scream. Kinda wants to stick a finger in his own bullet wound, give Liam a bloody thumbs-up, and tell him to take a wild guess. But his brain and his body lead different lives and he’s nodding before he knows it and he thinks about wringing his own neck because of it.
After the nod that Theo would like to pretend was a muscle spasm, Liam does this thing. Puts his hand on the empty space between them. Casual, nonchalant; unfurled atop the backseat like it just tumbled into place by mistake—hey, how’d that appendage get there? Open like an invitation. He doesn’t move closer. Doesn’t say anything. Just waits.
Theo isn't, like, that dense. Stubborn, maybe. But he gets the point, so he closes the gap. Whatever. Hypovolemic shock or something—his willpower’s gone anemic. He tells himself this is a kind of self-sufficiency: being able to give yourself what you need.
It’s less of a robbery now that he knows what’s coming. Liam stiffens, Theo sags. His body goes quiet, makes a blank slate of itself. Empty but not hollow. Cracked open in the creme brûlée kind of way. And it doesn’t hurt. Liam lets go when the exchange goes sluggish, when he’s not so much taking pain as he is holding hands.
“You didn’t really have to do the whole…” the words fizzle out into uncertainty. Theo jerks his head toward the dark veins receding on Liam’s arms. “Could’ve just said thanks and called it a day.”
Liam exhales fast and hard, a strained laugh that doesn’t quite catch air. “Yeah, no. I’m not gonna thank you for the shit you pulled because I don’t want you to do it again,” he says, then takes a breath and adds, “Seriously. I actually need you to not ever do that again. It’s not brave, it’s fucking stupid.”
But it wasn’t like that. Liam doesn’t need a knight in shining armor and Theo sure as hell isn’t auditioning for the role. There was no thought behind it, just instinct: see a bad thing happening, stop it. He watches Liam flex his fingers, roll his wrists, shaking out the all bad, achey stuff he leached from—
Oh.
Take a bullet for a guy and maybe you realize you’ve been all bleeding heart for him, too.
Liam nudges him, knee-to-knee. Gets all annoyingly sincere again when he lowers his voice and asks, “You’re good though, right?”
“Yeah, I’m—” Theo waits for it, the stutter-step, but his heart’s outgrown its clumsiness. He clears the weird, choked things from his throat, and tries it again. “Yeah.”
He catches a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. A little gross, a lot run-down and ragged. A tinge of garden-variety neurosis in his eyes and a generous helping of thick, languorous hope like molasses; like the shivering, caged puppies in those overbearingly sad animal shelter commercials. And Theo would normally find it pathetic—his reflection—but instead, he’s trying to find himself in it.
“I’m good. Thanks.”
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A: Something to haunt it.