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Mason has been putting this off for as long as he reasonably can, which adds up to a grand total of five days after Scott defeats the Anuk-ite and Monroe flees town. Not nearly long enough, all things considered.
He sucks in a breath, bracing himself, and knocks on his best friend’s front door.
It isn’t his best friend who opens the door.
“Mason,” Theo says, a little awkwardly. “Liam isn’t here.”
“I know,” Mason says. “He and Corey are at lacrosse practice.”
He watches as Theo’s expression goes from reluctant to carefully casual, brows lifting in benign curiosity. It’s fascinating and a little frustrating to witness; a reminder of just how untrustworthy Theo’s surface-level reactions tend to be.
“Oh?” Theo says, mild.
Mason inhales deeply to fortify himself. “We need to talk.”
Theo’s lips tilt in a smirk that Mason would bet money holds no real amusement. “Let me guess, it’s not me, it’s you?” he drawls, and Mason forcibly reminds himself that he’s not here to let Theo get a rise out of him.
“No, it’s definitely you,” Mason says. “However. Since you’re apparently sticking around, I think we need to clear the air if we’re ever going to stand a chance of getting along.”
“Didn’t think that was something you were interested in,” Theo says, but he steps back, waving a hand to gesture Mason inside.
And isn’t that a fucking trip, being ushered inside his best friend since childhood’s house by the same narcissistic asshole who once plotted to kill said best friend and who is now apparently cohabitating with him. Mason has known for a few days now that Liam had essentially press-ganged Theo into staying with him while his parents are away on the all-expenses-paid getaway Rafael McCall had hastily arranged last week to get them out of town, and he’s known for over a decade that Liam is a first-class idiot, but it’s still enough to send Mason’s head spinning.
“It’s not,” Mason says belatedly, as he moves past Theo into Liam’s living room. “But…”
He waves both hands in a gesture he hopes encompasses both their circumstances and Mason’s deep and unwelcome feeling of well here we fucking are, so this is what it’s come to.
From the way Theo looks almost amused, he guesses he succeeded.
“Okay,” Theo says, and sits down on the loveseat. “Talk.”
Mason takes a seat across from him, on the couch, and is half surprised Theo didn’t take the opportunity to plant himself in the center of the sofa in some kind of bizarre effort to establish dominance. He remembers his posture back when they had him locked up in the Sheriff’s station: fingers laced over his stomach, knees spread, casual as anything.
Moments before Liam moved forward, and Mason realized Liam was really going to do it.
He should have known, Mason thinks resentfully. They were caught up in each other even then, when Liam still hated Theo and Theo was ready to bolt at the first chance, staring each other down through the cell bars as Liam shattered the one piece of leverage they had over the very dangerous creature Liam dragged out of hell.
Theo doesn’t look like that now. He’s affecting an easy posture, but there’s tension visible in his shoulders, and upon a second glance, Mason realizes the seat he chose puts his back to the wall and gives him a line of sight to the exits. He looks more cornered now than he ever did behind bars, and it’s a strange sort of reassurance to know Mason isn’t the only one out of his depth here.
“I don’t trust you,” Mason says, and immediately knows it was the wrong way to begin when Theo’s body grows tense and his face shutters further.
“Is that all? I hate to tell you that you wasted a trip, but you’ve made that pretty clear alrea—”
“Yet,” Mason interrupts. “I don’t trust you yet.”
It’s enough to stall Theo’s dry commentary, and he leans back against the loveseat as he studies Mason. Mason is sure Theo is reading his vitals and chemosignals just as much as his posture, so he forges on as honestly as he can.
“I meant some of what I said to you in the tunnels. I saw what you did to Scott. To his mom. To Liam. I meant it when I said I wouldn’t forget.”
Theo’s face is entirely blank now, no mask of benign impartiality. Just a studied lack of emotion that forces Mason to remember other things, too, like the fact that Theo spent nearly a decade being taken apart and put back together by the monsters that still haunt Mason’s dreams sometimes. What might Mason have done, to get away from a nightmare like that?
Maybe Liam’s most recent bout of ill judgment is rubbing off on him.
Maybe not.
“But,” Mason says, “I don’t actually think you’re out to kill us all, either.”
He feels the way Theo’s attention shifts, then, and he thinks maybe this is the first time he’s ever felt the full weight of Theo’s concentration on him.
It had never been about Mason, after all. For all that he was the Beast whose power Theo so desperately wanted for himself, back then, he’d still been an afterthought. A backup plan.
Even then, all of Theo’s attention seemed to be on Liam. On winding him up, stringing him along and stringing him out until he was snarling and bloodthirsty, the perfect weapon for the perfect crime.
But Theo is paying attention to him now, and it’s equal parts gratifying and unnerving. He doesn’t know how Liam can withstand it, the constant focus—he’s seen the way Theo tracks him when he moves, how he looks at Liam like he can see right through him, see all of him. How Theo was only half present in those tunnels with Mason, because whatever Mason had said at the time, he knows that Theo’s displeasure at being paired off with Mason had less to do with Mason than it did with being separated from Liam.
“Is that so?” Theo says, now, and Mason only hesitates for a moment before he answers.
He sees Melissa, weeping and wailing over her son’s dead body. He sees Corey, jumping at shadows. He sees Liam, seconds away from a mistake he could never take back.
He sees Theo, wide-eyed and devastated when he realized he couldn’t take Mason’s pain. He sees Gabe dying painlessly under Theo’s hands.
He sees his best friend, miraculously whole and alive in spite of everything, looking at the boy sitting in front of Mason with something like wonder in his eyes.
“Yeah,” he says. “I guess so.”
Theo’s expression flickers, just a bit.
“What changed your mind?” he asks, and even if he’s going for casual, the words come out slightly uneven.
“Honestly?” Mason says. “I don’t know.”
It’s true. He doesn’t know what changed—or, at least, he can’t pin down a single action or moment that tipped the scales ever so slightly in Theo’s favor.
“But I do know you’re different now. And I know Liam trusts you, which has the potential to be the most idiotic choice he’s ever made—”
Theo huffs out a laugh that Mason thinks might even be genuinely amused.
“But if he trusts you, he has a reason.”
“Yeah?” Theo says, leaning forward slightly. “How do you know it’s a good one?”
Mason would suspect him of trying to rile him up, but Theo appears to be genuinely curious. Then again, Theo is very, very good at appearing to be all kinds of things that aren’t true, but if Mason is going to give this olive branch thing an actual shot, he’s going to have to be willing to take Theo at face value.
“Liam’s an idiot, but he’s not stupid,” Mason says, and is treated to the impossible sight of Theo’s expression softening, at his eyes and the corners of his lips. “I don’t know what exactly he sees in you, but I know what I saw at the hospital. I know you protected him. So if he trusts you after whatever else you guys went through, that’s enough for me to give you a chance.”
Theo is silent, but his eyes rove over Mason’s face, like he’s trying to catch any trace of insincerity. It gives him the chance to study Theo in return, and he wonders, suddenly, what Liam would see, in his place. He meant what he told Theo: he doesn’t know what Liam sees in him. He can’t, because he hasn’t invested the time and energy Liam clearly has into reading Theo, into parsing out the truths behind his non-reactions. Even more crucially: he’s not Liam. Mason would put money on Theo being a hell of a lot more open with Liam than he is with Mason or anyone else. He’d seen glimpses of it, at the hospital—the way Theo looked at Liam, and the way his face closed off when he looked away.
Mason lets Theo scrutinize him for a few moments before he speaks again.
“My turn,” he says. “What changed your mind?”
Theo just blinks at him, and though Mason strongly suspects he knows exactly what Mason is asking, he clarifies: “When Liam brought you back, you were still willing to save your own skin above anyone else’s.”
Theo’s gaze goes sharp, and Mason quickly adds, “I know what I said when we were looking for Aaron. I was afraid, dude, and you were being an asshole, so I’m not gonna apologize, but I think you’ve pretty definitively proven that’s not the case anymore. So. What changed?”
For several long moments, Mason thinks he isn’t going to answer. That would be just like him, to drag out the inner workings of Mason’s psyche for his assessment without offering any of his own thoughts or feelings in exchange. Unfortunately for him, Mason—for all that he lacks the supernatural advantages Theo possesses—is the one with the upper hand here, and they both know it.
“This trust thing has to go both ways,” Mason tells him.
Theo glares at him, and Mason tries his best not to feel intimidated. It’s easier than he expects; somewhere along the way, Theo must have learned how to tone down his irritation to a level that doesn’t scream Imminent Danger at anyone unlucky enough to find themself a target of his displeasure.
Finally, Theo says, low, “You know what changed.”
“Maybe,” Mason says. “Tell me anyway.”
Theo’s glare sharpens. Mason tells himself that Theo wouldn’t murder him in Liam’s living room with less than an hour to dispose of his body and deal with the evidence.
He tells himself that Theo wouldn’t hurt him regardless, because:
“Liam,” Theo says, through gritted teeth. “That’s what changed. Happy?”
Mason is tempted, very, to drag more out of him. Theo would talk, he thinks, if Mason made it his condition: Tell me everything, and I’ll forgive you right here, right now. Tell me the truth, and I’ll ask Scott to let you into the pack.
Hand me your weaknesses, and I’ll tell Liam I approve.
But that’s the kind of thing past-Theo would have done, and he’s nowhere in this room.
“Extremely,” Mason says.
It’s an exaggeration, but it’s not a lie, and he knows Theo can tell. He doesn’t give him time to dwell on it.
“You’re picking Liam up from practice, right?” he asks, though he knows the answer.
Cautiously, Theo nods.
“Great,” he says. “We’ll carpool. Do you like burgers? There’s a place off Sunset that does these vegan burgers Corey loves.”
He stands up, and Theo mirrors him, looking faintly bewildered.
Mason raises his brows expectantly, and Theo nods again, more to himself than to Mason.
“Sure,” he says, and heads into the kitchen to collect his keys.
When he returns, Mason can’t help but smile at the pool ball dangling from his keychain.
Mason knows, based on the color, that it’s the number six.
The way Theo holds it, it reads as a nine.