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Theo lies in Liam’s bed, awake, while Liam sleeps beside him. They’re both naked and clean, and Liam is floppy, loose, and sprawled as people often are after hard sex and a hot shower, but more than anything else, Liam is vulnerable. Theo could kill him now, if he wanted to. Or Theo could kill himself. Instead he lies there, awake, and tries to sleep.
It’s boring. Time passes slowly.
His thoughts circle around the pointless and mundane. He remembers bad things he’s done and struggles to understand them - to return himself to the mindset that was capable of doing them, which he can no longer even imagine, let alone inhabit. Guilt and shame and hate circle in him too, but the emotional valence is lost - they are simply facts about himself, or facts about how he feels about himself, and not things that he experiences per se. Hate without anger. Guilt without remorse. He distracts himself with errata, too - plans for what to do tomorrow, lists of movies he wants to watch. Pop culture he wants to consume, to catch up on, so that he can better perfect his pretension of being normal.
Not that it isn’t perfect already, when he wants it to be.
But still.
He tries to sleep, too. Closes his eyes and tries to quiet his mind. Relaxes his muscles consciously, intentionally, one by one, from foot to calf to thigh to chest and neck, and everywhere else as well. Positions himself and repositions himself and then stills himself deliberately, refusing to toss and turn. It doesn’t help, and so he stops. Hopes that sleep will just come upon him by surprise, if he stops worrying about it, although he knows it never does.
Yes. Theo lies there, in Liam’s bed. Awake.
A few hours later Liam wakes up, groggy. It’s still the dead of night and Liam’s room is black and his house is still and quiet, his parents asleep and breathing evenly a few rooms over. Theo hears Liam’s heartbeat rising as Liam slowly wakes, and wonders if he should pretend to be asleep. It’s weird for Theo to be awake now, and Theo doesn’t want to be seen as weird. But in the end Theo decides not to, because he wants to believe that this isn't a space where he has to hide, though he knows that it nevertheless is - his open eyes the smallest reconnaissance as he shows his most acceptable unacceptable parts. More than anything else, Theo just wants to be seen at all. Liam stumbles out of bed and off to the bathroom for a piss in a half-aware daze, and it’s only when he returns, slightly more awake, to climb back into bed that he seems to notice Theo at all.
“Sorry,” Liam mumbles. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s fine," Theo says. He pats the mattress beside him, and holds up the blankets for Liam to climb in under. “I wasn’t sleeping anyway.”
“Mmm?” Liam snuggles down into the covers beside him, curling up into Theo’s side. “How come?”
Theo just grunts.
“You can -” Liam yawns into the side of Theo’s chest. “Can get up if you want. You don’t have to -” yawns again. “Stay.” Even as he says it, he tightens his arm around Theo’s waist.
God. Please. Anything to be released from this. “Are you sure?” Theo asks. “You don’t mind?”
“Yeah. S’fine.” Then Liam is asleep again, or near enough, and Theo is still awake.
He can get up.
Huh.
It hadn’t really occurred to him that that was an option.
-=-
He dresses himself in his jeans and a t-shirt and one of Liam’s hoodies and pads out of the room on bare and silent feet, grabbing his phone from the side table as he goes. He slips down the staircase and into the living room and recovers his shoes and socks and wallet and keys as well. The moon is a waxing crescent, barely more than new, and tonight is when Liam is at his most human.
He goes for a walk.
Beacon Hills is crisp and wet underfoot as he trods the dewy grass down the street that Liam lives on and towards the boulevard of nowhere in particular. The greyscale facades of uninspired McMansions bear silent witness to his passage as he navigates between pristine pavement princesses - lifted trucks, SUVs the size of tanks - parked in driveways and blocking paths, too big to fit in their garages. Liam’s family has money, and this is what passes for the nice part of town in a place like Beacon Hills. Nobody else is out on the streets. There aren’t even any cars. The streetlights are blazingly bright, and cast a hostile blue-white LED glow that obliterates even Theo’s shadow as he passes under them. Supposedly, flooding the night with light keeps crime down. Beacon Hills has a problem with that, apparently.
As he walks, Theo regulates his breathing. Slow, deep, and even. He draws in all the scents around him - of brake dust and dog shit, flowers and pesticides - and sifts through them, searching for anything out of place. He listens and looks, too. But there’s nothing, not that he expected there to be, and eventually he gives it up - patrolling. A joke. Patrolling for what? Just busywork to distract himself from his thoughts. Pointless and sad
Theo doesn’t need distractions from his thoughts. He’s not a coward like that. He faces them head on. He draws up the worthlessness he feels, the stupidity, the alienation - the growing sense of panic that violence is all he is and all he knows, and that the only way he can experience relationships with others is as threats and targets - and considers them. They are the stupid thoughts of a damaged teenage boy, of no significance and only passing interest, which play on repeat inside his mind at regular intervals without novelty or fresh insight. Accordingly, he dismisses them. Everything is fine, or at least no different than it was before, and so he has no excuse for this. Whatever it is that this is.
Maybe he should become a police officer, he thinks, as he decides on a destination and turns towards the gas station a few miles down the road. The possibility of a future is a novelty to him that feels increasingly real these days and he finds he likes exercising the idea of it. Police officers are allowed to be violent - required even, sometimes - and he would be good at it. The Sheriff could be a way in, with time. Or if not a cop, a prison guard? Security guard? Something like that, anyway, where what he is is not a problem. But the problem, of course, is not paid employment. Liam’s family has money, after all, and so does Derek Hale, and by extension the McCall pack. If he stays in good standing they will support him, and he will just work for them as needed, as whatever they need him to be. No, the problem is more substantive - Theo needs to do more than find a job that rewards him for hurting people. It’s the way that he lies awake at night next to Liam, and all he can think about is how easy it would be to kill him. He needs to deal with that.
It’s not that Theo wants to kill him. It’s just another fact.
It’s a fact that Noah Stilinski is an older man with slower reflexes, and Theo could take the gun from his holster and empty it into him before Sheriff Stilinski could meaningfully react. It’s a fact that Melissa McCall walks back to her car alone at night from the hospital, and anyone who wanted to could simply walk up behind her and gut her with their claws. Stiles’ piece of shit Jeep could be messed with. Lydia Martin’s home alarm is dependent on an external power supply, which can be cut. These are facts. It doesn’t mean anything that Theo knows them. He’s not making plans, and it’s nothing he wants to act on. But he still knows them. He hasn’t graduated high school, doesn’t know half of what even Liam does about algebra, but he knows this. And every time Liam bares his throat or turns his back, Theo idly catalogues the location of the nearest knife.
He doesn’t want to know these things. He knows that knowing these things - noticing them, putting them together inside his head on automatic - is what separates him from everything he wants to do and be, now that he is free to want and do and be. And he doesn’t know how to unknow them.
And as always, after the facts come the findings. He could shoot the Sheriff, yes. But he could also just shoot himself. He could gut the nurse, but he could also just slit his own throat. Why shouldn’t he? After all, if this is all he knows, and this is all he can do, then -
“Just this, thanks,” he says, putting a protein bar and a sports drink down on the cashier’s counter with some money.
The cashier rings him up without comment, taking in his hoodie and the late hour and Theo’s challenging glare in a slow, up-and-down glance. After a moment’s hesitation, the cashier presses the button and opens the till. Gives Theo the change. Theo snatches it away and takes his snack and stalks out. The faintest scent of dawn is in the air, and there’s a nice place to eat and watch the sun rise not far away.
-=-
The sun rises.
-=-
Liam calls him. Theo looks down at his buzzing phone - no ringtone needed, he leaves it set to vibrate, that’s loud enough - and really doesn’t want to answer. He does, though. Answering your phone when your friends call is the sort of thing that you simply have to do to be a normal person.
“Theo, hey, where are you?” Liam asks immediately, rushing through the words. He sounds almost breathless with concern. “Mom’s freaking out that you’re not here.”
It’s cute. Theo suppresses his amusement. “I’m in the Preserve,” he replies. He doesn’t laugh at Liam. Doesn’t call him out for his transparent lies.
“But you’re okay, right? Did something happen?”
“I’m fine, Liam,” Theo says. “I went for a walk.”
“Oh.” There’s quiet for a moment, and then. “Ohhh, right. You couldn’t sleep. I remember.”
“Did you forget?”
“Nnnno,” Liam says. “Maybe.”
Theo waits.
Predictably, Liam explodes. “Look, I just woke up and you weren’t here, and I was - like. When people just disappear in Beacon Hills it usually isn’t good!”
Theo bites back his mocking reply. It would be counterproductive to tease Liam when he’s demonstrating good instincts. “You did the right thing checking,” he says instead. “I’m fine.”
“Where are you?”
“In the Preserve,” Theo repeats.
“I meant where in the preserve? Like -”
“The old firebreak, the access road,” Theo replies. “You know the one with the big gravel hill?”
“Oh, yeah. I know it. Do you want me to come pick you up?”
“Don’t you have school?”
“It’s like six AM,” Liam replies. “I have time.”
“What car are you gonna take?”
“I’ll take your truck.”
“I’ve got the keys.”
“I’ve got your spare, remember.”
“You don’t have my spare, it’s in the box on the fridge,” Theo replies.
“I have access to your spare,” Liam says. “Do you want a lift or not?”
Theo considers. He looks around the small clearing he’s in, the rock he’s sitting on, the spiky grass and bare trees. There’s nothing here for him now. There never really was. It was just somewhere to be that wasn’t Liam’s bed. “Sure,” he says. “I’ll wait at the gate, come get me.”
“Alright. See you soon.”
They hang up. Theo tosses the protein bar wrapper and empty plastic bottle off somewhere into the woods and walks back towards the road.
-=-
He waits by the gate until Liam pulls up in Theo’s big blue truck. Theo clambers into the passenger side, refusing when Liam offers him the wheel. “You drive,” he says. “I’m tired.” It’s not safe to drive while tired. Just a pointless, stupid risk.
“Did you get any sleep last night?” Liam asks, looking him up and down.
Theo desperately, reflexively wants to lie. Doesn’t want to be the weird one - the object of concern. He doesn’t need people sticking their fingers in his open wounds to pull them wider and watch him bleed, no matter how well-intentioned they may be. It never makes him look good either, getting blood all over the floor. But he is tired. Too tired to play these stupid fucking games.
“No,” he grunts out. “No sleep.”
“How come?” Liam asks. There’s no reproach in his voice, no judgement in his open face or worried eyes. He’s every inch the picture of benevolence, ready and eager to insert his useless face and dispense his ignorant advice, and impose on Theo the labour of pretending to be grateful for his ineffective help and worthless concern. In that moment he just wants Liam to fuck off.
He shrugs instead of answering. “Dunno,” he says. “Just couldn’t.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Just tired. It doesn’t matter, I’ve got nothing on today so I’ll just sleep while you’re at school.”
Liam just keeps looking at him. What - does he think Theo’s lying to him? Hiding things? Sneaking out at night to murder hookers, or something?
Does he think that Theo’s not fine?
“I’m fine, Liam,” Theo repeats. “It was just a bad night. It happens.”
“Was it because we -” Liam starts.
“No,” Theo cuts him off. “You were great. It was great. It’s nothing to do with that.”
Liam, underneath him. Theo’s hands against the mattress, Liam’s legs around his hips. How easily Theo could wrap his claws around Liam’s throat and squeeze. Not strangle him - crush his windpipe and watch him choke. Drown him in his own blood, gurgling speckled foam from his gasping, gulping mouth, eyes wide with betrayal and uncomprehending fear. Or when Liam had been on all fours and Theo behind him and on top, when his hands wrapped around Liam’s body and it had occurred to Theo the way that from this angle he could draw a perfect line across Liam’s belly with the claws on both his hands and Liam’s guts would all fall out into a pile on the bed. Once they started the thoughts didn’t stop. Theo couldn’t rid himself of noticing, no matter that he closed his eyes. He had fought his way through it, though. Liam had come, and Theo had made himself come, and made himself do everything else that he was supposed to do to make Liam comfortable and cuddly and warm.
“Are you sure?” Liam asks again. “Because -”
Theo nods sharply. “Yes, Liam. I’m sure.”
Liam pauses again, for a moment, and then finally breaks out into a smile. “Okay, thank God,” he says. “Because I was kinda worried it was so bad you ran away.”
“It was great,” Theo repeats. “You’re top ten for sure.”
“Top ten? Not the best?”
Theo shrugs. “It was your first time. We’ll work on it.”
Liam’s grin is feral. Theo peels his lips back and points his teeth in Liam's direction in return.
“Work on it how?” Liam teases.
Theo rolls his eyes and looks away. “Drive, Dunbar. You have school, remember?”
Liam laughs and keeps teasing him all the way home.