Archive of Our Own

It started, as most things did, with the little things.

He’d never had a home to call his own before, so when Theo held the keys to his apartment in his hand, it felt a little like the world was falling out around him. Not the way it did when he was shunted down to the Skinwalker Prison, but like the world was trying to reconfigure itself around the new shape of him, trying to remake everything he had ever known without knocking him off his feet in the flurry. The apartment was apparently identical to every other apartment in the building, opposite the hall from Alec’s and four floors beneath Derek’s, not that he would know.

Derek handed him the key and a shiny black credit card and sent him on his way. The operating theatres were dark and dank, simultaneously too loud and too quiet, so still and silent that even his breathing threatened to shatter that peace into millions of tiny, sharp-edged shards while also somehow being cacophonous with the whirring of machines and the echo of his footsteps and the mechanical cranking of experiments, least of all the whines and cries of the failed subjects. He was so used to the way that anxiety clawed at his throat as he turned corners and waited with bated breath for the Doctors to return, stepping into every room with hesitation. But now he had his own apartment, a house to call his own, with his own bed and his own kitchen and his own living room, and a fire escape that led down to the back car park and the preserve beyond it.

The first night, the door had slid shut behind him, and he stood, stunned, in the middle of the room, just trying to take it all in. There were no towels in the bathroom, no cutlery and crockery in the kitchen, and no pots and pans. There was no bed, no couch, no TV, nothing. He spent the night curled up on the cold, hard floorboards as a wolf, but he was happy, happier than he had been in a long time.

The next day, he used his new luxe black credit card and brought the essentials. A bed, a couch, a TV, pots and pans and plates. He brought sheets to go on the bed and pillows to go on the couch. Towels, shampoo, conditioner and body wash, a bookcase, a chest of drawers, a floor-length mirror and a set of bedside tables. He tossed the flatpacks into the back of his truck and tied them all down with bungee cords, and he spent four days putting everything together. He put the pots and pans in the kitchen, as well as an assortment of wooden spoons and tongs, whisks, labels and spatulas that came in a ‘first home essentials’ bundle at the store. He plugged the TV in and watched David Attenborough and old cartoons while he methodically put together the couch, the bookcase, and the black glass-topped table the TV would sit on. He arduously carried the chest of drawers and the bed up the inconvenient spiral stairs and had music blaring from the TV speakers as he built the rest of the bedroom items. He made the bed with the sheets he had brought - a soft slate grey- and set all the towels and soap up in the bathroom.

He made ramen for dinner with his new pots in his new kitchen. He sat on his new couch and watched the nightly headlines on his new TV in his new living room. He had a shower in his new bathroom and slept in his new bed in his new bedroom. In his new apartment, in his new home. He figured it would take a long time for this whole thing to stop feeling like a dream.

But then, on Saturday morning, his breakfast was interrupted by a knock at his door. He froze with his toast halfway to his mouth because he hadn’t expected anyone, and both Alec and Derek already had a key for emergencies, just like he had a key to their apartments. He hoped it wasn’t a neighbour coming by to welcome him. It was too early in the morning for him to pretend to be a human being.

Instead, when he slid the door open, it was to reveal Liam and Corey and Mason, looking eager and excited, grinning from ear to ear. “Surprise!” Liam shouted at a decibel way too loud for the early hour. He held a round, blue potted plant in his arms that was filled with rich soil and a small green sprout in the centre.

“What the hell are you guys doing here?” Theo asked as he leaned against the door. “It’s way too early for you children to be awake. It’s a weekend.”

“Hardy-ha,” Corey rolled his eyes. “This is a housewarming. Happy housewarming.”

“Pretty crappy housewarming,” Theo said. “Just the three of you?”

“Well, Nolan was here with us, but he went to see Alec instead,” Mason jerked his thumb over his shoulder, where Theo could see the door to Alec’s apartment slightly ajar. “And Scott and the others were going to come, but something came up at the last minute, so yeah, it’s just us.”

Theo had more sarcastic comments lined up, but Liam pushed past him into the apartment before he could speak to them. “It’s been a whole week, and you haven’t invited us over once. I thought you would have wanted to show us your new digs.”

“Never say that again,” Theo said as he shut the door behind them. “And I’ve been a little busy. I knew you’d find your way around eventually, and what do you know - I was right.”

Liam set the pot in the middle of the floor and spun in a slow circle to observe the rest of the apartment. He looked at the clean kitchen, the empty bookshelf, the few pillows on the couch, and cocked his head to the side like a puppy hearing a sound in the distance. “Looks good already,” he assured, and Theo hadn’t known that he cared about his opinion until something settled in him at the words. “But something’s missing. I just can’t put my finger on it.”

“Yeah,” Corey said, pointing at the empty space between the kitchen and the couch. “A dining table. Where have you been eating?”

“On the couch, or over the sink,” Theo hadn’t even considered a dining table. It was just him, after all. He didn't anticipate having many guests. “Anything else I’m missing? I’m new to this whole having a house thing.”

He studiously ignored the complicated looks that flickered across their faces and the way their scents dipped into something sad. “Blankets. Coffee table,” Mason listed off on his fingers. “Lamps for softer lighting - my mum is all about that low light. Uh, books in the bookcase? Decorations?”

“I meant essentials,” Theo said. “Am I missing anything essential?”

“Not essential, but,” Corey pointed again, out the back door to the little patio beside the fire escape. Through the entire wall of windows, he had a pretty good view of the preserve, and early morning sunlight streamed brightly into the apartment. “But you could probably spruce up that patio with something cool, like a deck chair or something. Somewhere else you can chill - you put a little table out there, and you can have a coffee with the fresh air and the sunrise or drink a cold beer after patrol without getting blood on the furniture.”

Theo stared at him as if he had grown a second head. “Huh. That was actually pretty thoughtful,” he lightly kicked the pot that Liam had left in the middle of the room. “What’s this for?”

“It’s a housewarming gift!” Liam proudly explained. “My mum said that it’s tradition to bring someone a gift when you visit their new home for the first time, so I brought you a plant!”

“Uh-huh. I can see that,” Theo eyed the plant wearily. “What do you want me to do with it?”

Blinking, Liam squinted at him. “Uh. Water it? Give it sunlight? Keep it alive.”

“Right,” Theo said. “What kind of plant is it again?”

“I don’t actually know. The guy at the store said that it was hard to kill, and I thought the pot was nice,” Liam shrugged. “Anyway, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Are you going to give us the tour, or not? I want to see if the big bad chimera of death makes his bed.”

Theo did, in fact, make his bed. With hospital corners and harsh lines, which he was more than happy to point out to Liam and compare to his perpetually messy bed, which looked like a pigsty even when he had taken the time to make it.

And so, it began with a plant in a round blue pot. He put it beside the windows, and every morning he poured a cup of water onto the soil while waiting for the kettle to boil. He took their advice - he brought a six-person dining table and set it up between the kitchen and the couch, he brought lamps for the living room and two for the bedside tables in his bedroom, he brought blankets to throw over the back of the couch and more pillows to rest on, put a lawn chair and rickety metal table on the patio outside, he brought a short, long coffee table and another couch and set it in an L-shape with the other couch, because there had already been complaints about the lack of seating. He thought that Liam’s potted plant fulfilled his request for decoration. It was starting to look much homier.

After that, it was as if the metaphorical floodgates had opened. Throughout the next week, various members of the pack came to visit. Lydia had been surprised that he’d managed to buy and set up so much furniture by himself, and he felt mildly offended that she thought he was so incompetent. Stiles had immediately critiqued Theo’s decor, and Theo had retaliated by locking him outside on the fire escape as the approaching storm got closer and closer, the taste of ozone heavy on his tongue and the dark clouds pregnant with the promise of a downpour. Scott was beaming with pride, his scent saccharine sweet with it, and his arms were laden down with a tray of Melissa’s white-chocolate and raspberry brownies and a pot of Argent's chilli, and as Theo helped him pack them into his sparse fridge, he confidently determined that food was the best kind of housewarming gift. Malia had stalked in and immediately inspected every room, checking the locks on his doors and sticking her head out onto the fire escape to sniff at the air for any lurking danger, and once again, he was mildly offended that she thought he hadn’t already done that, but he allowed her to get it out of her system, and let her collapse on her back on the couch with her sent sparkling with satisfaction. Nolan did come visit, shyly apologising for getting sidetracked the first time, informed Theo that his apartment was much neater than Alec’s and gifted him with a book titled The Colorado Kid, and it became the first book on Theo’s bookcase.

Theo watered his plant with a cup of water every morning, kept it in the sunlight beside the windows, and tried to keep it alive. He had always been better at killing things, but it was never too late for an old dog to learn new tricks.

Alec and Derek visited occasionally. Derek mostly invited himself in to mess through his fridge and eat his food before silently returning to his own apartment like a raccoon rifling through someone’s bins. Alec seemed to spend more time in Theo’s apartment than he spent in his own. Sometimes Theo was woken up by him banging around in his kitchen, sometimes he came home after a long day of pack business to find Alec already lounging on his couch as he dug through a tub of ice cream with a spoon, and sometimes Theo had gone to bed with Alec passed out in front of the TV. Sometimes the three of them would hang out in each other’s apartments just for something to do, much to Alec’s glee and Derek’s chagrin.

As much as Alec and Derek spent time in Theo’s apartment, it was nothing compared to Liam. He seemed to spend more time in his apartment than he spent in his house. It felt like he was always there, lurking around every corner; between classes, after lacrosse games and before training, in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep or in the middle of the day when he was bored. Stupidly, Theo had given him the key after he had threatened to pester Derek for one, and now he let himself in whenever he wanted, even when Theo wasn’t home. Once, Theo came home from the store, and Liam was on his couch, eating his leftovers and watching a football game.

“Where’s your cutlery?” Liam called from the kitchen the first night he had stayed for dinner. “Why do you only have one fork, one spoon and two knives? One of these knives is plastic, like from a takeout bag. What the hell?”

“I’m only one person, Liam,” Theo sighed. “I don’t need a drawer full of cutlery.”

“And your bowls? You don’t have any bowls?” Liam sounded aghast; his voice muffled where his head was jammed into the cupboard. “How do you eat soup?”

“I eat it out of the pot,” Theo called back, exasperated. “And I do have bowls. You’re just not looking in the right place. Can you come and sit down, please? You’re giving me a headache, and your team is losing.”

Liam had continued to grumble, appalled, for the rest of the night, and Theo had smothered him with a pillow and laid out all his bowls on the coffee table just to shut him up. Liam had left unconvinced, but at least he didn’t complain for the rest of the night. Theo made a point to eat every snack entirely out of bowls just to spite him.

The next day, Theo had arrived home after working with Argent, made a beeline to the kitchen for a late lunch, and froze at the drawer full of cutlery that clanked and rattled together, shiny and pristine, almost gleaming under the overhead lights. His cupboard had dozens more plates, bowls and melamine stacked in neat towers. He immediately texted Lydia.

Theo. 3:45PM

Did you break into my apartment and buy me bowls and forks?

Lydia. 3:46PM

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

He forgot about it. Somebody had given him more cutlery - so what? But then it kept happening, with bigger and better things.

Once, while Corey and Mason were playing Just Dance in his living room on the second-hand Wii that he had salvaged from a garage sale, Theo had looked up from his paperwork and frowned at all the books on his bookshelf. For so long, it had been sparse with nothing but Nolan’s The Colorado Kid. Now, there were more novels. An old Latin dictionary, an instructional manual about plant care, a cookbook, two box sets of the Percy Jackson series that he hadn’t read since he was young, a historical recounting of the fall of Sparta and a thick tome with a glossy cover of Greek myths and gods. He blinked uncomprehendingly at them, paperwork forgotten.

“Hey,” he called to Mason and Corey. “Did you put these books on my shelf?”

They twisted around to squint guilelessly at the bookshelf, still mostly empty except for a smattering of carefully curated tomes. Even as they uttered answers of “Nuh-uh,” and “Don’t think so,” he already knew they had nothing to do with it. Two Percy Jackson box sets, a history book and a Greek mythology academia? It could only be one person who had the key to his apartment, constantly waltzed in while Theo was away like he owned the place, and could have easily slipped the books onto the bookshelf on any number of his visits.

Theo. 1:22PM

What’s with the books?

Liam. 1:22PM

Wot.

Theo had to resist the urge to throw his phone across the room and nail Mason in the back of the head. Liam knew how much Theo hated it when he texted like an illiterate cretin. He knew, because Theo had told him repeatedly and often with violence. By now, he was sure that Liam only did it entirely to piss him off, and the worst part was that it worked every time.

Theo. 1:23PM

The books on my bookshelf. Sparta. The Percy Jackson. Greek Gods. Plant care. Latin. The cookbook. Why’d you put them there?

Liam. 1:23PM

How do you know that its me?

Theo. 1:23PM

Liam.

Liam. 1:24PM

Alright, fuck.

I just thought you’d like them.

I was at that bookstore near Sinima that we passed recently and they made me think of you so I brought them.

Why?

Don’t you like them?

I can take them if you want.

Liam. 1:30PM

Theo? Where’d you go?

Theo. 1:30PM

Leave the books. They’re fine.

But that wasn’t all. Now that Theo had noticed the books, he started noticing other things too.

One morning, he came downstairs after a fitful night to see a little wooden wolf on the bookcase, squished between the books. He stared at it for a while before delicately plucking it from where it sat and turning it over in his hands. It was smooth, a light-brown colour, and he could feel the sticky residue where a price tag had been clumsily torn off. Something warm and tight had caught in his chest as he carefully set it back down where he had found it and moved on to water the plant.

He paid more attention as another joined the wolf, and another and another until there was a tiny wooden pack of wolves nesting on the bookshelf. A mama with its baby, a wolf with its head resting on its paws, an alpha howling on a jutting rock, a pair of cubs playing together, an older wolf napping in a tight ball with its tail over its snout, a wolf gnawing at a blue and red marble, a wolf sitting on its back legs with its head cocked to the side, a wolf rising up on its hindquarters to claw at the side of the bookshelf. He didn’t know where they were coming from. He didn’t know how Liam was sneaking in and placing them there. He wasn’t an expert in espionage, and Theo knew that for a fact, but he just couldn’t figure out how. He was over so often that his apartment always smelled like him a little bit. Sometimes, Theo would be out with Liam, at the mall or the grocery store or at the lacrosse pitch, and he’d return home to find another wolf on the shelf, but he was certain that Liam was doing it. Somehow. Maybe he was conscripting other members of the pack to do his errands. He needed to keep a better eye.

Was Liam responsible for getting all that cutlery into his drawers, all those plates and bowls, and that giant serving platter that he doubted he’d ever use? Getting Lydia to do his dirty work, cajoling Derek or Alec to sneak in and deliver useless home goods while Liam kept Theo busy? What was the end goal? What was his plan?

It shouldn’t matter. He didn’t have to make a big deal out of this. It was fine. Theo had endured plenty of terrible, unthinkable things, and Liam somehow adding decorations to his house didn’t even make the list. But he was so used to knowing things, to having all the answers all of the time, to being the person who could always be relied upon to figure things out, so the fact that this was being thwarted by Liam fucking Dunbar was so strange to him, so alien, that he wasn’t sure how to cope with it. He stared at the little wooden wolf pack taking up residence on his bookshelf, filled with novels and cookbooks and ancient histories, and decided that he liked them. He liked the little surprise tchotchkes, liked seeing what Liam would come up with next, liked looking at them in the mornings while he drank his coffee. Maybe it didn’t matter how they got there, or why. Maybe it only mattered that he liked them.

He filled up a cup with cold water and poured it over his potted plant. He knew nothing about plants, about growing things, but he liked to think that the little green bud was starting to look a little larger, was beginning to peak out a little further from the soil.

People came over a lot. More than he was used to, anyway. He wasn’t used to people liking him enough to want to willingly spend time with him, and yet the pack… did. It wasn’t just Liam, or Alec, or Derek. Sometimes Mason and Corey would come over to camp out on his couch or play the Wii, and sometimes they, Nolan and Alec would sit together on his dining room table and study for upcoming tests while he pottered quietly around them, his training with the Dread Doctors still coming in handy. Sometimes, he would hear a bark from the back door and he would look over to see a coyote pawing impatiently at the glass where it stood on the fire escape, wedging itself between the deck chair and the table, and Malia would spend the rest of the day following him around like a very judgemental shadow, or would take up most of the couch as she spread all the way out, or would lie in inconvenient places on the ground and make him manoeuvre around her. Derek and Argent came over to talk strategies and update each other on the Monroe hunt, and sometimes they would stay for dinner, sometimes they’d have coffee and sit on the couch and watch whatever sport was on until they decided it was time to go home. Sometimes, Lydia came to critique his lack of interior decorating and would perch herself at the kitchen counter with her laptop and work, preferring his silence and his particular brand of tranquillity. Stiles was like a whirlwind, playing music too loud and eating all his food with his mouth open and ordering deliveries that Derek wouldn’t let him get in his own apartment. Scott would come over to pass along information that could’ve simply been a text or a phone call, and he would chat Theo’s ear off and follow him into every room and would act like the two of them hanging out on their own in Theo’s living space was the most natural and normal thing in the world.

And Liam? Liam spent more time in Theo’s apartment than he spent anywhere else, even at his own house. His particular brand of stink, teenage boy, bitter rage, sea salt and fresh mowed grass and that strawberry and cream body wash that Jenna had brought, clung to every surface, hung heavy in the air, even with all the windows open and Liam nowhere in sight. Sometimes, when Theo rose with the sun to go on patrol through the preserve, Liam would be sleeping in his bed, and he would still be asleep when he returned. Sometimes, Theo would come back from visiting Derek upstairs or a grocery run and would find Liam cooking them dinner and making a mess of the kitchen doing so. Sometimes, he would turn to say something to Liam and be left shocked and wrong-footed when he was not there, where he was supposed to be.

Everywhere he turned, Liam was there. Hanging upside-down from the couch, his legs hooked over the back of it, and his hair dangling away from his face and towards the floor. Pacing a tight, anxious circuit passed the dining table as he practised a speech for his English class. Talking encouragingly to the potted plant in soothing tones because he had read somewhere that talking kindly to flora made it grow better. Standing in the kitchen, utterly covered in flour, because he had got frustrated trying to make fresh pasta and had accidentally torn the paper bag open with his claws, and it piled up on the tiles around him like freshly fallen snow. Waiting in bed while Theo finished his shower, scrolling on his phone and already tucked under the covers in a pair of Theo’s sweatpants and hoodies even though he already had a pair of pyjamas stashed away in the drawer Theo had reluctantly allowed him to use, smiling so softly and so sweetly at Theo when he saw him bathed in the bathroom light with steam wafting out behind him that it did something painful and pitiful to his heart.

There was something about it that Theo felt as though he didn’t deserve. Barely even human, lost boy with a dead sister’s heart, more blood on his hands and murder on his conscience than anyone else he had ever met. His organs didn’t belong to him, his body didn’t belong to him, his face didn’t belong to him, his memories and thoughts and wants and needs and hopes and dreams and desires didn’t belong to him, and yet here he was, pretending that his apartment belonged to him, that his stuff belonged to him, that even his relationship with Liam belonged to him. And it had all just been handed to him. He hadn’t even needed to work for it, not really, not in the way that he was so used to doing.

He spent his days doing things he had never been allowed to do before, things that could be considered, to many people, wasting time. He read the books that Liam had gifted him, allowed himself to get lost in Greek mythology and familiar Latin, following the adventures of Percy Jackson and his friends and understood the Fall of Sparta in a new light. He read the cookbook and the plant care directory with a pad of yellow sticky notes, highlighters and pens, and he marked the pages of recipes he liked and succulent information that he thought might apply to his little blooming sapling in its big blue pot, highlighting key words and phrases and jotting down amendments and notes in the margins. Anybody else would probably think he was giving himself more work, that all this extra study was defeating the whole purpose of the exercise, but Theo didn’t know how to relax unless he was working, unless he was pushing himself, unless everything had a reason to be done. He couldn’t justify just sitting down and reading a book. It would be a waste of time, otherwise, and he couldn’t have that.

When he went shopping, he brought the essentials: the bread, the milk, the eggs, the fruit and vegetables and cheese. But he found himself bringing home other things, too, less sustaining things but things he liked the taste of, indulgences that he never would’ve allowed himself mere months ago. He found himself unpacking and putting away tubs of cookies and cream ice-cream and share bars of white chocolate, caramel syrup, brown sugar and cinnamon Pop-Tarts, containers of fresh raspberries and chillies. The sight of them would surprise him every time, as if he hadn’t been the one to pick them from the shelf, bring them to the register and pay for them, and put them into his bag to bring home, like someone had evaded detection and slipped them in his cart when he wasn’t looking. He couldn’t recall the last time he had brought something, not because it sustained him, or it fulfilled a need, or it helped him blend into the role he was playing, but just because he liked it, and wanted it, so he brought it for himself.

Truthfully, he tried not to think about it too much. Even after all this time, it still felt like he was wearing somebody else’s skin, living a life that somebody else should’ve been living before Theo swooped in and took their place. Sometimes, he woke up and expected to find himself in the cold, unfeeling rooms in the operating theatre, or in the tiny, enclosed space of the morgue drawers in the hospital, running through the hallways from Tara, his heart fluttering like a dead bird in his chest. He didn’t deserve it. No matter what he did, no matter what the pack believed, there was no world in which Theo deserved to have any of this.

The first time that Liam caught sight of the miscellaneous things he had stashed around his kitchen, Theo wasn't quick enough to stop him. Liam rose from the couch, proclaiming that he needed a drink, and just as he was pulling open the doors to the fridge, Theo remembered the pint of chocolate milk in the door, the half-eaten caramel slice he had picked up from the store on a whim, and the can of whipped cream. Liam went silent, his cheomisignals brightening into something shocked and pleased, and Theo felt his heart drop into his toes.

“Theo,” Liam practically purred, pulling out the half-drunk chocolate milk and the can of whipped cream. “What’s this?”

Theo had brought the chocolate milk because he had seen it out of the corner of his eye and remembered that on sleepless nights, when he was about six or seven years old, he would find his way into the kitchen and would pour himself a cup of this same brand of chocolate milk. His favourite mug had been odd-shaped and some type of novelty thing that had come with a kid’s meal at some takeaway eatery, striped with different shades of blues and yellows. Theo had seen it sitting there unassumingly in the diary section, and his body had moved on autopilot, his brain still trapped in a distant memory that he had always assumed was taken from him, fuzzy and vague and static-like, as his hands put it in his cart and brought it home. The whipped cream he had brought to fulfil a childhood wish, a fantasy that he would joke about with Josh and Tracy if they ever escaped from under the thumb of the Doctors – to sit in their nice homes and eat whipped cream straight from the can, tipping their heads back and spraying it straight into their open mouths. He forced his chemosignals to be as blank as his expression, his heartbeat to even out into a steady, almost nothingness, a distinct refusal to give anything away.

Immediately, Liam’s face fell. “Hey, no, don’t do that,” he said, setting the milk and the whipped cream on the counter and rushing to Theo’s side on the couch so quickly that he nearly tripped over his feet. It would’ve been endearing if Theo hadn’t wanted to vanish desperately into the couch cushions. “I was just teasing you. Please don’t do that.”

He didn’t know what to say. He sat there, looking at Liam’s wide, worried eyes, his nose filled with his plummeting chemosignals, his hands wrapped tightly around Theo’s own, and he had no idea what to do. “It’s nothing,” he managed. “It’s probably Alec’s.”

It was a lie, and a bad lie, at that. Probably the worst lie that he had ever told, and the knowledge of that set his teeth on edge. If the Doctors caught him lying this badly, this unconvincingly, he’d be forced to go through a session of penalties to refresh his memories of all their teachings. He would deserve it. Theo has been lying effectively for longer than he’d been a real person, so failing this badly in the face of something so foolish and innocuous earned him correction.

He might’ve been able to get away with it for a while, but the problem was that Liam knew him better than Theo ever wanted to be known, that he looked into his eyes and despite how sterile and blank and even he tried to make his expression, heartbeat and chemosignals, Liam somehow always managed to read him like a book, could see past every single wall and facade that Theo put up to see the wretched vile truth beneath.

“Theo,” Liam’s entire expression collapsed, eyebrows drawing low, lips pursing, eyes going sad. “You’re allowed to want things just for the sake of it, you know? If you want chocolate milk or whipped cream or a dessert treat, then who gives a fuck? It’s your house, your money, your kitchen. You decide what you put into it.”

Theo shook his head, though he didn’t know what he was trying to refute. “It’s stupid,” he muttered, for some reason wanting Liam to know that he wasn’t so concerned with the sweet dairy products as he was seemingly making himself out to be. “It doesn’t even matter.”

“It doesn’t have to matter,” Liam’s face was tight in that way it always was when he tried to teach Theo, in his hesitant and uncertain way, that everything he had learned and forced himself to become with the Dread Doctors didn’t have to be so anymore. “But if it matters to you, then that’s okay. Even little things like this can matter.”

Liam wouldn’t let it go, even as Theo repeatedly asked him to. That night, Liam made them both tall glasses of chocolate milk topped with a generous squirt of whipped cream, and they shared the remaining caramel slice, watching old episodes of Scooby Doo, episodes that even Theo had seen before he was taken, and it just felt so domestic that Theo was almost able to convince himself that he deserved this. Deserved Liam’s weight against his side, whipped cream on his upper lip, the bright, cheerful colours of the show, in an apartment that was, for now, his own.

The plant continued to thrive. Theo would water it, and he would check its progress with the horticulture book. He still didn’t know what kind of plant it was, but he was almost positive it was some kind of succulent. Its leaves were a silvery-green colour and fuzzy to the touch, like the skin of peaches. Around the outside edge was a reddish-brownish colour, rusty, like dried blood. He started watering it whenever the soil looked dry instead of every morning, and he spun the pot around so different sides faced the window, in case that helped with even growth.

He had never kept anything alive before. Killed plenty of things, of course, and had kept things on the brink of death until he no longer had use of them, but a swift and painful death was typically the outcome. He liked to think he kept Liam and the rest of the pack alive, but he could admit that they did a pretty good job of that themselves, and he was just the final line of defence between life and death. But this plant, this furry-leaved succulent the colour of mercury and blood, might be the first time he’s ever intentionally kept anything alive, much less thriving.

It was odd. Apparently, having an apartment and being a person meant that outsiders and other people got to decide the kind of hobbies you had or the pastimes you might partake in. Nobody had told Theo this, of course, but he was nothing if not a good learner.

After a patrol around the preserve, Theo stood in his kitchen early one morning in nothing but a pair of exercise shorts, sipping from his coffee black as pitch with six sugars, scrolling idly through the nonsensical ramblings and amusing images that had been sent through to the group chat the night before. He didn’t understand any of it, but he liked to consider it as just another language, one that he would learn and master just as easily as he had learned Latin, Hebrew, and his irregular understanding of Sumerian.

There was a commotion outside his door. Hissed conversation, the clamour of many things jostling about, the distinct sound of Stiles whining and Lydia’s exasperation. He could probably help them. Moving to open the door and sliding it open so they didn’t have to worry about it. It was kinda heavy, and they sounded like they were struggling with something, so it would’ve been kinder for him to help them.

But he wasn’t kind, so he stayed against the kitchen counter, sipping his coffee, as they eventually wrestled the door open and stumbled into the apartment with their arms laden down with what he could only assume were lots of little plants in plain black plastic pots.

“You’re here,” Lydia said, maybe a little reproachfully, maybe not.

“I am,” Theo replied. “It’s my house. Where else would I be?”

“Little birdy might’ve told us that you’ve been spending an awful lot of time at Liam’s house,” Stiles teased. He was holding most of the plants, a whole precarious armful compared to Lydia’s mere handfuls, edges pinched between her fingers. “You might not even need an apartment for much longer, huh? You’ll just move in with Liam and sleep in his Superman bed and charm Jenna and David into making you meals.”

“Liam doesn’t have a Superman bed.” Theo wasn’t sure why he felt the need to defend him on this, but it just felt important, like letting Stiles talk shit about Liam was the opposite of what a good boyfriend should be doing. “And Mason needs to learn to shut his mouth before someone comes along and does it for him.”

Stiles went to open his mouth, probably to share one of his many witty comments, but Lydia cut him off with a very tired sigh. “These are for you,” she announced, setting her pots on the kitchen counter and getting soil all over the surface. She turned and began to pluck Stiles’ cargo from his arms one by one.

“No,” Theo glared at the pots. “Absolutely not.”

Lydia stared at him like he was speaking an entirely different language. “What do you mean, no?”

“I don’t want any more plants,” Theo told them. He pointed accusingly at the succulent in the corner. “I didn’t even want that one.”

“Sure,” Lydia scoffed. “But these don’t count.”

“You sure about that?” Theo retorted, setting down his empty coffee cup. “They look like plants to me.”

“They’re herbs,” Lydia insisted as if he were a disruptive child who refused to listen. She pointed at each of the pots individually as she named them. “Mint, basil, thyme, chives, coriander, rosemary, sage, oregano.”

“The big one is a chilli plant,” Stiles helpfully pointed at the biggest pot of the bunch. “Alec said you liked spicy foods, so we thought it was smart for you to start growing your own chillies.”

Theo stared at the assortment of plants taking up space on his kitchen counter. These little sprouts in small black plastic pots and copious amounts of soil, labelled by flags stuck into the dirt with the name of the plant and a picture of it fully grown. On the back was probably care instructions, things that he could find in better detail within the pages of his horticulture book written in abysmally tiny script.

“I don’t need anything else to take care of,” Theo tried to protest, but it didn’t come out as harsh as he wanted it to, the edges dulled like an old blade rusted with disuse. “I don’t even know where I’m going to put these.”

“Why?” Stiles teased. He hopped up on Theo’s counter, almost knocking over the potted basil, and felt around for Theo’s coffee cup. He brought it to his lips and drank back the cold dregs of tar-black, sugar-sweet coffee, and he made a disgusted face. “Because you don’t even know how to take care of yourself?”

“Because I’m too busy looking after you chucklefucks, all your angry betas and humans with death wishes and true alphas who think they can take on a whole army with nothing but a smile,” Theo shoved Stiles off the counter, and he stumbled back to his feet with an outraged squawk.

“You don’t have to keep them if you don’t want to,” Lydia said, ignoring Stiles’ offended rant. She was looking at Theo as if she could see right through him, past the wilting papier-mâché skin of the barely human and down into the rotting, vile core of him, the blackened pit fuelled by mercury and kept beating by his sister's stolen heart. “But I would like it if you did.”

The collection of herbs sat clustered thoughtlessly around the window by the succulent in its round blue pot like a little plastic army. He didn’t think about them often. He watered them, nudged them gently aside with his foot when they got in his way, valiantly defended them from Liam’s sticky fingers and Malia’s curious snout. For a week, they sat there, unbothered.

Until he saw some of the leaves start to wilt pitifully, and he realised that he actually liked the barely perceptible scent of mint and basil and oregano that started to infuse every surface of his apartment, fresh and relaxing and better than any scented candle, mixing with the smell of Liam to make a new smell he liked just as much, a smell that reminded him of home. The smell made him think about the kinds of foods he could make. Fresh pasta sauce with sprigs of basil. Bagels with cream cheese and chives. Pizza made on pita bread bases and sprinkled with oregano. Potato salads made with olive oil, chilli, and mint. Roast chicken stuffed with sage.

He rearranged the fire escape in one morning of frustrated productivity. He dragged the deck chair, little wobbly table and janky sun umbrella, only kept stable by its metal weight, into the apartment, careful not to leave scratches or gouges in the wood. He growled in irritation as he pulled in the shoe rack and Liam’s muddy boots kicked off after patrol and Alec’s forgotten cleats left behind after lacrosse practice last week – he had left his housekeys behind and Theo had made him wait outside on the fire escape while he slowly made his way up the elevator to his apartment to let him in – all tumbled onto the ground and kicked clumps of grass and mud and preserve dirt all over the place. He brought a series of little shelves that all stacked atop one another, made of black metal piping, and shoved them into the place furthest against the wall, out of the way. He settled the herbs onto the rack in alphabetical order and arranged the umbrella, the deck chair, the little table and the shoe rack into their new places and swept out all the mud and dirt and finely trimmed grass out the back door. He brought a watering can, an obnoxiously cheerful thing the colour of cheddar cheese or old embalming fluid or Liam’s favourite buttercup yellow mug that he kept in Theo’s kitchen cupboard. The herbs continued to grow, and Theo was using them as often as he could, adding them into dishes that probably didn’t need them, buying fresh lemons so he could add them and mint to ice water to offer guests.

The first time he’d slid a glass across the counter to Liam, his chemosignals had spiked with pleasant surprise, and his eyebrows had shot up into his hairline, but he had, wisely, kept his mouth shut. Apparently, you could teach an old dog new tricks.

A small glass turtle appeared on his bookshelf alongside his wooden wolf pack and his assorted collection of books. It was heavy and fragile, and the pale blue glass shot rainbow fractals around the room whenever the light from the window hit it. He had no idea how it got there, who smuggled it into his apartment and set it on his shelf, how long it had been sitting there. He held it in his hand, turned it over, felt the cool smooth glass between his fingers and realised that he didn’t care who was responsible for it. He could find out – could bring it to his nose and sniff for any residual identification like the Dread Doctors had taught him, like he had taught Josh and Tracy and all the other poor failures, or he could causally mention it at the next pack meeting and see who’s chemosignals shifted or who’s heartrate spiked or who’s dismissal was too forced, could weed out the liars from those who genuinely had no idea what he was talking about.

It was a strange admission. A realisation that had him sinking to the couch and sitting with it for a while. Someone had been in his home, had altered the interior in some small way, had left something of themselves behind like smeared fingerprints at a crime scene, had broken past all his defences and through his lowered guard, and he should be angry about that, should be furious and willing to do something cunning and malicious and petty just to make sure it never happened again. But he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to go through all that effort over something so inconsequential, didn’t want to make a mountain out of a mole hill and blow up this little nugget of peace he had built with his own bloodied hands, had fought fang and claw for a tiny piece of normalcy, when he didn’t have to, and he knew he didn’t have to. This apartment was nothing like the operating theatres beneath countless unnamed cities, and the people coming by and leaving things, the McCall pack, - the pack he so shamefully wanted to be a part of but knew he never could be, even if they wanted him, which felt blasphemous to even hope for - were nothing like the Doctors. They would not leave behind a note with a mission or a task or a victim on the bookshelf instead of knick-knacks and books, would not expect him to rend himself apart and tear out his organs and set them on a silver dish like tainted chimaera foie gras for them to peck over like vultures, would not expect him to notice every single little detail as soon as it was changed and praised him for his pinpoint accuracy and punish him for a mistake so small it never even made it past the barrier of his skull into conception.

Maybe Malia, understanding the concept of laws but not entirely feeling beholden by them, found it in a store she had trailed Scott into and slipped it into her pocket while the clerk wasn’t looking and thought it looked better in Theo’s bare apartment than in Scott’s bedroom. Maybe Alec had seen it at the second-hand store that he and Nolan frequented, the sunlight dancing off its surface like it did now, and had paid two dollars for it and peeled off the sticker and grumbled as he picked at the sticky residue that clung stubbornly to one of its feet. Maybe Melissa had found it in a box of stuff hidden away in the basement and thought that Theo would get more use out of it than she would and conscripted one of the pack to ferry it over and slide it onto the bookshelf when he wasn’t looking. Maybe –

It didn’t matter. He didn’t care. He didn’t want it to matter, didn’t want to care, and so he just… didn’t. He put the turtle back onto the shelf and forced himself to turn away, back to his lukewarm coffee and his grocery list, and pretended like everything was normal, like he was normal, like he was a person who deserved wooden wolves and glass turtles and rainbow fractals of sunlight across his hardwood floors.

Argent brought him a chess set. It was a real chess set too, not the kind you unfolded with the crease in the middle, but one that came with its own standing table and a case lined with fabric to display the hand-carved pieces. The table was made of redgum wood, the light pieces made of birch and the dark pieces made of black walnut, ancient-looking, like they had been passed down from generations. It was by far the most expensive thing that Theo had ever owned.

One afternoon, Argent texted him to tell him he was on his way up, and Theo had made his way down from Derek’s apartment to greet him. Knowing Argent was coming, Theo had left the door unlocked, and by the time he joined him inside, he had seen the chess table already set up in the empty corner near the door beside the kitchen, and Argent was sitting in one of the velvet cushioned wooden chairs, a white pawn already advanced onto the board.

“What the fuck is this?” Theo gaped at him, frozen, in the doorway.

“It looks like a chess set to me,” Argent replied idly, replying to a text from Melissa. “It’s your move.”

“I know that it’s a chess set,” Theo was too shocked to be properly annoyed. He crept closer, brushed his fingers softly over the glossy wood. “Where the hell did you get this? How much did it cost?”

“Didn’t cost me anything. Got it in return for a favour I did for a friend a few months ago. I guess he finally found something good enough to repay me,” Argent slid his phone back into his pocket and raised his eyebrow at Theo. “Are you going to make a move, or what? It came with a clock if you really wanted to play.”

Numb from the waist down, Theo sank into the chair opposite Argent and thoughtlessly moved a pawn. Any other day, he would’ve come up with about a dozen different plays against Argent specifically that would guarantee Theo the victory, but he didn’t even consider it, too shocked by the unexpected generosity to do much more than move his pawn forward a square and hope he hadn’t lost before the game began. “What is it doing in my apartment?”

“It would just be taking up space in Melissa's house,” Argent moved his pawn two spaces forward. His pieces look to be carved from ivory, from animal bones, under the gleaming midafternoon light. “I think you could benefit from it more than anyone else could. I think Stiles and Derek could appreciate the beauty of it, but I don’t know if they’d really get the use out of it that it deserves. It’s old, you know. Maybe even a century old. My old pal, it was made by some sort of ancestor of his and restored over generations.”

Theo moved his rook. “Why’d he give it to you?”

“He’s got no kids, no family to pass it on to when he dies,” Argent eyed Theo from beneath his brows as he moved his knight. “He asked me if I knew anyone who’d appreciate it.”

“And that was me, was it?” Theo made no more moves on the board, just folded his hands limply in his lap. This was nothing like the tchotchkes on the shelf and the accidental herb garden in all their little black pots and the succulent that bloomed near the window and the pots and pans and plates and bowls and cutlery in the kitchen. This was more than that. This was something that someone had given to him, knowing he would enjoy it, knowing him well enough to be certain that he would get some use out of it, that he would, at the very least, appreciate it. Did everyone know this about him? Was he that easy to read? Was he knowable now, perceptible, comprehendible? Every training that the Doctors instilled in him screamed in the back of his head for him to flee from here. He’s stuck around for too long, he’s been compromised, he has to move on and start again and do it better this time. He forced his feet to stay rooted to the spot, like vines had grown out of the hardwood and bound him there. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch,” Argent hummed. His hand was poised above his pieces, respectfully waiting for Theo to get his shit together and make his next move. “It was going to go to waste otherwise. End up in some pawn shop or be lost with all the other junk in Melissa's basement. This way, it goes to a loving home with someone who will appreciate what they’ve got. And I can play chess with someone competent whenever I want. That’s a rare treat these days, surrounded by all these children. Now shut up, say thank you, and make your move.”

“Thank you,” Theo moved his bishop, and he could spy a checkmate in nine moves. “I’m still gonna kick your ass, though.”

He wasn’t sure if he was starting to lose time, or if he was starting to become complacent, shutting off all these vital, important parts of his brain that allowed him to see minor change and every tiny detail, the skills that he had honed through trial and error and desperation. One day, he turned the corner and found a photo frame hanging on his wall. It’s a quaint thing, hanging by a thin twine and made out of simple brown wood. How long had that been hanging there, in plain sight, the only decoration in his otherwise bland apartment? How long had it been right in front of his face and he’d never noticed it?

There was a photo set within it, obviously taken on Nolan’s beloved camera, the one he carried with him almost everywhere. But Nolan was in the photo, sitting on the arm of the couch in the McCall house beside Mason, and on Mason’s other side, Theo looked resigned and defeated, and Liam’s fingers reached for Theo’s face and dragged the corners of his mouth into a smile. Scott was leaning down with his arms around Theo’s shoulders, beaming. Behind them, Stiles was hanging off of Lydia and Derek, who looked both fondly exasperated and resignedly amused. Alec was sitting on the ground between Theo’s knees, head tilted back to settle on Theo’s thigh as he posed. Mason was leaning back against Corey’s chest, both of them making cheesy faces. Malia was stretched out on the floor, stuffing her mouth with a forgotten slice of meat lovers’ pizza.

He remembered that day, but only vaguely, because it was months ago. Just another pack meeting, and Melissa had seen all of them gathered so close together in the lounge room that she simply needed a picture and had retrieved the camera from its precious bag despite Nolan’s feeble protests. Theo didn’t know why he had a copy of that photo. He didn’t know who brought the frame, sneaked into his apartment, and hung it up on his wall without him noticing.

The sight of it made him feel untethered, a little disconnected from his body. Because this wasn’t like the knick-knacks on the shelf or the herbs on the fire escape or the succulent in its big blue pot that he watered and cared for. Unlike all those other things that he could simply remove whenever he felt like it, this was permanent, because even if he decided to take the picture down, the hole in the wall would still be there, forever, unless he cared to cover it up, and he would be constantly reminded of what used to reside there, what used to decorate the otherwise bland apartment.

His room in the operating theatre, where he spent the most time, could hardly be called a bedroom. It was a eight by eight cinder-block cage with an iron door with barely enough space for a cot and a little desk he had salvaged from the side of a road, a stack of papers piled under one of the legs to keep it from wobbling, and a ratty old chair that was kept together with duct tape and super glue, all wedged into a space barely big enough for a dog. The walls were bland and undecorated, unless you counted the gouges and scratches from when Theo was first getting used to the shift, and pictures of his targets he had sticky-taped to the brickwork. The desk was piled high with files and paperwork and documents he needed for any missions he was sent on, and they were all sitting there accumulating dust by now, forgotten and untouched in the time he had been gone. Even if the Dread Doctors had allowed him to decorate his space, even if he had any inkling of interest in it, he wouldn’t even know what to put up. Paintings? Photos? Artwork? Memories? Plaques? Of what? Generic things from a dollar store and the stock photos that came in frames, so he could pretend he was a real person and not just the most useful weapon in the arsenal?

He put up a calendar, once. He hammered a nail into the grout and hung it from a length of green yarn he had severed from a bobbin at a textiles store and walked out with it in his pocket, and the calendar, of various colourful animals on the foreground of an equally vibrant nature background, was free at the post office. He had scribbled in birthdays, important dates, and deadlines. The Pathologist had torn it down and told Theo that if he wanted to be effective, he should have been able to memorise all his important information without relying on outside forces. He hasn't used a calendar since, and had just relied on his own mind, sharp as a blade and filled with more knowledge than a library, for everything.

But he buys himself a calendar. He didn’t know why, but after seeing the photograph hung up in its nice wooden frame, passing the calendar in the rack near the registers at the grocery store wasn’t quite so effortless. He stared at all the options for an embarrassing amount of time, debating the merits of each type and design, arguing about which one he would most accept being in his home, until he eventually felt foolish enough to snatch one at random, tuck it under his arm, chuck some money at the nervous young woman manning the register, and bring it home with him. He looked at the receipt for a long time after he got home, idling in the car park of his apartment – five dollars for a calendar. A calendar he probably wasn’t ever going to use. A calendar that he already had on his phone. A calendar that he wasted five dollars on because someone had nailed a picture frame into his wall with a nice photo in it, and got him thinking about how sad and pathetic his home was.

He sits on his couch to see, arguably for the first time, the calendar he spent too much money on. Every month was a different flower, and Theo decided that putting this on his fridge would expunge him of any dignity he had left in his miserable body. Poppies for January, lavender for February, cornflowers for March, lilies for April, bells of Ireland for May, bougainvillea for June, amaranthus for July, blue and green chrysanthemums for August, delphinium for September, queen lime zinnia for October, marigold for November, forget-me-nots for December. Theo’s fingers traced over the white lilies, the pink-green queen lime zinnia, the pale blue forget-me-nots. He thought about birthdays and flowers and months and how he hadn’t celebrated his birthday since even before the Dread Doctors recruited him.

So, he shoved the calendar in a drawer and forced himself to forget all about it.

The succulent was flourishing, growing steadily bigger and healthier every week, and one day, Theo watered the damp soil and saw little flowers growing out of the dirt. Purple buds, petals folded inwards like a clenched fist, peaking from the soil like a hand clawing from a grave and reaching from the sky. There was no succulent in Theo’s horticulture book that bore purple flowers, and he couldn’t find anything online either.

“Whoa,” Scott complimented one day as he crouched down in front of the plant and admired it from the ground. “Look at how far this thing has come along. It’s huge.”

“I’ve been watering it,” Theo said, though he didn’t know why. Scott didn’t ask for an explanation, so Theo didn’t have to give him one, but he was. He wanted to. “Liam got me a book, and I’ve been learning more about it. I never had plants to care about before. It’s… an interesting exercise.”

“An exercise, huh?” Scott’s mouth tilted upwards into a smile, his tone fond, amused. “What kind of plant is it?”

“A succulent,” Theo said. “I don’t know what kind, though.”

Scott sniffed, his nose wrinkling up, and wiped a hand across his face before he rose to his feet. “I think I’ve got hay fever or something,” he said with a little laugh as his eyes began to water. His breath caught, and he turned to Theo hastily and said, “Hey, do you have any –?”

Theo shoved a tissue box in his face before he sneezed.

He liked writing on the windows. Stiles had a corkboard that he filled up with pictures and pins and different coloured strings, but Theo had the discipline, mental capacity and sense to accomplish the same effect at a much more efficient rate. He brought a ten-pack of water-based markers that came in different colours and wiped away cleanly with a wet paper towel or a wet-wipe, and he used the large floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the backside of his apartment to jot down notes. Sometimes he wrote out his grocery list, things he noticed he needed to get while idly searching his cupboards or rifling through the fridge. Sometimes he wrote down phone numbers, to-do lists, things he needed to remember, snippets of important phone calls, data that Argent or Derek or Noah had sent him, all scrawled out in different colours across the windows.

There was something about having so much space to put his thoughts that felt freeing. Nothing like his copious notebooks and whiteboards and documents all carefully labelled in manila folders and categorised in a filing cabinet in the operating theatre, but this was like someone had cracked into his skull and let all his thoughts pour out to splatter across the glass. It made him feel focused. He could always see it like this. It was the first thing he saw when he came downstairs in the morning and the last thing he saw when he went upstairs at night.

Alec, not much of an artist, had drawn a very ugly cartoon wolf that Theo suspected was supposed to be him, but it was sketched in painfully vivid yellow and pink, so he wasn’t entirely sure if it could be reasonably called anything other than an eyesore. Liam routinely came over just to draw pictures and leave messages while Theo was cooking them both a meal, because Liam had been banned after he put a packet of mac and cheese into the microwave without any water and had almost set the apartment on fire, and though Theo always put up a stink, he never wiped them off, even when they got in the way of the flow of his thoughts, the neat arrangement of the text. Mason had tried to write on it once, and the look on Theo’s face had been enough for him to put the marker down and back slowly away. Wisely, he hadn’t tried it since.

“What, in the actual fuck, is this?” Stiles demanded from behind him, the door slamming open hard enough to make the glass of water on the coffee table ripple. Theo didn’t glance up from his book. He hadn’t gotten this far in Percy Jackson before, and he wasn’t about to let Stiles Stilinski of all people stop him. Jason Grace reminded him of a lot of people. “I heard rumours that you lost your mind, again, but I didn’t believe it. Now I know that everything they’re saying is true. You really are batshit crazy.”

Sighing, Theo replaced his bookmark and set it down on the coffee table. “What are you prattling on about now?”

Stiles had his hands on his hips like a very disgruntled middle-aged lady arguing about the price of a burger. Derek and Lydia stood on either side of him, looking wide-eyed and gobsmacked. “What the fuck have you done to the windows?” Stiles demanded as if Theo hadn’t spoken.

“I’ve used them. They’re serving a purpose,” Theo stood from his comfortable slump on the couch. “It’s no different than what you do with your cute little focus board in your bedroom with your rainbow string and your pretty pins. This is how you’re supposed to do it, which you would know if you had half a brain stuffed inside that empty skull of yours, but I guess not all of us can be lucky enough to be born with common sense.”

“My cute little…? Okay, what the fuck?” Stiles stormed into the room, waving his arms about like one of those inflatable men outside of used car lots. “First of all, you cannot possibly believe that your method is better than mine. We’re doing the same thing! Second of all - !”

“If you’re finished,” Theo interrupted smoothly, and the satisfying way that it set Stiles spluttering had him suppressing a smile. “Argent said you were coming by to bring me some new information?”

Lydia produced a pile of paper from her satchel and handed it to Theo, looking sceptically at the writing on the windows. “I have to admit; this does look a little… insane.”

“I need the space.” Theo turned his back on them and began to riffle through the papers, picking out words like Monroe and South Dakota and Hunters and True Alpha mutt, , and he smiled a little bit at that. He scanned for coordinates, for pictures, for surveillance, and found very little of anything worthwhile. “What’s she doing in South Dakota?”

“Argent thinks she’s got a safe house or something there. One of his old contacts has reported an increase in Hunter activity, and not the good kind.” Derek leaned his hip up against the counter. “He’s sending someone to go check it out.”

Theo frowned, uncapping a red marker with his teeth and spitting the lid into his hand. “I haven’t heard about that.”

Unbothered, Derek shrugged. “Then I guess you don’t have to worry about it.”

It rankled something in Theo, an omnipresent, lurking part of him that was compelled to worry about it, needed to be always kept in the loop and designated to send to places like a honed missile, set it off and watch it go. He hated knowing that important and probably dangerous things were happening all around him, so close that he could reach out and touch them, but he was just uninvolved enough for it to pass him by like a road sign on the freeway. When did he become this person? This person who would tend to his pot plant and read his new books and write on his windows in peace when terrible things were happening? He wasn’t sure how he felt about it, so he drew a solid red line between is she recruiting new Hunters? and the newly added increased Hunter activity in South Dakota.

“Milk, sugar, cinnamon, tartar sauce, Lucky Charms, toothpaste, Jenna’s iced coffee,” Stiles rattled off from his grocery list with his nose almost pressed against the window. “This one says, ‘try not to make anyone cry today’. Seriously, what the hell is this?”

“Alec thinks that adding Lucky Charms to my list means I’ll just buy it from him,” Theo said absently as he continued to write. “And last week I accidentally made some kid at a lemonade stand cry because I told him that I could smell the rotten lemons he used and he was going to make people sick. Liam didn’t think it was very funny.”

“What do you even use this for?” Stiles waved angrily at the windows. Theo wasn’t invested in the slightest, but he did gain a perverse amount of joy out of watching him lose his fucking mind over something so inconsequential. “You’re not supposed to use a focus board for ten different things. You’re not supposed to put your shopping list and reminders to not be a dick and stupid cartoons on it.”

“According to you, who, last time I checked, was not exactly the leading expert in espionage and forethought,” Theo pointed out. “Just because you can only manage to concentrate on one thing at a time doesn’t mean that the rest of us need to be so restrictive.”

“Okay!” Lydia announced overly cheerfully as Stiles’ face instantly turned a shade of maroon that Theo hadn’t seen before, without it pouring out of a slowly dying body. She set both hands on his shoulders and steered him away from the window. “We’re going to get out of here before Stiles pops a gasket. We’ll see you later.”

“Bye,” Theo replied. “Hope he doesn’t have an aneurysm in the elevator.”

Swiftly, Lydia and Stiles left, and Theo could hear them bickering all the way down the hallway and into the elevator. But Derek remained, his chemosignals vaguely curious and his heartbeat steady, still leaning his hip against the counter. Unlike Lydia’s morbid fascination and Stiles’ outright hostility towards the scribblings on the windows, Derek seemed to be reading them all slowly, methodically, as if he actually cared about what was written there.

“What?” Theo bit out when he started to feel like he was being watched.

“Nothing,” Derek replied, amused. “I like it, that’s all. Sometimes you’ve just got to get everything that’s in here,” he wiggled his fingers at the side of his head and then waved his hand towards the window like shaking water off, “out there.”

“It helps,” Theo admitted, stepping away from the windows and recapping his marker. He took in all the new information he had added and set the papers down on the dining table for him to put away later. “I like getting to see it all laid out. With the Doctors, I sort of just had to have it in my head ready to spit it out for them at a moment’s notice, but… I don’t know, I kinda like how messy it is.”

“Everyone can add to it,” Derek said. “It’s not just a focus board, it’s like… a mural.”

Theo looked at his grocery list crammed into the corner, at Alec’s silly little neon drawing and at Liam’s loving reminder scrawled in his messy script. In the corner, written in white and so small that nobody would see it if they didn’t know it was there, was a note that read, ‘never forget that I love you’.

“Yeah,” Theo cleared his throat – why was it so thick all of a sudden? “I guess you’re right.”

There was still a part of Theo, a not-so-significant part but an easily ignorable part, that was still getting used to sharing a bed with someone. Liam snored, and he moved around a lot, and he threw off heat like a furnace while even Theo’s blood was cold, like a snake's, and sometimes he muttered wordlessly in his sleep, talking to someone in his dreams. He would latch himself onto Theo and breathe into his skin, nose pressed against his ribs and chin digging into his chest, and Theo would cup one hand at the back of his head, fingers tangled in his hair, and would listen to his heartbeat and breathing as he stared up at the ceiling.

That wasn’t to say he didn’t like it. Waking up with Liam’s sleeping face inches from his own as his first sight of the day was a blessing and a gift that Theo still believed he didn’t deserve. Knowing the cadence of his breathing and the pattern of his heartbeat were the only lessons that Theo ever wanted to learn, these days. Getting to watch him for a few moments as his face twitched and his eyes moved beneath his lids and his brow wrinkled in sleep before he inevitably woke up was Theo’s favourite sight.

Sometimes, the two of them would curl up under the blankets and make out until hunger or the need for coffee drew them down to the kitchen, and sometimes they woke up needing a little bit more than a slow, lazy make-out and would tear off their clothes and toss them aside and go at it like dogs. But sometimes they just lay there, facing each other on their respective pillows, speaking in soft, sleep-rough voices, morning breath and dried drool cracked on their chin and mused bedhead and bleary eyes and all. Theo would map every wrinkle and every freckle and every curve of Liam’s face, would memorise the sheen of his eyes and the way his tongue darted out to wet his lips and the way his hair made him look absolutely ridiculous, and he would fall in love with him a little bit more every time.

“You’re staring,” Liam mumbled muzzily. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you that it’s not nice to stare?”

“No,” Theo replied. “I was raised by immortal megalomaniac scientists who tore out my organs and turned me into a supernatural creature. Staring 1-0-1 was not exactly high on their course list.”

If the apartment was Theo’s first home, then it was definitely Liam’s second home. He had no trouble making himself comfortable. He brought an eight-pack of rainbow metal straws and stored them in a little plastic cup with a picture of Snoopy on it in the cupboard where Theo kept his glasses, and he was intent on using them whenever he could, even sticking one in Theo’s bottle of beer one day to try and convince him to use them. Theo had taken one look at it, pulled it from the bottle, and flicked it at Liam, so it bounced off the side of his head.

There was almost always at least one pair of muddy lacrosse boots on the fire escape. He kicked his lacrosse gear into a messy pile in one of the corners, so nobody tripped over it. He dumped his backpack near the front door and scattered his homework all over the place. Jenna crocheted Theo a blanket, and Liam used it more often than not, always wrapped up in it when they watched TV, and now it resided on the back of his couch for easy use. Liam’s clothes were inexplicably intermingled with Theo’s in his bedroom drawers, their pyjamas and their hoodies and their shorts and their pants and their singlets and even their fucking underwear. He had a toothbrush in his bathroom, a childishly colourful thing that looked cartoony beside Theo's sleek black, sensible one.

The place had even started to fucking smell like him. It smelled more like Liam than it smelled like Theo, and Theo was the one who actually lived in the damn place. Even when he cracked the door and threw open all the windows, propping the fire escape on that rickety mud-encrusted shoe rack, and lit every candle he owned, he still couldn’t get rid of the smell. Not like he cared overly much, because, though he would never admit it, Theo liked the smell of Liam infusing into every inch of his house, so ingrained into his space that he had found his permanent way even into his sinuses.

It was Liam, really, who taught Theo the most about having a home. He taught Theo that sometimes it was okay to walk around in nothing but his underwear, because nobody could see him up here, even with the wall of windows, and it was his house anyway, so nobody could tell him what he could and couldn’t wear. Taught him that it was okay to lounge in bed all day when he couldn’t be bothered getting up and doing anything other than eating and occasional trips to the bathroom, and that if he ever wanted to spend a whole day in his pyjamas, then that was alright too. Taught him that he could listen to any music he liked, could cook any food he wanted, could watch whatever he fancied, without giving a fuck about what other people might say about it. Taught him that he could stay up as late as he cared to and get up at midday if he desired, that he could leave the apartment for a stroll or a trip to the store or to satisfy a late-night craving in the early hours of the morning when the sky was still dark as pitch. That he didn’t have to answer to anyone, and his decisions were his own, his whereabouts not something he needed to report with, his days allowed to be as meaningless and uneventful as he dared.

At first, it felt wrong. To deviate from his schedule, to eat plastic wrapped artificial cheese and buttered white bread for lunch, to indulge and eat a few messy handfuls of Alec’s sugary cereals, to become invested in a documentary about Chernobyl only to check the time and find that it was already two in the morning, that he could lounge around in one of Liam’s hoodies and a pair of pyjama pants with holes in the knees and frayed ankles, to wake naturally at six in the morning like he had done for years and make the conscious decision to stay and bed where it was warm and soft and go back to sleep until nine, to wake up restless at four in the morning and go for a walk before going back to sleep, to be so bored that he rode the elevator up four floors to visit Derek at all hours of the day or cross the hallway and barge into Alec’s apartment to repay the favour, to have days that were not productive and efficient and planned right down to the last minute and instead were used solely to just be lazy.

Liam’s hands were calloused from years of lacrosse and yet soft from an early life without harm or strife, and when Theo held them in his own, he was keenly aware of the difference between them. Liam ran warm, and he could feel his touch already warming him up where their hands were pressed together. Theo’s fingers were longer than Liam’s, but Liam’s palm was broader. They both had scars on their palms, but Liam’s was a raised nick near the long side of his thumb from slicing it on a piece of broken crockery when he was a child, and Theo had multiple age-old silvery ones from various weapons, altercations and experimentation.

“This is so stupid,” Theo huffed into Liam’s neck as they slow danced in their socks and pyjamas in the space between the kitchen, the couch and the dining table. Music played from Liam’s phone, tossed onto the arm of the couch, something slow and soft and gentle, vaguely familiar to Theo in the way that most popular things were, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. “What are we even doing?”

“We’re dancing,” Liam replied with a smile. Theo could feel the curve of it where his face was pressed into his hair. “Can’t you tell?”

“No,” Theo retorted, just to be an ass. “This doesn’t look anything like the dancing I know.”

“Yeah,” Liam sounded amused, because no matter how many times Theo tried to test the waters or drive him away with well-placed barbs or specially crafted insults, Liam always saw straight through it. “Because you’ve never danced in your socks with anyone before. You wouldn’t know dancing if it bit you in the ass.”

“Have you?” Theo asked, though he didn’t know why. It was a stupid question. “You dance in your socks often?”

“I’ve always done it with my mum. We’d put on the radio and listen to whatever pop song was on, and we’d dance until we were out of breath,” Liam said. “And we do it with David, too, sometimes. Sometimes I do it alone in my room.”

There was something about the image of Liam, eight years old in his superman pyjamas spinning hand in hand with Jenna, at thirteen years old jumping about and singing at the top of his lungs with Jenna on one side and David and the other, at sixteen years old with his earphones in alone in his bedroom sliding and around and pretending to sing into a microphone in nothing but his socks and undies, that was so terribly endearing that it made Theo bite his lip until he could taste the tang of blood to suppress it. He didn’t want to ruin this perfect moment by saying something sappy or depressing.

When they finally pulled back, just far enough to see each other’s faces, Liam was smiling so big, and his chemosignals were so syrupy sweet that it threatened to give Theo a toothache. His cheeks were pink, his nose was scrunched, and his eyes sparkled with mirth. Theo wanted to kiss him, so when Liam opened his mouth to say something to ruin the mood, he gave in to the urge and kissed him hard enough to push him onto the back of the couch, his phone being covered by his body, the music muted and muffled against them as Theo pulled off his shirt and kissed him until they were both breathless.

One morning, he’s battling with some scrambled eggs and his temperamental toaster – only temperamental because Malia had used a fork to try and retrieve a lost piece of bread and almost short-circuited the damn thing and electrocuted herself – when commotion at the front door had him sighing and setting aside his breakfast. “One morning,” he grumbled to himself as he made his way towards it. “All I ask is for one peaceful morning.”

Yanking open the door revealed Alec standing there in nothing in his pyjama shorts – not that Theo could tell, really, because his whole body was covered by the massive, gift-wrapped square he was holding, arms stretched wide and fingers barely peaking out from the edges. He had to tilt his chin back to peek his head over the top. “You’re home!” He exclaimed, muffled with about four nails between his teeth.

“I am,” Sceptical, Theo stepped aside so Alec could enter and deposit his very flat cargo on the couch. “What is this?”

“A gift,” Alec spat the nails into his hand as Theo shut the door and moved warily towards him. “I saw it and thought of you. Don’t worry, you’ll love it. Open it, come on, I wrapped it and everything. I had to actually buy that wrapping paper, so you know, be grateful.”

Tearing away the obnoxious black and white striped wrapping paper revealed a very large pinboard with a pale wooden border. There was sticky residue on the back of it where a price tag or barcode had been clumsily removed - could nobody in the pack remove those stickers without leaving a mess? “What is this supposed to be?”

“Decoration for your apartment,” Alec beamed, proud of himself. “I figured you could hang it up on that big blank wall in your kitchen, and you can put reminders and pictures and notes and things.”

“That’s what the windows are for,” Theo told him. “And if you haven’t noticed, I don’t exactly hang up anything permanent.”

Alec furrowed his brow and pointed triumphantly over his shoulder at the picture frame of the whole pack hanging lonely on the wall. “Oh yeah? Then how do you explain that one?”

“Yeah, about that,” Theo eyed Alec carefully. His chemosignals were perhaps a little excitable but otherwise calm; his heartbeat was bland and even. “You didn’t hang that up, did you?”

“No, I actually like being alive, so I know better,” Alec shrugged. “I should’ve known you didn’t do it. It was very out of character.”

Though Theo wanted to question him very thoroughly about what, exactly, he believed to be ‘out of character’ for him, instead, he shook his head. “It’s fine. I’ll figure it out.”

“Well, now that we’ve got the conversation out of the way,” Alec hefted the corkboard and struggled to tuck it awkwardly under his arm, the nails cupped in his other hand. “Have you got a hammer?”

“You’re not hanging that up,” Theo insisted as he followed Alec towards the blank wall of his kitchen. “Alec. Alec, can you hear me? Are you listening? You’re not hanging that ugly thing up in my apartment. Don’t even think about it. I’ll gut you with my bare hands and eat your organs. I’ll skin you and wear your hide as a hat. I’ll -”

Alec hung up the corkboard with nails narrowly missing electrical lines, and Theo had no choice but to walk away and let it happen.

His succulent was growing, the leaves looking strong and healthy, and the little purple buds maturing and beginning to unfurl, the soil and base of the plant peppered with these vibrant purple flowers. He watered it, watched the droplets roll off the leaves and fall onto the flowers below, and caught sight of the calendar hanging on his fridge.

He stood up so fast he got lightheaded. That thing had been shoved in the lovingly designated junk drawer ever since Theo brought it, and the last thing he ever wanted to do was hang it up. He probably had Liam to blame, or Alec, or hell, any other member of the pack who snooped around when Theo wasn’t looking. They were all meddlers, every last one of them.

Stalking his way to the fridge with the intention of tearing off the calendar, he froze when he saw writing scrawled in Liam’s chicken scratch on the dates. Gingerly, he pulled it off and began to flick through the months, reading the birthdays written sporadically on various days. 

Liam: October 11th. Corey: September 25th. Mason: October 4th. Alec: June 10th. Nolan: August 5th.

It was just five birthdays, five days filled in, four months with writing in the little boxes, but Theo still felt like the floor was falling out from under him and any moment now, Tara’s hand would be reaching through the floorboards and dragging him back down with her. He sat hard on the arm of the couch, lightheaded.

He was still looking at October dumbly when he heard socked feet descend the spiral staircase and shuffle towards him, Liam’s hand gliding gently across his back. “Hey,” he murmured sleepily. Theo wondered if his chemosignals or his heartbeat had done something drastic enough to wake Liam from his sleep, or if there was something else there, something deeper, something more intuitive and preternatural that had Liam seeking him out still half-asleep. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” Theo shrugged. And really, it was nothing, nothing at all. “Just this calendar. I don’t know how it got on my fridge.”

“I put it there,” Liam told him. “I found it in the drawer and thought you might’ve just forgotten about it, so I just put it up. There was a magnet on the back. I thought you might like that better than hanging it somewhere.”

“Did you put these birthdays in, too?”

“Yeah. I thought that’s what you brought it for. To remember everybody’s birthdays and stuff.”

Theo shook his head. “I didn’t buy it. I mean, I did buy it, but I didn’t mean to.”

For a moment, Liam was quiet, thinking. They were both utterly still except for the glide of Liam’s hand across Theo’s upper back and shoulder blades, the pressure consistent and grounding. “Theo,” he said carefully, like navigating a minefield. “You did mean to buy it. I saw the receipt. I mean, you spent five dollars on a calendar, and the last time we went out for breakfast, you refused to spend the extra two dollars on halloumi cheese. Maybe you didn’t know what you were buying it for, but you definitely meant to do it. You never do anything without having a reason. Maybe you just hadn’t known your reason for it yet.”

He had brought the calendar on a whim and instantly regretted it. He wished that he could tell Liam that he was right, that he had stumbled across the correct answer, but he couldn’t. He was trying to do less lying these days, and especially to Liam. “Maybe,” he allowed, setting the calendar down, flicking through the months.

“Why are you freaking out about this?” Liam asked softly. “I didn’t think it would be such a big deal. People use calendars all the time. I know that Noah has at least two, and we use one at home.”

“You start caring about people’s birthdays, and you have to accept that you’re going to know these people for a long time,” Theo hated the lily of April, the pure white thing with delicate petals and optimistic hope for a better future. “It’s more permanent than I’m used to.”

“I hate to break it to you, but none of us are going away any time soon. You’re pretty stuck with us,” Liam’s hand came up to play with the hairs at the back of Theo’s neck. “Do you want to add your birthday?”

Theo shook his head. “I know when my birthday is. I don’t need it written down for all those sticky-beaks you call friends to see.”

“Okay, okay,” Liam huffed a laugh. “Drama queen. What do you want me to do with it? If you really don’t like it, you don’t have to keep it. I just thought you’d like to have that information on hand. But I can throw it out of you like.”

The problem was that Liam was right – despite it being awfully exposing and way too invested than Theo ever wanted to be, he craved knowledge and information like plants craved the sunlight, a sunflower always tilted towards the rising sun for a hint of its rays. “It’s fine. You can put it back.”

Liam placed a kiss on Theo’s crown as he rose from the couch and replaced the calendar on the fridge.

Very early on, Theo regretted giving Derek and Alec his spare keys. He had one for each of them, of course, set in the bowl where Theo kept his own keys when he didn’t need them, designated with random keychains he brought for a deal at the corner store. But he, at least, was respectful. He didn’t barge in unannounced when they weren’t expecting him and didn’t make himself at home when they were out, and he didn’t riffle through their pantry and steal their food and ‘borrow’ their linens and towels with no intention of giving them back. He was respectful, though lord knew they didn’t deserve any respect from him.

There was a time of day when the sunlight would stream in through the wall of windows and would make the whole apartment incredibly warm, almost like a sauna, everything lighting up like someone had turned on a spotlight and the enclosed space turning humid and prickling with warmth. Theo liked to strip off and set his folded clothes aside, and shift fully into his wolf so he could lie there and bask in the direct sunlight. He threw open the door to the fire escape to let the cool breeze in, and he dozed there, content and comfortable, as a wolf spread out on the floor.

The front door was slid open, and Theo was rudely woken from his nap to see Derek shuffling inside. “Oh, hey,” he said mildly as he kicked the door shut with his heel, his spare keys to Theo’s apartment dangling from his finger. His arms were wrapped around something big and bulky that he was carrying effortlessly into the room. He settled in the corner near Argent’s chess set and began to diligently unpack, paying Theo no mind as he watched him idly. “Don’t mind me.”

Reluctantly, Theo rose to his feet. He stretched and felt his bones pop and creak as his muscles relaxed, yawned large enough to hurt his jaw, licked his lips and blinked the sleep from his eyes as he trudged over. He bumped his large body against Derek’s side, and Derek’s hand fell to find its way to Theo’s scruff, and he dragged his fingers through his thick fur as he arranged things one-handed.

It looked like a waist-high shelf with glass doors that opened up, and as Theo watched, Derek carefully set a polished-wooden box with a plexiglass lid atop it. Theo only realised that it was a record player and that the shelf was filled with vinyls when Derek opened the doors to select one, gently shook it out of the sleeve and placed it in the record player. The dulcet beats of Under Pressure filled the apartment.

“Lydia found this at a garage sale and thought you might like it,” Derek explained. Theo twisted his head to bite reproachfully at the thin skin of his wrist, but Derek paid him no mind, just scratched him between his ears. “And Stiles was getting rid of these vinyls anyway, so I thought you’d better have them.”

Theo wished that people would stop giving him things, would stop thinking about him when they saw things he might like or would interest him. He didn’t need or want anybody’s charity or their help. He was perfectly capable of making this new life his own – sure, he was barely even human, and yeah, maybe he was more a weapon than a person, and okay, maybe this was the first time he’s ever got to live his own life the way he wanted to live it, but he didn’t need anybody to hand-feed him his humanity. He wanted to figure it out on his own. He had his potted plant, he had his knick-knacks on the shelf, he had pots and pans and a corkboard full of photos and a floral calendar of birthdays and a framed photo of the pack on the wall and an herb garden on the fire escape and a perfect patch of midday sunlight. He didn’t need anything else.

Yawning, Derek stepped away and pulled his shirt over his shoulder. “If you don’t mind,” he said, unbuckling his belt, shimmying out of his jeans and underwear and kicking his clothes away as he took off his shoes. “I think I’ll join you.”

Two black wolves slumbered spread out in the patch of sunlight that streamed across the apartment as David Bowie and Queen played in the background.

And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves

Dates continued to be added to the calendar, and Theo had no idea who was writing them in. He couldn’t identify the handwriting because it was different every time.

Stiles: September 30th. Lydia: March 19th. Derek: September 1st. Scott: October 11th. Malia: November 28th.

Theo had flicked through it and caught sight of all the additions, and could do nothing more but sigh, because what else could he do? Scott had seen his birthday written there in blue ink and had grinned so brightly that Theo was almost blinded, his chemosignals going clear and airy with unexpected joy.

More trinkets appeared on his bookshelf. A snowglobe with a golden retriever figure inside it that reminded him embarrassingly of Liam. A yarn bracelet Malia had braided. A smooth rock painted with colourful decorations. An ornate teacup of white porcelain and blue details. Another wooden wolf with its tail in the air and its front paws covering its eyes and snout. Deaton had given him a very old autopsy kit wrapped in a thin leather pouch. There was a photo frame that Alec had made and decorated at one of those DIY craft stores, and it contained a photo of Theo and Liam curled up together, asleep on the couch in the McCall home, nestled under a blanket, Liam asleep on Theo’s chest, and Theo’s face turned into Liam’s hair. It was front and centre on the shelf, a place of pride.

He watered his plant. Whenever the leaves started to droop, he gave it more water, and the deep purple blossoms continued to grow and grow. He thought they were nice, dangerous and severe-looking yet so measly and weak. He could kill them by pinching them a little too hard between his fingers, or plucking them firmly from the soil, or breaking them in half by the stem. But they were beautiful, in their own way.

Malia didn’t like them. Every time she came, whether she was two-legged or four, she would wrinkle her nose up in disgust and would give the pot a wide berth, as if she was offended by its very presence.

“What’s your problem?” Theo asked her one day, curiosity nipping at his heels. “You scared of a plant?”

“I don’t know,” Malia answered honestly for once, eyeing the succulent as if it had recently cornered her in an alley and taken her money. “I don’t like the way it makes me feel.”

He didn’t know what to say about that, so he didn’t say anything at all.

Theo never thought that he would actually have… stuff. Like, real stuff, stuff he owned, like a selection of jackets lining his wardrobe and a series of shoes that he can wear for different occasions. He had a favourite blanket, brought for him by Jenna on one of her many shopping trips, warm and fluffy and blue, that sits on the back of his couch. The book of Latin that Argent gifted him, so old and worn that the pages were thin and yellowed and the cover flaked off under his fingers. There was a framed photo taken by Nolan on his bedside table of him, Liam and Alec at a club that he had been unwillingly dragged to, the two of them wearing hideous face paint and an obscene amount of glitter on their cheeks, over their eyes, in their hair. Theo was in the middle, squished between them, wearing a pink feathered boa they had draped around his shoulders for the picture. It was a good night, and Theo had allowed himself to be dragged to the dancefloor at least once before putting his foot down at three in the morning and escorting everyone home.

He’d never had his own things before. He’d had things that he brought and used for assignments, things that would help him further a con, but nothing he’d brought or owned just because he wanted to. Maybe when he was younger, but his memories of that time were spotty at best and non-existent at worst, pulled right from his head just like everything else had been taken from him. He thought, maybe, he might’ve had a collection of Ninja Turtle action figures that Melissa had brought him for his birthday one year, but that was it. The Doctors never told him he wasn’t allowed to own things, but he knew that certain belongings were not permitted, and he also didn’t see the point in possessions. They were distractions. They were worthless. They just got in his way.

Now, he had a wardrobe and a dresser full of clothes and a bookshelf full of trinkets, he had a series of blankets and an obscene amount of towels, plates and bowls and pots and pans, forks and knives and spoons, he had a calendar of birthdays and a corkboard with recites and Polaroids and letters, and writing on the window and a fire escape with a herb garden, a potted plant with flowers and a photo frame hanging on his wall of people he, against his better judgment, has come to care about.

What would he take with him if he needed to leave? If he overstayed his welcome and the pack remembered the viper they had allowed to slither into their den, if they decided, one day, that he had outlasted his usefulness and sent him packing, as so many people had before? Sure, Liam and Alec would kick up a fuss, and Scott would be against it, but there might come a time when he overstepped a solid line and broke one of their precious moral rules, when he proved the chimera in him promised only terrible things, reminded them that he was barely even human, and the choices were to die, to be sent back to the Skinwalkers, or leave. It would tear him apart, but Theo would leave.

It used to be simple. He’d pack his two duffle bags – the big black ones hidden under his bed, empty, for the first time in a decade – and would fill them with his clothes, jackets, shoes and underwear, with the cash he had stashed away around the apartment, with the fake IDs the Dread Doctor’s made and the toiletries in the upstairs bathroom. He’d fill his truck and run.

Now, he had things that mattered to him. What would he bring with him if they asked him to leave tomorrow? What did he deem to be the most important things? He would bring the photo of Alec and Liam from his bedside table, and after a brief hesitation, he would take the one hanging on the wall of the pack.  He would leave behind all the trinkets on the shelf, his favourite blanket and his potted plant. He would leave all the books, except for The Colorado Kid and the Latin tome from Argent, which could be useful in the future. He would leave the corkboard and the calendar, though he would consider it for a real second, and feel stupid about the brief hesitation later. He would try to bring everything that reminded him of Liam, but it wouldn’t all fit in his truck, so he’d bring some of the hoodies and sweatpants he left in his apartment, anything that smelled like him, any notes he had written and pinned up on the corkboard, any knick-knacks he had smuggled in. He would leave behind the windows and all the things written on them.

See. It mattered now. He couldn’t just load up a bag and go. Now, he had to think about things, weigh up the pros and cons, put numerical amounts to how much they mattered to him and what he couldn’t live without, what would tear him apart to leave behind, what he would miss.

Even the perfect patch of midday sunlight from the wall of windows.

All his life, Theo had been able to pack up and move on at a moment's notice. When a mission went south, or a con outlasted its usefulness, he was able to kill the version of himself that no longer mattered and skip town, return to the operating theatre, and continue on. He could throw his things in his truck and go. He never owned so many things in his life, nothing that he didn’t care about losing, nothing that actually mattered to him. Fake parents and temporary friends had brought him things, sure, but he felt nothing about those possessions. They stopped existing the moment he could no longer see them.

And now he was staring at all his belongings and wondering what he could leave behind if he ever had to go. And still, to this day, he didn't know how he was ever going to manage it.

Nobody lived the life that Theo lived and escaped it unscathed. His skin did not scar; his removed and replaced organs adapted to his body and settled as if they were his originals, his poisoned blood did not fester, the lesions on his brain from memories taken were only present in his imagination. Unblemished, inside to out.

And so, he dreams. Of Scott’s broken and bloody body lying prostrate beneath Theo, of Liam lying there instead, his sightless eyes staring past Theo to the stars above, his hot blood coating his claws. He dreamt of Alec screaming and crying and growling through a mouthful of fangs as he was tortured by a Hunter, peeling off layers of skin and stabbing a knife down to the bone. Derek’s wolf and Malia’s coyote twisted at unnatural angles; fur matted with blood. The pack, decimated. Monroe, victorious. Theo, standing alone in the middle of it all, a survivor to the very end, even when he wished he wasn’t.

He dreamt of the Dread Doctors, the operating theatres, the mercury and the memory treatments, the procedures and the punishments. He dreamt about Josh and Tracy and Corey and Donovan. He dreamt about the Surgeon's raspy disappointment, the Pathologist's bitter corrections, the Geneticist's amused observations. He dreamt about their hands in him, on him, through him, injecting and removing and changing and twisting, their voices in his ears and in his head and in his soul, always with him like the burn of mercury, a disease he can’t sweat out.

More often than not, he dreamt of Tara. Mostly, it was the Tara from the Skinwalker’s Prison, the drowned, bloated corpse of a girl with the open wound on her chest from the unwilling heart surgery barely hidden beneath her bloodied hospital gown, her hair wet where it dangled around her face, her fingers clawed and hands impossibly strong as she chased him through the hospital and rammed her hand into his chest to tear out his heart. Sometimes, he dreamt about the person he imagined Tara might’ve been today if he’d given her that option – he thought she might’ve been a teacher, maybe, or worked with children in some way. She always had a soft spot for kids, anybody but Theo.

Rarely, he dreamt of the girl she was before that night, mostly because Theo’s memory of those days was spotty and non-existent. He remembered his parents more than he remembered Tara. How they would leave him in the hospital for days at a time after an episode of asthma or heart palpitations because they didn’t have the time to stay with him, how everything he wished for was an inconvenience and how he was shown more love and consideration from the McCall’s and the Stilinski’s than he was shown from his own parents. How his parents never bothered to teach him how to ride a bike, or how to swim, because what would be the point? He’d never be able to do it anyway. But Tara had been whiny, and a know-it-all, and Theo didn’t like her very much because she was their parents’ favourite, and he was jealous of her, envious of their easy love for her. But sometimes, during thunderstorms or high winds that would rock the foundations of the house, he would creep into her room, and she would throw back the covers, and he’d crawl into bed with her until it passed.

The only problem with these nightmares, despite how used to them Theo was by now, was that there was no disguising his chemosignals, his heartbeat and his scent during sleep. He had tried, of course. The Geneticist had told him it was possible, but Theo had never quite figured it out. He was a light sleeper, sure, but there were some things that even the First Chimera couldn’t do - one of his only failures. 

He didn’t know why, but somehow, he always slept sounder when Liam was warming the other side of the bed, sheets tangled around his legs, hair flaring out around the pillow, snoring mightily in Theo’s ear. Maybe it was his warmth, or his heartbeat, or the constant rhythm of his breathing, the space he took up in his cold, empty bed. Theo didn’t know. But whenever Liam slept over, Theo’s dreams were painless and gentle, devoid of blood and rotten memories and sensations that zinged through him like phantom limbs. He dreamt easily, if he dreamt at all. Sometimes, he fell asleep and seemed to wake up just a moment later with sunlight streaming into the room and Liam looking more sleep-rumpled and bed-headed than before. It was easy, though regretful, for someone like Theo, someone raised by the Dread Doctors, to acknowledge the truth of it, but he’d rather tear out Tara’s heart than admit it to anyone, Liam least of all.

The nightmare tonight was a particularly bad one. So bad, in fact, that Theo spent most of the time oscillating between trying to wake up and being confident that he wasn’t dreaming at all. Clawing his way out of the morgue, sprinting through the sterile halls of the hospital, outrunning Tara but never quite fast enough to evade her grasp, her hand plunging through bone and muscle, ribs and sternum and cartilage, to wrap around his heart, her heart, and tear it out of him, squeezing until her knuckles went white as rivulets of black, noxious blood and gleaming silver mercury dripped over her fingers and fell like raindrops onto his face. He ran and ran and ran, the cycle continuing again and again, waking up and freeing himself and running and being caught and Tara taking her heart back and dying and –

Sometimes it wasn’t Tara. Sometimes it was Liam. Sometimes, Theo would stumble out of the mortuary and whip around the corner to see Liam chasing him instead, eyes gold and angry and fangs bared, clawed hands already dripping with blood from previous attempts at Theo’s life. They race, Liam always chasing Theo through the halls like it was a round of cat and mouse, toying with him, playing a childhood game of tag around the playground with his friends, except the prize for catching Theo was his heart. It was hard to run from Liam. Theo never imagined him ever running away from someone he loved so much, somebody he wanted so much. Now he ran through the halls of the hospital, and his bare feet slipped on the bloodstained epoxy. The lights flickered in a way that made his head hurt, his own heartbeat and pulse and breath burning burning burning, and Liam smelling of nothing but rage and satisfaction and Theo’s own blood. It almost reached a point where Theo stopped running. He gave up, knowing he could never escape him, and turned to let Liam claim his prize, knowing that a death from the man he loved was a better death than a monster like him could hope for.

He jerked awake with his fangs piercing into his gums and his eyes flaring hotly, gold reflecting off the light fitting in the roof. He tasted blood from where he had sunk his fangs into his tongue, and a fresh gash bled sluggishly on his chest where his claws had raked through him. That had probably been what woke him up, the very real bright burst of pain, enough to remind him that everything else he was feeling was just a memory. A twisted one, but a memory all the same. This shirt was ruined, torn and bloodstained and stinking of fear-sweat. He’d have to get rid of it until Liam found it and asked too many questions.

For a little while, he just… lay there. In his sheets that stunk of fear and in a tangled blanket that was damp with his sweat, and now with his blood. He stared up at the ceiling, let his eyes trace shapes in the darkness, and waited for his heartbeat to gradually settle, for his breathing to slow, for his jackrabbit pulse to even into something approaching normal. He let the panic seep from him in increments until it was just him alone in his room with the darkness and the healing wound in his chest and the memory.

But he wasn’t alone, was he, because on the main floor of the apartment, he could hear two familiar heartbeats, the muffled drone of conversation carried to the upper level, the bitter chemosignals of barely restrained worry. Theo threw the covers off of himself and crept down the obnoxiously inconvenient spiral staircase to behold the living room.

Derek and Alec lounged there on opposite ends of the couches positioned in that L-shape, snuggled up in the blankets from their own apartments. They paused their conversation to glance up at Theo as he approached. “Damn,” Alec said. “I was hoping you’d go back to sleep.”

“What,” Theo proclaimed. “The fuck?”

“It was Alec’s idea,” Derek effortlessly threw Alec under the bus, and his lips quirked up at Alec’s betrayed bluster. When Theo turned his gaze onto Alec, he shrank down and huddled behind the pillow in his lap.

But Theo was undeterred. “You have ten seconds to tell me what the hell is going on here before I gut you and turn your organs into a wall ornament.”

Wincing still behind his pillow shield, Alec shoved both his hands out in front of him in desperate defence. “You were having a nightmare!” He explained so fast his words tripped over his tongue. “And I’m no genius, but even I know that you don’t have any when Liam sleeps over.”

Theo blinked at him, probably looking as dumb as he felt. “So?”

“So,” Alec continued, apparently content in the knowledge that Theo wasn’t going to kill him – yet. “You also sleep better whenever we have sleepovers at the McCall house, or that time when the three of us fell asleep watching the Great British Bake-off marathon in Derek’s apartment, even though he tried to kick us out.”

“Get to the point, Alec,” Theo sighed, even though thinking of that night in Derek’s living room had made him feel reluctantly blissful at just the memory. Theo, whose cultural knowledge had ceased sometime around his ninth birthday, and Derek, who had never cared about such things until dating Lydia and Stiles and was suddenly thrust right in the middle of reality television and celebrity gossip, were Alec’s favourite pastime, teaching them all the important things that they had missed. “It’s two in the morning. Nobody has time for this.”

“I’m not a doctor or a scientist, okay? I can’t explain it,” Alec shook his head. “But I know – no, I am certain that you sleep better when there are people around you. I don’t know why. But I thought tonight, Derek and I would test it out, and won’t you believe it! You did!”

“You and I have very different definitions of ‘sleeping better’,” Theo rolled his eyes at Alec before he glared at Derek. “And what about you? How’d you let him rope you into this?”

“Because the kid's right,” Derek shrugged, and Theo felt betrayed in a way he couldn’t make sense of. “I’ve noticed it too, but he was just the only one with the balls to follow through with it.”

“But your experiment failed, and therefore, your hypothesis was disproved as false,” Theo said. “Apparently, you’ve been here all night, yeah? Eating my food, watching my TV, taking up space? And lo and behold,” he tugged at the ruined, bloody scraps of his shirt. “I still had a nightmare, and you were here the whole time. It didn’t work.”

“But it did work!” Alec insisted. “We’ve been here for ages! You were asleep the whole night until you had your nightmare, and then we howled, and you woke up.”

That made Theo pause, thinking. He hadn't heard them howl, but he felt energised and awake in his body in that way he did whenever he heard members of the pack howl for him. He had assumed that his claws scraping across his body had been what woke him up, but now that he was thinking about it, he’d had plenty of nightmares that tore him up and had him spilling his own blood, and he’d never been woken as abruptly as he had tonight. Maybe it was possible that what Alec was saying was true, but he doubted it.

“How about this?” Derek said. Theo wanted to strangle him. “Let’s say tonight was a wash. I don’t know what your nightmare was about, but it was obviously bad enough for our influence not to work. So, let’s try it again and just see if it works.”

Theo couldn’t think of anything worse. This apartment was his home, now, and though he was still getting used to it, the thought of anybody else encroaching on his space in this way made his hackles rise, and his teeth prickle at his gums as they tried to force their way through. But Alec was looking at him so imploringly and hopefully, eyes wide and bright and wet, that he could do nothing but sigh, defeated. “Sure. Fine. Whatever.”

It was clear that nothing else was going to get done tonight, so Theo removed his torn shirt and sweat-stained bottoms and dropped them carelessly to the ground. He fully shifted into his wolf, stretching out all his aching muscles, before he crawled over and hopped up onto the couch, sitting as inconveniently as possible on Alec, and joined them to sleep the rest of the night away on the couch.

He slept the whole rest of the night soundly and woke up well rested. He wasn’t about to mention that, though.

Over the next few nights, they experimented. Theo was known for bouts of insomnia, and he had long learned to use them to his advantage, but with no missions to prepare for or cons to plot, he just found those long sleepless nights a little… lonely, quiet, and restless. He had felt it coming on, and for two nights straight, Theo had been unable to sleep and kept himself occupied by patrolling the preserve, watching the news and reading some of the new books that appeared on his shelf. And then Alec and Derek started staying over, sleeping on opposite couches as if they were brought for that intention, and Theo slept more deeply than he had in recent memory. No dreams, no restlessness, just drifting to sleep and waking up with birds outside his window as if no time had passed. It made no fucking sense, and it made Theo experience a fury that he hated just as much because he couldn’t explain it, but he was nothing if not a follower of the scientific method, and he had to admit that it was true.

He trudged reluctantly down the stairs and found Alec and Derek already awake and sitting up, shit-eating grins on their faces as they watched Theo descend. “What the fuck?” Theo rubbed a hand down his face.

“Good morning, Theo,” Alec greeted, way too cheery and self-satisfied for the early morning hour. “How’d you sleep? Good, right? The best sleep you’ve had in ages? Gee, I wonder why that is. What do you think, Derek? Can you think of any possible explanation?”

“I think you’re spending too much time with Stiles and Mason,” Derek stretched his foot out to prod Alec warningly in the thigh. He returned his gaze to Theo, head cocked to the side. “Answer his question. How do you feel?”

“Pissed off,” Theo sighed. “And pretty good.”

Alec threw his arms in the air and tilted his head back to shout at the ceiling. “Yes!” He cried, smelling so strongly of smug satisfaction that Theo almost choked on it. “Take that, scientific process!”

While Theo was busy feeling sorry for himself and Alec was waking up the neighbours, Derek was watching them both, so fond that Theo wanted to slap him. “I owe you money,” Derek told Alec as if Theo wasn’t even there, ignoring him as he stood there floundering in his mind at his body betraying him.

There was nothing Theo could do. They were right, had played him like a fiddle, and he had strolled right into their trap. They knew him better than he knew himself, and that made him want to tear his skin off so he could rearrange and relearn the configuration of the borrowed and stolen and implanted parts of him. He dropped his hands, bunched tightly in his hair, and sighed. “If you speak a word of this to Liam,” He threatened. “I’ll…”

“Yeah, yeah, you’ll kill us, we know,” Alec bounced to his feet with a yawn. “What’s for breakfast?”

Full moons were somehow simultaneously Theo’s favourite time of the month and also one for melancholy and introspection. Because on one hand, it was his opportunity to babysit the rest of the pack to the best of his abilities – Scott, Derek, Malia, the always heightened Liam, the still learning Alec, as they sprinted unbidden through the preserve. Theo was the only one not affected by the full moon, and that was a fact he took full advantage of. He’d always enjoyed it, looking down at all the wolves and the coyotes, those that came into their abilities through genetics or happenstance, and knowing that he had so much more control than them, was so much better at corralling and suppressing his instincts to the point that a pull such as the full moon did not affect him and never would. Now, he knew that he was wrong. He was just fake, a man-made test-tube thing assembled in a lab, and he would never know the siren's call of the full moon, not because he had more self-control than the others, but because there was something wrong with him right down to his bones. Because the Doctors had needed him to be as efficient as possible, and reverting to an animal's base instincts once a month was the opposite of what they needed from him.

On the other hand, it made him think a lot about his own situation, his own place in the pack, or rather, his lack of one. He didn’t share that pack-bond, wasn’t a part of anything, and yet they trusted him to keep them safe during full moons, keep everybody else safe when they were at their worst. They know what he's done. They know what he was. He killed Scott. He would’ve killed Liam. He killed Josh and Tracy and Tara, and so many countless others that their names weren’t even worth remembering. But they trusted him to run with them, sane and sensible, as they warred with the wild side of themselves, steering them in the right direction, keeping them away from late-night hikers, preventing them from hurting each other. They shouldn’t trust him, and yet they did. They wanted him with them. They asked him to join because even though he wasn’t affected by the full moon, they thought of him as one of them, and they wanted him by their side.

The bullet had found Liam’s flank in a flurry of gunpowder and wolfsbane. Theo smelt the tinge of bitter infection, heard Liam’s pained yowl, felt his hot, wet blood splatter across his face in an arc that felt too much like a falling gavel. Liam had stumbled into Scott, and as he was flocked by the rest of the pack, feral and fanged and furious, Theo hadn’t hesitated. He was good at many things, and one of the things he had become increasingly skilled at over the months was taking care of people he cared about. It was odd. Theo had never had anybody to care about before.

He killed the Hunter with a single swipe of his claws across the bare, exposed line of his throat. He hadn’t even known what he’d stumbled across, had just seen a small pack in the preserve on the full moon and had shot one at random in the hopes of taking a prize back to Monroe, but he’d made the greatest mistake of his life. Liam’s blood was drying on Theo’s face, and he didn’t hesitate.

“Is he dead?” Scott demanded, frantically, of Theo as he clutched at Liam. “Theo, is he dead?”

“No,” Theo lied, wiping the Hunter's blood on his pants. He’d dragged the Hunter further into the trees before he’d slit his throat. They wouldn’t know he was dead unless they went looking for him, which Theo knew they wouldn’t. “Is he okay?”

Everything was heightened on full moons. Worry, fear, rage. Liam’s pain as he pressed his face into Theo’s palm, sharp and caustic, as he keened low in his throat. He was holding the wound in his gut as blood dribbled through his fingers. “It hurts,” he whined. “Theo, it hurts.”

“I know, I know. Let me see,” With one hand against Liam’s face, draining his pain, Theo gently batted away his fingers to get a better view of his stomach. Blood burbled up around the circular wound, blackened around the edges, the bullet shining through the wound. It was messy and painful, but not the worst wound that Liam had ever suffered. “It’s okay. You’re okay, Liam.”

Inky black lines of pain drew from Liam’s skin into Theo’s arm, and Liam sank forward to rest his weight against Theo’s chest, face in the crook of his neck. “It hurts,” he sounded so pitiful, even with his voice muffled against Theo’s collarbone, that Theo couldn’t help but bring his hand up to cup the back of his head. “Make it stop.”

“I’m trying,” Theo replied through gritted teeth. It made him want to tear his own heart out, the realisation that even now, even when it was needed the most, he couldn’t even do this for Liam, couldn’t even take the pain from the person he loved, even when he was begging for it. He glanced up at the distant horizon, at the sunlight just beginning to lighten the sky as daylight broke. He turned to Scott, bundled Liam into his arms like he weighed nothing. “I’m taking him home. Keep yourselves alive.”

He brought Liam back to his apartment and drew his pain the whole way there, even though he was lightheaded and breathless from the strain and the worry. He set Liam down in the space by the stairs and let him writhe there, bleeding and groaning, while he ran around his apartment for the first aid kit in the bathroom cupboard and the lighter in the bowl on the kitchen bench where he kept his keys. He burned out the wolfsbane and had to cover Liam’s mouth with his hand when he howled. He dug the bullet out with his fingers, felt Liam’s wet blood slick all over his hands. He wiped away Liam’s tears and kissed his cries from his lips. He carried Liam up those obnoxious stairs and washed away the blood with a wet washcloth, dressed him in Theo’s pyjamas, and tucked him into the bed. And just like that - it was over.

Liam’s blood was vivid and slick across Theo’s hardwood floors, glistening like snow or shattered glass in the slowly rising sun coursing in from the windows. It made Theo sick. It smelled of fear, and pain, and anguish. It smelled of Liam’s tears and the bitter taint of his blood. It tasted like the metal tinge of the operating theatres whenever the Dread Doctors pushed too far, when the Surgeon cut too deep, and the Pathologist took too much, and the Geneticist demanded more more more. Liam was asleep upstairs, snoring, healing, and yet Theo couldn’t stop thinking about the worst-case scenarios, how it could’ve been so much worse if Liam was a little slower, a little less durable, a little less fucking stubborn.

He filled a bucket with hot water and bleach. It made him gag, made bile rise bitter in the back of his throat, reminded him of terrible things that he had spent so long trying to forget. He got down on his hands and knees right there in that puddle of Liam’s blood and used a pile of rags and a bristle brush to scrub out the stain. The water in the bucket darkened with Liam’s blood, the soap on the floor going frothy and red. He scrubbed and scrubbed until his fingers tingled and his hands ached, his skin burning like one of the Doctor’s had poured corrosive acid on his skin to see how long it took him to heal, again.

The sterile scent was so much like the operating theatre, days spent wiping down used tables and sterilising tools, nights spent trembling and gasping for breath as chills wracked his body, as his skin and organs and muscles tried to fuse themselves back together, cleaning solution and sterilisations making his eyes prickle and his throat burn and his nose sting. He’s tried so hard to keep his apartment from ever smelling that way – he fills the space with the smells of fresh cooking and the pack, of scented candles and the herbs in the garden and Liam.

His jeans were cold and cloying where they clung to his knees, Liam’s blood seeping through the denim to stain Theo’s skin, even this part of Liam refusing to let him go, and Theo didn’t care. He could only focus on the sound of Liam asleep in his bed upstairs and the way the stain was slowly yet steadily lifting from the hardwood. Even when the floor was perfectly clean, borderline sparkling, smelling of that distinct bleach smell that he knew as well as he knew the metal taste of mercury, he poured the bloody solution down the sink and refilled it with fresh, unsoiled mixture and continued again and again and again until he could no longer smell Liam’s blood, and the only memory of what had happened here was the one burned behind Theo’s eyelids.

“Theo,” he glanced up from the bristle brush and the hardwood cleaned of blood to see Liam standing on the bottom steps of the staircase, the morning sunlight streaming in from the window lighting him in profile. He was scratching at the mended wound on his stomach where the bullet had gone in, his shirt lifted just a little bit to reveal his unblemished skin, the wound long healed. “What’re you doing?”

“Cleaning,” Theo huffed. He looked away, because if he looked at him for a second longer, he was sure to do something stupid, like confess to him how worried he was or leap up to wrap Liam into a hug and press him into his chest and never let him go. “What does it look like?”

“It looks like you’re losing your mind a little bit,” Liam continued the last few steps until he was standing on the hardwood, inches away from where his spilled blood once congealed. “You know I’m okay, right? Look at me. I’m fine. I’m already healed, and it doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

“You begged me to make it stop,” Theo reminded him, teeth gritted, angry not at Liam, but at himself. It was his job to keep them safe on full moons, and he couldn’t even manage that. “Do you remember? You told me it hurt, and you told me to make it stop. And I couldn’t do it. I just had to bring you home and take out the bullet and burn away the wolfsbane. I couldn’t make it stop.”

“I don’t really remember, but I shouldn’t have asked that of you,” Liam admitted sheepishly. “Don’t beat yourself up for not being able to complete an impossible task. I remember how much you helped me. I remember you taking my pain and carrying me home and cleaning me off. You tucked me into bed just like my mum does. You put me in pyjamas. You did plenty.”

“Not enough,” Theo shook his head and returned to scrubbing. “I know this makes no sense to you. I know you look at me on my knees with a bucket of bleach, cleaning an already clean floor and think I’m going insane. I don’t care what you think. This is my home, the first home I’ve ever had, and I’m not going to have it tainted with the blood I couldn’t keep you from spilling. I’m not going to have it smell like the operating theatres, no matter how hard I scrub. So, I’m sorry if this looks crazy. But I have to do this.”

Liam was quiet for a long time, his heartbeat steady, his chemosignals sad like distant smoke. Theo refused to glance away from his pink bucket of bleach for shameful fear of what he might read on Liam’s face. Carefully, Liam inched forward until his toes were on the outskirts of the wet puddle of pink foam and bleach. “Is this the kind of thing you had to do a lot? At the operating theatre?”

“Well,” Theo said bitterly. “It’s not as if the Doctors were in the habit of cleaning up after themselves.”

He heard Liam exhale a shaky sigh, and he watched through his eyebrows as Liam crept around the puddle and disappeared further into the apartment. Theo shut his eyes and hunched his shoulders and continued scrubbing, letting the bleach burn the constantly healing and constantly developing cuts on his fingers and palms from the rough treatment of the bristles against the floorboards. He should’ve been paying more attention. He should’ve known better than to freak out over something as common as Liam’s spilled blood. He should’ve been better. He’s the First Chimera – he should’ve been able to prevent this, as he had sworn to the pack he would.

Though he half expected Liam to leave the apartment to go check on Alec or Derek, he surprised him, once again, by returning from the laundry with a mop. Theo paused to blink up at him in astonishment as he, barefoot, began to mop up the foamy red bleach. “What?” Liam asked with a laugh. “We both know you look good on your hands and knees, but you really are losing your mind if you think I’m going to let you clean up my blood by yourself.”

“But I failed. I let you get hurt,” Theo protested. “I’ve got to make it right.”

It was stupid, an impulse born from no sleep and high adrenaline and Liam’s blood slick and hot on his hands mere hours ago, but it was the only coherent thought that Theo could form in the face of Liam’s teasing. How could he be making light of this? There was the very real chance that he could’ve died last night, bled out right here in Theo’s apartment, inches away from his beloved potted plant that had started all of this.

“You want to make it up to me?” Liam’s smile was wolfish, unafraid, and confident. All the things that Theo pretended that he used to be and loved Liam for being unapologetically every day. “We finish this up quickly, and you can fuck me until I can’t see straight.”

It was absurd. It was insane. It was ridiculous. And it was the only sensible thing Liam could’ve said to surprise a bark of laughter out of Theo and have him following his orders just like he always did.

The calendar continued to haunt him. Someone had added in the last few dates, and it felt like a completed set, like seeing everybody's birthdays scribbled into the little white boxes in an abundance of varied scripts meant that he had accomplished some kind of unthinkable challenge.

Melissa: July 8th. Argent: November 12th. Noah: January 19th. Parrish: November 5th.

Theo had never known this many people at the same time before, and he had never seen a calendar filled with so many birthdays. It shocked him to realise that he actually cared about these people, cared about checking the calendar in the morning when he was in the kitchen and sending off birthday texts or ducking down to the store to buy a present.

He started using it for other things, too. Daily things, imminent things. He jotted down dates for Corey, Liam, Alec and Nolan’s lacrosse games, and if Liam whined about it enough, he’d write down when he had certain assignments due so they could both pester him about it together. He wrote down the dates for upcoming pack meetings, when Scott, Lydia and Stiles were going back to university and coming back to Beacon Hills for a visit, when Argent was going out of town to meet with other hunters, indicated the full moon – mostly for Alec’s sake and anybody else who wasn’t paying the kind of attention they should’ve – with bold dots in the corners of the boxes with one of his coloured makers so there was no confusion. It started to matter to him, like the succulent and the herb garden and the knick-knacks on his bookshelf.

It was odd because Theo never really used a calendar before. The Dread Doctors had never allowed it, and at some point, he had started to believe that people who relied on calendars were weak-willed and lacked the discipline needed to keep all their deadlines and appointments, lacked the mental self-control that he so excelled at, that had been drilled into him since he woke up on that table with his sister's stolen heart beating away in his chest. He had a calendar on his phone, had always had one at his disposal, but he never thought to use it, and still didn’t. He didn’t like to think about what that said about him, so he didn’t think about it at all.

The calendar was a curse, because dates were missing, dates that nobody knew but him. It wasn’t like every other birthday – these would only be added if he wrote them himself. But he didn’t want to. He was a coward. If only the Dread Doctors could see him now. All that hard work, all those resources and hours training him and shaping him into the perfect tool and the sharpest weapon, the way a potter formed a lump of clay into something useful, all for nothing.

But Liam was upstairs in the shower. Theo could hear the water running and his off-key voice singing whatever song was stuck in his head. Theo might’ve been weak and cowardly, but Liam made him strong and brave; even the proximity of him in his home made him cross to the kitchen bench and retrieve one of the pens that Mason had left behind when he last came to study on his dining table. He let the scent of Liam using the last of Theo’s peach shampoo fill him with courage and let the sound of his voice drown out the staccato beat of his pulse in his ears as he brought the pen to the calendar and filled it in.

Josh: May 7th. Tracy: February 19th. Tara: December 2nd.

He went to fill in his own birthday and found that someone already had – no, not someone, it is so obviously Liam with his cramped chicken scratch filling in April 15th with a tiny little heart crammed into the corner. No words, but a declaration all the same, proof that it existed. So, Theo drew a little star in the corner of April 14th to represent to nobody but himself, the day that he killed Tara and his life was altered forever.

It had been so long since his last birthday that the most recent one was just a distant memory. A few days before, he’d had a short stint in the hospital after another asthma-and-palpitation scare, and Clauda Stilinski had snuck him to the food court and brought him a Happy Meal before they were caught, and the toy was a little Lilo and Stitch figure. He’d played with Scott and Stiles all day until Melissa decided it was late enough to take them home, and she kissed him on the forehead and gifted him a little yellow remote-control car with red flames on the side. When his parents came home, they’d had fish and chips for dinner. He couldn’t remember what they’d brought him for his birthday, but he remembered that the wrapping paper was hot pink princess leftovers from Tara’s birthday the year before, and he’d fallen asleep that night to his parents arguing loudly about medical bills and second jobs.

“Hey,” Liam stood at the bottom of the spiral staircase, wiping at his wet hair with a towel, water dripping down his neck onto his bare shoulders, halting in the waistband of Theo’s pyjama pants, loose around his waist. He smelled like peaches. “What’s the matter? You smell weird, like, I dunno, like you’re sad or something. You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Theo let the calendar fall back to his current month and set it back on the fridge. “Just thinking about what to get you for your birthday.”

Liam grinned, bright and easy. Theo’s lips prickled with static at how badly he wanted to kiss him.

Ten seconds away from stripping naked and darting into the preserve on a last-minute four-legged patrol, his phone vibrated with a message.

Scott. 4:42PM

Don’t forget!

Pack meeting tonight.

Pizzas will be ordered by 6

Theo. 4:42PM

No

Scott. 4:43PM

No?

What do you mean no?

Theo. 4:43PM

It means I’m not coming. You want it in a different language? Pick one.

Theo waited an obnoxiously long time for Scott to reply, trying to wrap his head around the thought that someone just refused one of his pizza-and-video-game-nights disguised as a pack meeting. Theo stood there on the outskirts of the preserve in nothing but his boxers, a backpack with his clothes sitting at his feet.

Scott. 4:49PM

But it’s a pack meeting.

You have to come.

Theo. 4:50PM

I really don’t.

There were some things that Scott and the others just refused to accept. Despite how often Theo hung around them and how much he, begrudgingly, enjoyed their company, he wasn’t actually a part of their pack. He was more pack adjacent if anything, like Jackson or like Ethan. No matter how often he tried to tell them otherwise, they refused to be deterred, refused to see the truth that was right in front of their noses.

He couldn’t be part of the pack even if he wanted to be. Chimeras were incapable of forming that connection with real, original supernatural beings, which was why Theo forming the Chimera Pack had been so important. But, then again, Corey had somehow managed it pretty easily, folding into the pack as if he himself was a werewolf and not some man-made abomination built in a lab, so maybe it was just Theo who was the problem. Maybe there wasn’t enough goodness in him to bridge that gap, or maybe he was so vile, deep down, so detestable and dark of spirit, that the connection just couldn’t reach him.

Scott. 4:54PM

Theo

It’s a pack meeting.

You have to come.

Theo. 4:55PM

Saying it more times isn’t going to convince me any quicker.

Scott. 4:55PM

Does Liam know about this?

Theo. 4:55PM

I have to run everything by Liam now? What is he, my handler? I’m going on patrol. If the pack meeting is still going on when I finish, I’ll swing by, but don’t hold your breath.

Though his phone continued to go off with incessant messages, instead of checking them, Theo threw it and his boxers into the backpack and hid it in one of the low boughs of a tree, concealed by the darkness and the foliage, ready and waiting for him to return to it. He shifted into his wolf, felt his muscles stretching and his bones cracking and his body reshaping, and darted off into the preserve.

He weaved between the tall, strong trunks of the ancient trees, his feet pounding across the hard-packed dirt littered with fallen leaves and broken branches, and he searched for the prints and the track marks and the scents of animal and human alike, looking for deer and fox and rabbit, wolfsbane and gunpowder and blood. He kept his snout to the ground, and his ears perked up, eyes peering through the darkness, hoping to find either a late-night snack or a Hunter lost in a place they shouldn’t be.

After a few hours of scouting and patrolling with nothing to show for it, no prey caught other than a rather wily hare that thought it could outrun him and who now filled the nooks and crannies of Theo’s fangs, he returned home to his apartment, tracking his way through the preserve with the crescent moonlight. He shifted back on the outskirts of the tree line and retrieved his bag from the branches. He redressed himself, checked his phone for any new messages or missed calls, and found none but the ones from Scott he'd initially ignored and continued to ignore.

The lights were on in his apartment. He reached the back car park and glanced up at the floor that he knew he lived on, and he could see lights on, shining brightly through the windows. His apartment wasn’t the only one lit up, of course, but he was certain that he had switched everything off before he left, even the television. Alec and Derek were supposed to be at Scott’s for the pack meeting, and there was no way Liam wouldn’t have heard about Theo skipping out and not come to the preserve looking for him. His stomping and his shouting and his scent would’ve been enough to lure Theo out, no matter where he was.

Cautiously, Theo climbed the fire escape, keeping himself low. He partially shifted, sharpened his hearing and his sight, and pressed himself up against the stairs of the fire escape, out of view. If someone was breaking into his apartment, he wanted to be ready. It could have been Hunters, though he doubted it. It could’ve just been some wayward delinquents who assumed his apartment was empty and thought they’d peek around. It could’ve been some supernatural from out of town, picking up his scent and waiting for him to return. It could’ve been any number of things, and Theo was ready for all of them.

And then he heard a sound that he knew better than the sound of Tara’s heart beating in his chest – Liam’s laugh, the one that had him throwing his head back and wrapping an arm around his middle to keep his guts from spilling out through split skin, snorting and heaving breaths, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes, the one that Theo could taste in his own mouth like champagne bubbles.

Confused, he climbed the rest of the way up onto the little patio with the herb garden and the deck chairs and the muddy rack of shoes, and saw the rest of the McCall pack spread around his apartment like it was the most natural thing in the world, sprawled across his couch and occupying his kitchen and sitting backwards on chairs in the dining room. Malia was a coyote resting on Scott’s lap on the floor, and Alec and Nolan were playing Just Dance on the Wii. Melissa and Argent were setting out pizza boxes on his kitchen counter, unravelling a sweating bundle of chips, potato cakes, dim sims and seafood sticks from the fish and chips shop. Lydia was quietly appraising the new knick-knacks and books added to his shelf, and Stiles was trying and failing to beat Corey in an arm-wrestling challenge. Everyone was there, all spread out across the apartment and treating Theo’s space the way they treated the McCall house – like it was safe, like they were welcome, like they were supposed to be there.

Liam was standing by the windows, as close as he could get to Theo without even knowing it, crouching down and smiling like a fool at the succulent he had brought him at the beginning of all this, that housewarming gift in the blue pot he hadn’t even known what was taking root in it, growing under Theo’s diligent care into something quite beautiful. He turned his head to face Theo as he approached, as if drawn to his presence like a flower turned towards the sun, instinctually seeking out its light.

“Hey!” Liam stood up and beamed at Theo. “You’re here.”

“I am,” Theo quietly shut the door behind him, and all eyes turned to face him. Derek looked away from where he was riffling through Theo’s fridge, Alec got distracted and allowed Nolan to nudge him out of the winning lead, and Malia’s tail gave a pleased thump on the hardwood. “Why are you all here? What happened to the pack meeting?”

“My fault,” Scott admitted, though he didn’t look very chagrined. He was smiling too brightly for that, his chemosignals too syrupy sweet. Proud of himself and pleased with the outcome at Theo’s expense. Maybe some of Theo’s training really had rubbed off on him after all. “I thought that because you couldn’t make it to the pack meeting, we’d bring the pack meeting to you. You don’t mind, do you?”

He wondered, vaguely, if Scott had mentioned to Liam that he had chosen not to attend and had made himself busy. Because he didn’t have to patrol tonight – sure, he was already there, but he had plenty of time to do a quick check of the parameter, get changed, and join them. But he hadn’t wanted to. He hadn’t wanted to be around people today, had wanted to be four-legged and free for as long as possible. Liam would’ve understood, but he also would’ve been disappointed. He had fought so hard to allow Theo to attend pack meetings that were just excuses to hang out and had nothing to do with Monroe and the Hunters, and Theo never wanted to let him down.

Judging by how he latched himself to Theo’s side, took him by the chin to kiss him deeply in front of the whole group, ignoring their whoops and whistles, Liam probably had no idea that Theo had entirely blown this off mere hours ago. He didn’t know why Scott hadn’t mentioned it. He didn’t know what to make of it.

“Are you to blame for bringing this riffraff in here?” he mumbled against Liam’s chapped lips. He tasted of vanilla lip balm, strong coffee, and teenage boy. “I should take away your key.”

“I’d like to see you try,” Liam growled into his mouth, smiling. “You’re happy we’re here, admit it. I can tell.”

“Maybe we need to revisit our lesson on chemosignals,” Theo bit back. His hand found the back of Liam’s head, and his fingers burrowed through his hair. “You’ve obviously forgotten everything I’ve taught you, because you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Sorry, Big Bad Chimera, you can’t fool me,” Liam’s hands moved downwards to settle on Theo’s waist, his fingers finding the empty belt loops and using them to pull Theo closer, possessive, pleased. “I might be shit at reading chemosignals, but I can read you like a book. And I know for a fact you’re pretty happy to see us, even if you don’t want to admit it.”

“Alright, love birds, break it up,” Stiles called from where he was nursing his wounds from his recent failed arm-wrestling battle, rubbing his elbow and wincing.

“Don’t forget, you’re the ones who barged into my apartment uninvited,” Theo reminded him, making no move to pull away from Liam in the slightest. “If I want to strip my boyfriend naked and fuck him right here on the couch, then there’s nothing any of you can do about that.”

Alec choked on his soda, and Scott and Stiles both looked so scandalised at the thought that it made Theo hide his grin in Liam’s hair, even as Liam groaned and buried his face in Theo’s chest to hide his own matching grin. Thankfully, Melissa and Argent were busy chatting in the kitchen and didn’t have anything to say. Malia was laughing in a way that only a coyote could laugh.

“Not to interrupt… whatever this is,” Derek held out a pizza box. “You hungry? We ordered heaps.”

“Actually,” Theo used his tongue to poke at the pieces of hare between his teeth that the wolf hadn’t managed to get out. Liam hadn’t seemed to mind. It was no secret that he liked the taste of blood. “I just ate.”

He hated to admit it, but it was… good. Really good to have the whole pack together in his apartment. They ate too much food and laughed until their bellies hurt, and just this once, he even let the others draw and write on his windows with the markers – with very strict instructions not to touch any of the notes he had written there – and he debriefed Derek and Argent of the absolute nothing he had found in the preserve. Nolan took an obnoxious number of photos of everyone and had to run back to Alec’s apartment across the hall for more film. Malia shook off her coyote and shifted back into human, and after getting changed in Theo’s downstairs bathroom, he kicked her ass in Just Dance, and she threatened to bite him, blunt human teeth at all, chasing him around the couches.

They ate too much pizza and threw chips at each other from across the room to try to catch them in their mouths. They played a game that Theo had never heard of before, where you had to guess the designated person the others had given you by asking the right questions, and he was pretty shit at it, because they selected him things like Jack Sparrow from some pirate movie and Edward Cullen that made everyone laugh way too hard and Michael Scott from a show of some sort, all of which came out while Theo was busy being a murdous spy. Melissa praised the growth of his succulent and jokingly asked him if he could come over sometime to tend to her garden. Alec and Corey pinned Mason to the floor by sitting on him to stop him from winning a game of Mario Kart. Lydia and Derek both talked Stiles out of starting another fight with Theo about the integrity and worth of his windows full of writing, but Theo was in too good a mood to actually get annoyed with him. It was just fun to argue with him, especially when Theo always won, and Stiles always reacted so beautifully, like a very angry violin playing perfectly under Theo’s fingers.

For most of the night, he had Liam tucked under his arm, the warmth of him seeping into his side, his heartbeat fluttering against Theo’s body, his breath ghosting across Theo’s collarbones. He smelt of sweat and mud and pineapple, fingers sticky with it from plucking it from Theo’s pizza. His weight was familiar, comforting, and any residual adrenaline or unexpected stress from all these visitors in his home settled when he pressed his nose into Liam’s hair and inhaled the scent of him. His bedroom smelled more like Liam than it did of himself, at this point. He didn’t know why, but it settled him more than anything else in the world.

The high schoolers talked about the lacrosse team and their recent wins. The college attendees talked about how their classes were going and when they’d be returning. Derek, Argent and Theo filled them in on recent developments of the Monroe variety. Malia told them about all the game she’d caught in the preserve, facts that were only interesting to Derek and Theo but grossed out everyone else. They talked about everything and nothing, and all the things in between. Fuck, Theo loved it. Why? What the hell was so special? They were filling his apartment up with their stink and putting their greasy fingers all over his polished furnishings and making a mess that he hated, moving his furniture and going through his fridge and touching all his things. He should hate it. This should be his worst nightmare.

“Well, before we finish up,” Scott said with a yawn as he stood from the couch beside Malia. “Is there anything else anybody wants to talk about? Any other questions?”

Theo’s gaze drifted to the photograph hanging on the wall, of a night so alike this one that it could almost have been a loop. “I have a question,” he spoke up, and didn’t know why he did it, but when everybody’s eyes turned to him, he jerked his thumb at the photo and asked. “Which one of you numbskulls hung up that photo?”

His question was met by silence. Liam hid his smile by turning and pressing his face into Theo’s shoulder, and Theo followed the dipping chemosignals to Scott, who stood at the front of the pack with his shoulders around his ears and his hands in his pockets and the most chagrined expression on his face that it almost made Theo break character and laugh. Gotcha. “Uh,” he managed, unsure in a way that they rarely saw from him these days. “I, uh, I thought…”

“Relax, Scott,” Liam huffed out when everybody started to shuffle, tense. “He’s not really upset. Not anymore, anyway.”

“It’s grown on me,” Theo admitted, and he watched this slow, genuine smile spread across Scott’s face, and the whole pack deflated and started to watch, and Theo couldn’t help the blooming sense of satisfaction at finally having a question answered, and a missing piece slid into place.

Life goes on. Theo tested the dampness of the soil in the pot, and he watered his plants. He cooked more dishes from his cookbook, he lounged four-legged in his perfect beam of sunlight, he indulged all of Alec’s sugary whims and let Liam have his way with him. More knick-knacks appeared on his shelf – a wolf standing regal and proud, a small metal rose, a little praying angel, a bottle of holy water in the shape of Mother Mary that Theo had pretended to be burned by. Stiles and Scott had grifted him a dreidel and a little menorah with strange expressions on their faces and warring chemosignals – high and hopeful and dusky and uncertain, and Theo hadn’t known why he’d spun the dreidel as often as he did, but he liked the sound of it, the way it rattled against the bookshelf. He set the menorah up high, where it couldn't be broken. It would be a waste of a well-made craft.

Most mornings, he woke up to Liam sleeping beside him, and on the rare occasion that he didn’t, he would stumble downstairs to see Alec or Derek or both of them on his couch like they’d been there all night. It didn’t make him as angry as it used to, and these days, he repaid the favour whenever he could. He’d hear Alec’s keening whines from across the hallway, and he’d use his spare key to sleep on Alec’s couch until he settled and, in the morning, scare the absolute shit out of him – Theo was ten times more sneaky than Alec was even on his worst day. Sometimes, he’d hear the sound of Derek’s own restlessness and nightmares and would ride the elevator all the way up four floors to the loft and sleep as a wolf curled up at the bottom of the stairs or spread across his pitifully uncomfortable couch. It worked for all three of them, really, and none of them really knew what to say about that, so they didn’t engage in much talking about the subject. And more importantly, nobody told Nolan, or Stiles and Lydia, or Liam.

Deaton came over exactly once, and it was one time too many. He was off-putting and hard to read. He smelled like soil, loam, bitter dampness and the herbs he used for all his druid stuff, and he stunk of cats and dogs from the vet clinic, stuffing up Theo’s senses and making his hackles rise as if he were one of the animals stuck in a cage.

On his way through, Deaton stopped by to personally hand Theo the documents he had been gathering for him, instead of Theo having to go all the way through town to get them himself.

“Thanks,” Theo said as he stepped aside to let Deaton in. He wasn’t alone. Scott had come by, too, and had brought Malia with him. They stood hand in hand as Deaton curiously walked through Theo’s apartment, seemingly fascinated by the corkboard in the kitchen, the calendar on the fridge and the knick-knacks on the shelf. Theo tried not to let his interest get to him. It was no different from everybody else’s idle interest. “Were they hard to get?”

“Not particularly,” Deaton hummed. “I’m sure you’ve heard most of it already. The Dread Doctors were a font of information, after all.”

Theo set the manila folder on the kitchen counter for later. “That’s one way to describe them.”

He watched Deaton out of the corner of his eye as he meandered around his apartment, observing the couches in the L-shape and the chess table and the vinyl player and the photo of the pack framed on the wall, even as he was in the middle of a conversation with Scott and Malia about full moons and Hunter patterns and stepping up patrol. In his periphery, Deaton crouched down to look closer at Theo’s succulent, and that had his fangs threatening to pierce through his gums.

“Something the matter?” Theo asked as he broke away from Scott and Malia to stand against the windows, arms crossed. “It’s just a plant. Not that interesting.”

“It’s a panda plant. Kalanchoe tomentosa,” Deaton brushed his fingers across one of the rust-tipped, pale-furred petals. “Did you know that? You’ve taken quite good care of it, if its size and health of the petals are any indications.”

“Of course, I knew that,” Theo said. “It’s my plant. I’ve got a book on it.”

Deaton hummed, amused. Theo wondered if he could tell that he was lying. “Where did you procure it?”

“From Liam,” Theo shot a glance to Scott, who had wandered over with Malia and who looked equally confused. “As a housewarming gift.”

“Ah, that would explain it, then,” Deaton said cryptically, brushing his fingers across the little purple flowers that budded out of the dark soil. “Panda plants are not known for growing flowers of any kind, regardless of how well they’re taken care of. It would make sense that young master Dunbar would have no idea that he would be gifting something so potentially deadly.”

Scott made a sound that was similar to a crumpled trumpet. “Deadly? Deaton, come on. It’s a plant. Last I checked, chimeras got hay fever even less than werewolves do.”

“Correct,” Deaton said. “However, though they are more resistant, I believe chimeras are affected by wolfsbane just as werewolves are.”

Theo’s brain short-circuited like someone had thrown water on a computer, a complete blue screen that had him reeling. “What?”

“These flowers? They’re wolfsbane,” Deaton explained with that endless patience of his. “The seeds must’ve gotten mixed in with the panda plant at the nursery, and Liam was none the wiser when he purchased it. An honest mistake, I’m sure.”

Malia struck Scott in the shoulder hard enough to make him hiss and pull away, cupping an already-healing mark. “I told you!” She cried triumphantly. “I told you that plant made me feel weird!”

Stunned, Theo stared at the panda plant, at the beautiful little purple flowers that he had been so fond of. To learn now that they were deadly, that they could kill Theo himself, that there were people out there in the world that would do plenty of terrible, downright dreadful things to get their grubby hands on these wolfsbane flowers just to hurt Theo and the pack, made him feel lightheaded. He should’ve known – the Dread Doctors had specimens, of course, various kinds of wolfsbane in sealed glass jars perfectly labelled in their ancient loping script, the ground up stuff and the whole, healthy flowers. And yet, not once had Theo suspected that these buds might be that.

“I’m sorry, Theo,” Scott sounded genuinely distraught. “You’ve cared for these things so well, and they obviously matter a lot to you, but now you’re going to have to get rid of them. It's terrible. I'm sorry. ”

That, of all things, jerked Theo back into his body like electroconvulsive therapy. “What?” he demanded. “Why would I do that?”

Scott gaped at him. “Didn’t you hear Deaton? It’s wolfsbane! Surely you can’t be thinking about keeping it. It could kill you.”

“It hasn’t hurt me so far,” Theo continued. “I didn’t even know it was wolfsbane until ten seconds ago. Don’t you think if it was going to have any effect on me, it would’ve already happened?”

“We know chimeras are much more resistant to wolfsbane than werewolves,” Deaton pointed out as he rose to his feet. “It’s possible that in their whole, natural state, this wolfsbane won’t ever affect him. Like this, they’re quite safe for him.”

“What about the rest of us?” Malia protested. “We’re over all the time! Alec? Liam? You really want to put them at risk?”

“The only person who ever noticed was you,” Theo said. “And you only said it made you feel weird. It didn’t cause you pain. It didn’t make you sick. It didn’t smell like anything. You just didn’t like it. I’m not throwing away this plant, that I’ve taken care of for months, just because you’ve jumped to conclusions.”

Deaton was smiling slightly, amused at Theo’s vehement defence of a plant of all things, but Scott just shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he admitted. “I obviously can’t make you get rid of it, and I wouldn’t, anyway. You obviously care about it a lot. But just… why? It’s a plant. You can get plenty of others. You can go to a nursery and buy the exact same type. Hell, if it’s the fact that Liam brought it for you, I’m sure he has enough money to buy you another one. What is it about this one that matters so much?”

The realisation grew on Theo like a tumour, or like black mould, or like the wolfsbane flowers growing out of the soil they were never supposed to be in. He and these plants were the same. Against all odds, these two incompatible plants grew and thrived – one part, the panda plant, the rust-tipped succulent, was docile and pleasant, while the other part, the wolfsbane, the little violet petals, was deadly and dangerous. And it only happened because someone had fucked up something good and pure by putting a bunch of bullshit together just to see what would happen without caring about the consequences. And yet, despite it all, they had both twined together and become something beautiful, something that was loved and cherished. It reminded him of cages too small for the size of the wolf and stone walls too small for the size of the boy, and sterile metal tables that always smelled like blood and the metallic taste of glistening mercury, of a room filled with specimen jars containing organs in yellowing formaldehyde all labelled in his own delicate script, Theodore Karl Raeken. Nine (9) years old. Heart. 

It reminded him of himself.

“It’s a chimera,” Theo tried to sound disinterested and uninvested, but was sure he failed miserably. “A hybrid. Something that someone made by mixing a bunch of shit and seeing what worked and what didn’t, and sure, the person who added the wolfsbane probably didn’t know what they were doing, but the point still stands that this is the outcome. There was no reason why either of those plants should’ve survived. They could’ve killed each other plenty of times over, but they didn’t, and now they’ve learned to coexist and thrive. They're both stronger for it, something even the Chimera of Death couldn't kill. And look at it – look at what it’s become. It belongs here now. I’m proud to have it in my home.”

It was too honest, too open, too much. Theo already wanted to reach for the words and claw them back behind his teeth, berating himself for speaking when he should’ve just stayed silent. Why did he care so much about a fucking plant, anyway? It shouldn’t matter, but for some strange, unexpected reason, it did.

Scott was smiling. The bastard was fucking smiling, and he smelt so peppery-proud that it was thick like mercury on Theo’s tongue. “Okay,” he said with a little sigh, like something had been released from its clench in his chest. “Okay, Theo. Okay.”

The plant stayed – the panda plant, and the wolfsbane, and Theo loved the damn thing even more for all its faults.

Some days, it still felt like he didn’t deserve it.

How could he? He was a man-made thing built for destruction and crafted for death, honed into a weapon that could be pointed in a direction and released like a rabid dog to perform untold levels of anguish. And he was good at it. Holy fuck, he was phenomenal at it. There was nothing that could stop him, nothing that could stand in his way, and the Doctors loved him for it, praised him for it, treated him as something more than a pet or a project. He gave them the results they needed. He was a failure for the Beast, sure, but he was still their first success, and that made him their favourite.

He couldn’t remember all the people he had killed, all the lives he had ruined, all the subjects he had dragged down to hell for the Dread Doctors to use. He had disposed of the bodies, cleaned the tables for the next one, and rearranged all their tools and equipment exactly how they liked it. He trained the other chimeras, kept them in check, taught them everything they needed to know to make their lives worth it and ensured they were effective at anything and everything that the Doctors threw at them.

And he liked it. He loved being useful, fulfilling a purpose, finding something that he was good at, even if those things were conning people and earning trust that he was only going to break and killing people swiftly and easily, nothing more to him than snapping spaghetti noodles in half and watching them grow limp in the pot. Easy, effortless, something he could do with little thought.

He had framed Stiles, claiming a death on his head that he’d very little to do with, and he’d shot Malia and left her broken and bleeding on the hard concrete floors. He killed Josh; he killed Tracy. He almost let Mason be twisted into something beyond saving, into the Beast, the Doctor’s prize. He almost killed Liam, almost tricked him into killing Scott. Theo had killed Scott, the crunch of his ribs and the warmth of his blood and the flutter of his heart as Theo had punched his fist through his chest was a sensation that would never leave him, no matter how long his stint in the Skinwalkers Prison had been, and at the time, he had revelled in it. Sometimes, in his worst moments, he still did - in that victory, that success, the feeling of accomplishing a goal he had been set and making the Doctors proud. He didn't tell anybody about that.

Theo didn’t deserve any of this. Didn’t deserve a kid who lived across the hall and adored him for some unknowable reason or a grumpy grizzled wolf who lived a few floors up who understood the full-shift in Theo in ways that only Malia could, didn’t deserve a pack who considered him as one of them even though they were wrong and, an alpha who smiled at Theo and clapped him on the shoulder and spoke to him so sweetly even though Theo still recalled the moment his heart had stopped beating in his clenched fist, didn’t deserve this apartment with the obnoxious spiral staircase and the potted panda plant with wolfsbane flowers, his bookcase slowly filling with books and knick-knacks that people keep leaving for him, the calendar on the fridge steadily filling with dates and the photo frames accumulating on the walls and the corkboard filled with notes and reminders, his wall of windows used as a mural to scribble important information and sweet little notes that people he loved left for him to find – people he loved! He’s never loved anyone in his life! – and the perfect beam of mid-day sunlight and –

And Liam.

He stood in the kitchen humming to himself as he stirred eggs in a buttered pan. Bread was browning in the temperamental toaster, and the kettle was hissing, warning them that it was finally ready. Liam was humming to himself to the tune of Muse’s record Drones playing lowly from the vinyl player. He was wearing a pair of boxer shorts, odd socks, and Theo’s lavender coloured hoodie that hung limply off of him, at least a size too big and stretched from constant use. His hair was mussed from the pillow and sleep and Theo’s hands, the imprint of the sheets still red against his cheek. Theo watched him where he sat at the dining table, hands folded together, waiting at Liam’s behest.

The kettle screamed, the water boiled, and Liam abandoned the eggs to shuffle over and pour Theo his morning coffee. He added six teaspoons of sugar to pitch-black coffee and carefully brought it over to Theo, the mug so full that it threatened to slosh over the edge.

“Here you are,” Liam’s tongue was sticking out the corner of his mouth, his brows pulled together in concentration. It was so adorable that it made Theo’s teeth hurt. He slid it across the table towards him. “One black coffee, six sugars, no cream.”

“Thanks. To what do I owe this honour?” Theo asked as he wrapped his hands around the mug, their fingers brushing in the exchange. Heat seeped into his palms; his fingers tingled with the contact.

“Dunno,” Liam swayed there, hip pressed against the edge of the table, a dopey, cheerful look on his face. “I just wanted to do something nice for you. Maybe help you unwind for once. You’re always so high-strung, even in the mornings.”

Humming, Theo took a sip of his coffee, his tongue scalding and immediately healing. It was perfect, the way it always was, the way that only Liam could make it, even scatterbrained and half-asleep. He raised his eyebrows in the direction of the kitchen. “You sure you don’t need some help?”

“No, no, I got it - ah shit! Fuck, fuck, fuck…” Liam glanced over his shoulder and hurried back to the kitchen, slipping on his socks, as smoke started to rise from the toaster, the bread inside blackened around the edges. He had to hit the side of the toaster to encourage the bread to pop up, and he burnt his fingertips as he dropped them unceremoniously on two plates. He stuck his fingers in his mouth as they healed, while simultaneously trying to fumble for the butter. “I still got it. It doesn’t look like it right now, but I promise, I got it.”

“I have faith in you,” Theo said as he watched Liam slather an obscene amount of butter on the two burnt pieces of toast and slide the overcooked, rubbery eggs onto them. They bounced off the plate, and he swore as he plucked them from the counter and repositioned them onto the mountain atop the bread. He seasoned it with an obscene amount of salt and pepper. Theo spent about a decade of his life surviving off of bland oatmeal and energy bars and the nutritional slop the Dread Doctors mass-produced and fed all their experiments. If he could endure that, he could choke down Liam’s burnt toast and overcooked scrambled eggs. “Although I’m starting to think that faith might be misplaced.”

“Shut up,” Liam huffed as he slid into the seat opposite Theo at the table. He placed one plate in front of Theo and the other in front of himself. “Not all of us can be good at everything on our first try. The rest of us normal people have to work for it.”

Theo worked for it every damn day. He picked things up easily, Latin and chess and espionage, the piano, once, for a con, and Spanish and French and Italian, how to draw and how to knit and how to care for a potted plant. Hebrew, for fun, and an above-average understanding of Sumerian to be useful. But, despite all this time, he’s never quite figured out how to be a person.

The eggs were as rubbery and dry as he expected them to be, borderline inedible, and he thought, at one point, he crunched down on a shard of eggshell, but he smiled and told Liam truthfully that it was the most delicious thing that he had ever eaten, and Liam had smiled so big and bright that it made his whole face war with the rising sun, because he knew, the way he always knew and the way that Theo was teaching him to know, that Theo wasn’t lying.

They sat on the couch, drinking their coffees. Liam was slumped against Theo’s side, and Theo’s arm was draped over his shoulder, when he finally gathered the courage to ask, more fear and uncertainty in his voice than he’d wanted, “Do you ever wonder sometimes if you deserve it?”

“Deserve what?” Liam asked.

“This. All of this, any of this,” Theo carded his fingers through Liam’s hair just to give himself something to do with his hands. He needed a haircut. The ends were starting to curl against his neck in little ringlets. “The pack, your parents, lacrosse, your friends. Any of it. How do you know if you deserve it?”

Liam was quiet for a moment, thinking. They sipped at their slowly cooling coffees as they waited, watching the Scooby Doo gang solve another mystery on the TV. “I still don’t think I do deserve it, really,” Liam admitted in a quiet voice. “Some days, I wake up, and I can’t believe that this is actually happening to me. That I’ve got parents who love me and people who want to know me and actual friends for once. Nobody wants to be friends with the kid with IED, who could break your nose faster than he’ll shake your hand. I think a lot of people used to be afraid of me. Maybe they still are. But my parents aren’t, the pack isn’t – you’re not. I think it’s just about earning it. Putting in the work every day to make sure you’re worthy of it.”

“I don’t think I’m worthy of any of this,” Theo tilted his head back against the spine of the couch. “I keep waiting for everyone to remember who I am and change their mind.”

“That’s not going to happen, because you are worthy, and you do deserve it,” Liam said with so much conviction that Theo was almost inclined to believe it himself. “I watch you, you know. I can see how hard you work every single day. Everyone does. The whole pack does. We have every reason to hate you, and we don’t, because we know where you came from and who you used to be, and we know who you’re becoming.”

“I could be lying,” Theo pointed out, just to be contradictory. They’d be fools if they didn’t consider the possibility. “I could be manipulating you all – again.”

“No,” Liam moved to press his ear against his chest, right over Tara’s stolen heart. “You’re learning what it means to finally allow yourself to be a person instead of a thing. I pay more attention to you than I’m willing to admit. I can see how hard you work, how difficult accepting all of this is for you, sometimes. But you’re a stubborn bastard. You don’t give up. And fuck, I love you for it.”

Theo’s heart gave a traitorous thump in his chest, and he knew Liam could hear it, could feel it against his cheek. “I’ve never had a home before,” He said to the ceiling. “I’ve never had friends or a – a pack before. I’ve never had people that I cared about. People that mattered. And now I’ve got an apartment, I’ve got Alec across the hall and Derek upstairs, I’ve got people coming over an annoying amount. I’ve got you. I don’t know what to do with it all. I’ve gone most of my life without, and now I’ve suddenly got everything I could ever want, and I don’t know where I’m supposed to go from here. What do I do? What does that mean? What am I supposed to be now?”

“You can be whatever you want to be. Whoever you want,” Liam rolled around so he could lie on his back with his head on Theo’s lap, looking up at him. He reached a hand out to cup tenderly against Theo’s cheek, soothing his thumb across the harsh line of his jaw. He had dirt under his nails and blood where he had bitten at a hangnail, smelling of pepper and coffee and burnt toast. “Now you get to figure out what it means to be a person for once instead of a weapon. Deciding what you want to be instead of what you were made to be. Nobody gets to tell you what or who you ever ever again. And, I don’t want to jinx it, but I can already tell that the journey… it’s going to be beautiful. I just know it.”

With more vulnerability than Theo wanted, more desperate wanting weaved into his words than he’d ever admit, he traced Liam’s lips with his finger and asked, “Will you stay with me? I might get lost.”

The curve of Liam’s smile was hot and bright against Theo’s touch, transcendent, ephemeral, too real. “Baby,” he promised. “I ain’t going anywhere.”

Theo’s stolen heart fluttered hopefully in his chest, and he ducked his head down just as Liam surged upright, and they collided somewhere in between with the crush of noses and the clacking of teeth and the burst of blood against their tongues, Theo’s hands winding around Liam’s shoulders and back to hold him steady and Liam threading his fingers in Theo’s hair to drag him closer, and as he gasped on Liam’s hot breath and Liam laughed against his mouth, cheeks ruddy and eyes bright and so damn beautiful that if Theo died right now and this was the last thing he ever saw, he would die the happiest man in the world, he couldn’t help but think  - oh, so this is what it means to be human.

Barely even human – but maybe just human enough.