Work Text:
Melissa heard the bickering voices just around the corner of the hallway before she saw their owners.
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“Shut up and keep walking.”
“I'm fine. Ow! Jesus!”
“See, you ARE in pain.”
“Well, no shit, Dunbar, because you’re pressing on the bullet in my shoulder.”
She turned just in time to see an angry-looking Liam practically dragging a protesting Theo down the hall toward her. Despite his clear annoyance, the latter was holding his left shoulder, and even from afar she could see his already dark shirt slowly growing darker with blood.
The duo stopped in front of her, and she raised her eyebrows at them. “Boys,” she greeted. “Do you need something?”
Liam looked at Theo accusingly. “He got shot.”
Theo rolled his eyes. “We just fought a fucking war, genius. I’m not the only one who got shot.” He turned to address her with a practiced, laid-back smile. “It’s fine, Melissa, really. I’m just trying to get back to my truck; I’ll take care of it there.”
As Liam objected again, Melissa examined Theo. He always seemed slightly paler nowadays than he used to, but right now, there seemed to be a faint grey-ish tinge to that pallor, making the shadows under his eyes more prominent. Despite the easygoing, blasé demeanor he was clearly trying to maintain, he was leaning away from her—a subtle, almost imperceptible angle—like he wanted to keep his distance; like he wanted to be ready to run the second Liam let go of him.
On one hand, she could make up some excuse about being busy and let him figure it out on his own. Liam probably wouldn’t be too happy about it, but she hadn’t forgotten what Theo had done, and she couldn’t pretend like she’d lose all that much sleep over not helping the boy. Whatever happened to him wouldn’t be her fault.
On the other hand, Liam seemed genuinely concerned underneath his anger, and, whether she liked it or not, Theo had played a significant role in keeping him safe—from hunters and from himself—and had been doing so for several weeks now, according to Scott.
She sighed, “I’m sure you’re more than capable of handling it, Theo, but I’m both a nurse and standing right here, so why don’t you allow me to give Liam some peace of mind?”
The boy in question was watching the exchange, his eyes flicking between looking expectantly at her and checking on Theo. At Melissa’s words, he nodded vigorously, elbowing Theo roughly when he opened his mouth to respond. She couldn’t fight the small smile that tugged at her lips at Liam’s rather violent way of showing he cared.
A tiny percentage of that smile might’ve also been from said violence being directed toward Theo, but she wouldn’t admit that out loud.
“There’s a room right over here; we can use that one.” She gestured to the door a few feet behind her, remembering having seen it empty.
Theo simply sighed, nodding before trudging in the direction of the room. Liam went to follow before Melissa stopped him with a gentle hand on his shoulder,
“Liam, honey, why don’t you wait out here, give Theo some privacy?” She proposed.
Liam’s brow furrowed. “This is Theo; he never asks for privacy,” he replied.
“Liar!” Theo’s voice shouted from inside the exam room. Melissa should’ve known he’d still be listening.
“Shut up!” She winced as Liam shouted back over her shoulder. He brought his attention back to her, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Why are you trying to get him alone? Look, you have every right to still be mad about what he did to Scott, and I’m not saying you should just totally forgive him, but he’s really trying to change; he’s already changed!”
He would’ve kept on rambling if Theo’s voice hadn’t interrupted him again,
“Respectfully, Melissa, unless you want me doing this myself, could you guys hurry it up a bit?”
Melissa whipped around toward the open doorway. “Theo, don’t you dare touch anything!” She called before turning back to Liam, his posture still defensive. “Liam, honey, I promise you, I don’t want to hurt Theo.”
The “anymore” went unsaid.
“But if there’s anything else—any other injuries—that he’s hiding, he’s sure as hell not going to give them up with you there, so I just need a few minutes, okay?” She asked.
Liam pursed his lips, clearly not happy with it but still relented, shoulders slumped, “Fine. Do I just wait out here or something?”
“He’s probably going to need a new shirt; you can run to the laundry room and grab one from in there. How’s that?” She suggested. Liam nodded.
“Okay, but when I get back, I’m coming in,” he said adamantly. Melissa breathed a small laugh and patted him on the shoulder.
“Alright, now go.”
Melissa walked into the exam room to find Theo sitting on the bed with his back to the wall, one knee propped up while the other was stretched out in front of him. His hand was still on his bleeding shoulder, but didn’t appear to be pressing down as hard, and his head was tilted back, eyes closed, and face relatively relaxed. Instinctively, she felt her heart skip a beat with worry before he opened one eye and looked at her.
“Don’t get too excited; I’m still alive,” he drawled with a tired smirk. She returned the expression, raising her eyebrows,
“I’m fairly sure you can tell the difference between excitement and concern, Theo.”
A look akin to surprise flashed across his face before his features were pulled back into a neutral expression. In lieu of responding, he let go of his shoulder, placed both hands on the bed, and rotated himself, scootching toward the edge until he was sitting with his legs dangling over the side. The only indication he gave of being in any pain was a sharp breath when he pressed down with his left arm. Melissa watched as his right hand left a smear of blackish blood on the section of the sheets he touched.
Wolfsbane.
She crossed the room quickly, pausing to pull on a pair of gloves before nearing where Theo was sitting. She slid the pair of trauma shears she’d instinctively grabbed earlier from her pocket and held them up. As soon as Theo saw the blades, however, his eyes widened. He held both hands up placatingly, leaning back as much as he seemed able without falling over.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing?” he asked, eyes bouncing between Melissa and the shears.
She stopped, pulling the shears away. “I need your shirt off to access the wound,” she said plainly; she wondered if he’d hit his head during the fight.
He kept his eyes on the shears apprehensively. “I know that,” he said, sneering at the insinuation that he didn’t know something that obvious. “But do you really need to cut it?”
She took a step back, folding her arms. “Theo, if you can get your shirt off on your own, without hurting your shoulder even more, you are more than welcome to do so.”
With a determined look on his face, Theo began to raise his arms slowly, reaching back to try to grab the fabric of his shirt to pull it over his head. He choked back a groan, pressing his lips tightly together as he paused to take a deep, shaky breath.
As she watched, Melissa noticed a thin, pale scar that started on the edge of his forehead, climbing up his skull until it disappeared into his hair. Her brow furrowed; she thought werewolves couldn’t get scars because of their healing. She was almost sure that applied to chimeras, too. It looked old, though, so she supposed it could’ve been from childhood; had she just never noticed it?
A gasp of pain pulled her out of her thoughts just in time to see Theo attempt to strip his shirt off in one quick movement, which resulted in him nearly losing his balance, the fistful of fabric slipping from his fingers, and a renewed surge of dark spreading across his shirt. She decided it was time to intervene.
“Okay, that’s enough,” She said, stepping forward again. Theo leaned away, glaring at her and breathing heavily. “You’re going to make it worse like that, and, regardless, the shirt’s already ruined,” she said, gesturing to the bullet hole and the still-spreading blood with the shears.
Theo didn’t break eye contact for a few seconds, his jaw clenched, but finally he looked away and muttered, “Fine.”
He mumbled something under his breath as he sat back up properly that she didn’t quite catch, though she was pretty sure there was something about the price of clothing mixed in there. Not thinking much of it, though, she nodded and stepped forward again. This time, Theo stayed still as she brought the shears to his shirt, cutting up the center with experienced quickness.
She heard the rustling of fabric as Theo removed the remains of his shirt, while she slid the shears back into her pocket.
“Alright, let’s see what we’re dealing w–” her words died in her throat as she looked back up to see Theo’s now-exposed torso. There was black-tinged blood smeared along his left side, very obviously originating from the angry-looking bullet wound right at the joint connecting his shoulder to his chest, but she’d expected that. What brought her thoughts to a screeching halt were the scars.
Theo was covered in them.
Numerous pale lines marred the skin of his upper body; they traced different angles, lengths, and widths, some healed better than others, but all old, and all clearly made with expert precision—surgical precision.
Theo quirked an eyebrow at her when she stopped mid-sentence, but must have realized where her eyes were, because he looked down at his chest before sighing deeply, “Ah, right.”
Melissa cleared her throat, trying to shake away her surprise. “Those weren’t there–”
“Before Scott and his pack used the sword to put me in the ground, that’s correct,” he finished for her. “They showed up when Liam pulled me back out. My guess is that it either has something to do with the Dread Doctors’ deaths or that maybe the skinwalkers decided that I needed a more external reminder of what I really was—what I really am.”
Melissa furrowed her brow. “And what’s that?” she asked.
Theo looked her in the eyes, his lip pulled into a bitter smile. “Your son was the one who said it: barely even human.”
She looked back at the scars, eyes moving from one to another: diagonal lines tilted upward, a few inches above his hips, while two symmetrical ones curved just slightly under his ribs. Several lines ran vertically down his abdomen, and another ran perpendicular to them, disappearing around his side and onto his back. A long, horizontal line stretched the entire width of his torso, slicing him in half right above the belly button; higher up, a small line crossed his trachea, and even higher still, another diagonal line was a little too close to where his jugular would’ve been closest to the surface of the skin for her liking. Smaller scars peppered other areas of his skin, just as neat as the big ones. He looked more like an illustration from a surgeon’s textbook than a teenager.
“He was right, though,” he said. “I’m just a lab rat.”
Melissa swallowed, the declaration landing like a pit in her stomach, like it didn’t sit right. She pushed the feeling down, though. This was Theo; she wasn’t going to feel bad for him.
One of the most glaring scars in the assortment was the thick vertical line running straight down the center of his body, situated exactly between the two halves of his rib cage. It marked the spot where, if she remembered what Scott had told her, the Dread Doctors had replaced his original heart with his sister’s, making him a genetic chimera.
Theo once again followed the path of her gaze to the specific scar and clicked his tongue, “You never forget your first,” he joked, a dry sort of sarcasm lurking underneath the words.
Melissa didn’t respond immediately; instead, she reached out and lightly tapped his right hand, which had resumed covering his wound at some point she must not have noticed.
“Move this, please,” she instructed softly. As he let his hand drop away from his shoulder, she caught a glimpse of another long, pale line running up the length of his forearm. She leaned over to check his back for an exit wound. She didn’t find one, but she did find yet another scar along the path of his spine, starting around the center of his back before climbing up his neck and into his hair.
“I’m gonna have to pull the bullet out,” she told him. He nodded at her like that had been a given from the start, and she went to grab a pair of tweezers and a suture kit from the cabinet. “Do you actually remember, or did the Dread Doctors use some kind of supernatural anesthesia or something?” She asked.
Theo snorted, “I remember most of them,” he said flippantly, “the Doctors weren’t big believers of anesthesia…at least not when it came to me.”
Melissa almost dropped the suture kit as she was pulling it from the shelf, closing the cabinet before turning around. “What do you mean?”
Theo shrugged with his uninjured shoulder. “The body uses unconsciousness, or sleep, as a chance to work on healing instead of other tasks, even in regular humans. If you’re trying to perform a surgery on someone with supernatural healing, making sure their body doesn’t just fix everything within seconds is one of the most challenging parts. The Doctors came up with some kind of serum that blocked healing abilities, but it ended up… interacting poorly with general anesthesia, and they thought the latter was less important. Later on, they developed the black wolfsbane they used in all the other chimeras’ surgeries. They never deemed it necessary for me, though.”
Melissa could tell by his phrasing that there was more to that story, but she chose not to ask, holding up the pair of tweezers and waiting for Theo to give her a nod of approval before she began trying to get the bullet out of his shoulder. As she pressed into the wound, he didn’t even so much as tense at the movement. She felt the pit that had been forming in her stomach since she’d first seen Theo’s scars grow even more, “And for pain?”
Theo swung his feet back and forth gently as he let Melissa work in a way that was almost childlike, “I got used to it after a while,” he replied simply.
Melissa thought back to when the Raeken siblings had gone missing, just before Tara was found dead on the riverbank. If she remembered correctly, Theo had been around nine when that had happened. She imagined a fourth-grade Theo lying on an operating table, as three masked scientists cut into his chest. Did he scream? How long did it take for him to pass out from the pain? Was it before or after they cut his sternum in half and cracked it open?
She wondered how many years it took for him to stop feeling it—How many surgeries did it take before he simply lay still and quietly let it happen, just as he was now?
She felt the tweezers touch metal inside Theo’s shoulder, and she thought about all the scars that covered him. She wondered how many of them saw complications. Did they all go as planned? They couldn’t have. How many times had he been clinically dead?
“Are they all from some kind of transplant?” she couldn’t help but ask.
Theo shook his head. “No—really only the first one.”
“Tara’s heart,” Melissa said. He didn’t reply, so she decided to press a little bit more. “So everything else…” her tone communicated the question without any other words.
Theo raised an eyebrow at her, clearly seeing the attempt to fish for information. She expected him to shut down the conversation, but—to her surprise—he answered.
“When I was a kid, I thought that The Doctors just wanted some kind of excuse to cut something open: experimentation, exploration, maintenance, education, punishment, some combination of multiple things—it could’ve been pretty much anything.”
Melissa didn’t miss the way that he referred to himself as “something,” rather than “someone."
She chanced another glance at him as she pulled on the bullet carefully. He wasn’t looking at her anymore, instead staring down at his hands in his lap, picking at the flaking blood on his fingers. Finally, she fully removed the bullet from his shoulder, dropping it and the tweezers on the portable tray she’d placed on the bed. She then picked up a roll of gauze and a lighter.
“I’m seeing some black coloring in your blood; was there wolfsbane in that bullet?” She asked.
Theo reached forward and plucked the gauze out of her hand before she could react, pressing it to his shoulder and waving the lighter away. “Yeah, but not enough to actually do any real harm.”
Melissa remembered Scott telling her that the chimeras could pass through mountain ash as if it were nothing, but she could’ve sworn they were still vulnerable to wolfsbane. Before she could ask, Theo continued.
“The Doctors knew their chimeras would have a natural immunity to mountain ash, but not wolfsbane. The two react to different elements of supernatural creatures. But they wanted to see if it was possible to build up a tolerance.” He uncovered the gauze patch, revealing a regular-looking gunshot wound, bleeding regular-looking red blood; the stain on the gauze was black, as if all the poison had simply seeped out onto the pad.
“You’re still bleeding,” Melissa pointed out. Theo’s gaze moved from his chest back up to her, leveling an unimpressed look.
“Chimeras take a bit longer to heal than real werewolves; just give it a second.”
Melissa nodded, leaning forward to offer him a clean piece of gauze, which he took with a silent nod of thanks and pressed to the wound, his head drooping until his chin was against his chest as he waited for his healing to kick in further. She studied the used piece of gauze—the pitch black of wolfsbane-infected blood.
“So how’d they do it?” She finally asked.
Theo cocked his head to the side, lifting it just enough for his eyes to meet hers, his lips barely quirking upward at the corner. “Same way most scientists do things: trial and error.” He huffed a humorless laugh and lifted the gauze slightly to check the bullet hole. “Their trial, my error.”
Apparently deeming the wound’s healing progress acceptable—Melissa could see that it had stopped bleeding and was starting to knit back together from the inside out—he slid off the bed.
He strolled to the sink, dropping both gauze patches in the trash before grabbing a paper towel and wetting it slightly under the faucet as he spoke.
“The next time I did something that wasn’t to their liking—don’t remember what it was anymore—I woke up on the operating table alone, with a tray full of surgery tools sitting next to me. It felt like my insides were on fire; I was coughing up blood. I didn’t realize what was happening until I saw the blood was black.” He dabbed at the smeared blood on his skin, talking as casually as if he were recounting a school day. Finally, his gaze lifted to meet hers. “They’d filled a tea bag with wolfsbane, and left it somewhere inside me. It was a test, an experiment, and a punishment all in one: figure out where the wolfsbane is, then cut it out. Do it enough times, and eventually it’ll be more like reacting to a minor allergen than to a deadly poison. They figured that if they tried that with as many strains as possible, eventually I’d be able to walk off ninety-seven percent of wolfsbane strains. But more importantly, they figured if I wanted it to stop, I’d eventually learn to stop messing shit up. They were right on both counts, of course.”
He sighed, dropping the now-stained paper towel into the trash and picking the remains of his shirt off the ground where it’d landed after he’d taken it off, shrugging it on like a coat.
Melissa watched as a portion of his scars disappeared beneath the fabric, while others remained visible. When Theo looked back at her, there was a heavy tiredness in his eyes, a kind that wasn’t from blood loss. The two of them were silent, one having just put his past on display—literally—and the other trying to process the implications she realized she’d never thought about until they were glaringly in her face.
Theo broke eye contact first, glancing toward the door before gesturing with his head. “Liam’s back. Scott and the others are with him, too, sounds like. Think you could do me a favor just this once and go get that shirt from him so I can change before they get here? I’ve made it this long without anyone else seeing all this,” he waved a hand toward his torso. “And I’m too tired for Scott’s puppy dog eyes. Let your son and his pack keep whatever image of me helps them sleep best at night.”
The image of an evil psychopath who needed to be stopped at all costs.
The image of a villain who deserved what he’d gotten, and only remained alive because they’d needed him in some way.
He said the last sentence with a wry smirk and a sarcastic look of pity, mocking the inconvenience of gaining a new perspective, of realizing that the idea you had of someone isn’t what’s actually in front of you. Melissa wondered if his scars mocked him the same way when he looked in the mirror, like ghosts of all the things done to him until, eventually, the him that he’d known was no longer there, replaced by someone different. Something different.
“Maybe they should change it, though,” she replied softly.
Theo’s smirk remained, and he raised his eyebrows as if he were pretending she was a friend who’d said something scandalous at a Sunday brunch. “Now come on, Melissa, we both know I don’t deserve that.”