Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“So?” Aida says. 

It’s gently expectant. Bears none of the nail-biting suspense nor morbid curiosity Theo anticipated from her. Which makes sense, sure. It’s therapy. Not a gossip sesh. Still. 

At the end of their last session, Theo tacked on a casual, “If I happen to miss my next appointment, feel free to assume me dead or critically-injured and find a new client to take my slot” to his goodbye. He halfway meant it. Even considered showing up late today just for the drama, to watch dread give way to relief as he strolled into the office later than expected. 

But he’s not that cruel. And an hour-long session is already a tight-squeezed time constraint to recap the way his world briefly flirted with the possibility of total and utter collapse. 

Plus, Aida saw through his shit. Countered with, “Next session, if you’d like, we can talk about your learned tendency to be flippant toward your own wellbeing as a defense mechanism.” 

She’s too fucking good. Theo’s certain he used to be harder to read than this. 

He says, “So. I guess it’s over.”

Waking up with the taste of blood on his tongue, preemptive defeat. Every interaction laden with silent goodbyes; the unspoken reality of being a walking target. Being siren-minded and hypervigilant. Holding his breath. 

Theo won’t be naive in this. Monroe was never the end-all-be-all of hunters. And Beacon Hills has a talent for conjuring new threats out of thin air. He’s swallowed so much cynicism the past few years that his arteries are probably clogged with it. 

But, he can exhale. He can do at least that. 

“And…” Theo trails off, “I don’t know what happens next.” 

His life has been nearsighted. He stopped adding things to his wall calendar—tests, scholarship deadlines, school events—over a month ago. Didn’t realize it until after he and Liam returned home from the hospital, scatterbrained and spaghetti-limbed. Woke up the next morning trying to place himself in the week and found a blank stretch of days piled one after another instead of the usual meticulous day-by-day notation of all responsibilities and important happenings. It’s not that he stopped planning. He thinks he was planning for something worse, maybe. 

Liam—once he stopped looking like a human pincushion, or one of those rubber ballistics gunshot test dummies—fixed it. Scrawled PROM in red marker two weeks ahead. Then backtracked and retraced the letters in black instead, because the color’s gotten old. Scribbled GRADUATION!!! across not just the day, but the entire week that graduation falls on. Wrote in smaller, more timid letters, Didn’t Die beneath the date of the last battle. 

Theo’s still gotta lot of open space. So much. He doesn’t know what to do with it all. 

“And what’s that like?” 

This morning, as the first rays of the sun streaked across the sky, Theo slipped out from beneath his sheets, out from beneath Liam’s arms, out from beneath the weight of months of evading death, and ran. Dog-boy darting between the thick trunks of lofty Douglas firs, tongue lolling out between sharp teeth tasting morning dew. Dirt clumped beneath his claws. He ran. And there was nothing chasing him. No bad memories, unreconciled feelings, nor gunshots on his tail. He came to rest on a lookout point of one of the trails. Indulged in small joys. The sun, a warm patch of grass, dragonflies buzzing in the air, and beyond the hill a town that has tried and failed to make a cadaver out of him. 

His mind—for the first time in longer than he’d like to admit—is hospitable.  

“It’s a relief.”

*

The McCall Pack is huge. Scott and the ragtag bunch of teenagers Theo thought would be easy to pick off one-by-one with a little dissent sprinkled amongst the ranks were only the outer facade. This group’s a patchwork quilt of people bound primarily by Scott. Theo almost wants to shake his past self by the shoulders and call him a fucking idiot for believing he could dismantle them. But he won’t. Because he’s gonna cut that kid a break. He’s taken enough shit. 

Theo’s pack. Not his in proprietorship but his in terms of belonging. They can all more fully appreciate the content thrum of togetherness here in Scott’s living room now that it doesn’t feel like the last time they’ll all occupy the same space. Nothing solemn about empty caskets.

Occupy is generous. Sounds too polite. Melissa would probably gripe about her house being overrun by werewolves-shapeshifters-humans oh, my, if anyone could hear her over the tumult. Their voices combined are a muddy roar, each conversation overlapping another. And personal space is futile; everyone is sardine can close, flashing each other out-of-practice smiles until their cheeks ache with relief. The thread connecting them tonight is hope. In some other version of events, Theo supposes it could have been grief. 

He’s mourning elbow room more than anything else right now, really. 

“Some reporter from BCTV-1 contacted me to request an interview. Guess she got a copy of the newsletter we sent out,” Alec brags to his little storytime triangle of Theo and Corey. “It totally paid off having my name listed first.” 

Theo got the same email. Something, something, “your inspiring courage,” blah, blah “would love to chat with you about the experience,” and so on. He’s halfway certain everyone else involved in the letter received an interview request, too. But he’ll let Alec cling to this one moment of self-importance. 

Corey asks, “Are you gonna do it?” He feigns surprise well. Theo only picks up on it because of the knowing glance tossed his way. 

“Well, no. But only because Melissa said I’m not allowed to.” 

“No shit. Your face broadcasted on every television screen in the county would be a surefire way to give leftover hunters easy prey,” Theo says. 

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever,” Alec rolls his eyes. “But it’s not fair that the humans get all the credit and public adoration for being brave.” 

“Who cares. Let them be the targets for once,” Theo shrugs, surveying the room. 

Scott’s propped on the edge of the sofa chatting with Liam and Malia. He’s got a faint, crooked smile on his lips as his eyes trail over his pack. When they were kids—Theo, Stiles, and Scott—they’d play this game. Mind Reader. The three of them huddled inside the jungle gym, surveying the recess monitors at the playground's edge and guessing their innermost thoughts. Winner was whoever could come up with the most ridiculous prediction, have them rolling around in pebbles, clutching their stomachs in laughter. Usually Stiles. 

Here, Scott’s eyes drift from person to person, not as if he intends to guess what’s on their mind but instead like he’s overwhelmed with gratitude at the prospect of being in a room with so many minds to begin with. Minds that pooled together in mutual pursuit of peace. He nods—like he’s satisfied with the level of togetherness—excuses himself from the conversation, and slips out of the room and into the stillness of the kitchen. 

Theo follows and stops just shy of where Scott’s half-buried in the fridge. 

“Let me guess. You’re thinking…if your mom wasn’t here, you’d crack open one of those bottles of wolfsbane liquor you smuggled home.” 

Scott turns around with a can of soda in his hand, nudging the fridge door shut with his hip. Surprise descends across his face and yields to warm remembrance. 

“Close,” he says. Slow and deliberate with the word, like trying on childhood familiarity. “And you’re wondering how much longer you have to put up with all of us in one room before you can make your escape.”

Theo’s lips twist upward. “Mind Reader.” 

They fall quiet to the crack-fizz of the soda can. There’s an itch, some battle remnant that’s been gnawing at Theo. Taking up more headspace than he’d like to admit. 

"You gave up," he says. 

"What?" 

"At the preserve, I saw you. You were going to sacrifice yourself. To Monroe, of all people," Theo elaborates. She took advantage of the chaos. Everyone preoccupied in their pockets of war around the preserve, just bodies. Monroe with a gun and a straight shot. Scott, that bullet’s target. “If Lydia hadn’t stepped in, it could’ve been you that died.” 

Parrish retrieved Monroe’s gun after the dust settled. It held only five rounds. She came into the battle fully intent on letting her militia do the work for her. Specialty bullets—the lethal mixture of kanima venom and wolfsbane Theo served as a test dummy for. It was meant to be a killshot. She’d leave either a messiah or a martyr. 

Theo isn’t appeased by Monroe’s death. He saw it in the operating theater, her fear. Of him. Of people like him. Of a world that too readily descends into chaos and causes pain indiscriminately. He instead wishes that she would’ve realized that the thing to fight was something bigger than the presence of supernatural beasts. It is the willingness to exploit that existence in the pursuit of self-interested glory. Everyone loses. She did. The wolves that died in her wake did. The Dread Doctors did. All of the Beast’s victims did. And, Theo. He did, too. So long ago yet unsoftened by time and memory, he did. 

Scott sets down his soda and crosses his arms over his chest. His fingers briefly tighten against the tattoo circling his bicep, then fall away altogether. His scent goes smoky, muffled anger. 

"I didn’t give up. She wanted me. I thought maybe if I just—” he shakes his head, undoing the admission on the tip of his tongue. “My priority was—is—saving the pack. It always has been." 

Theo wants to scoff at that but doesn’t. There’s no equilibrium to be restored by offering up a life. He used to think so. Heart for a heart. Repay a whole lotta bad with some reckless good. But life isn’t simple that way. People die. They leave ghosts behind. Everyone’s worse off for it. It’s awful and it’s the oldest story in the book. 

“And you think letting her win would do that?” he asks. 

“It wasn’t about letting her win—”

“Then what?” 

Scott falls quiet. He would carry it all on his own if the pack let him. The burden of keeping people alive. Like this responsibility exists for him and no one else. Theo knows he hasn’t made it easy for Scott, saboteur he was. He’s sorry for it. For letting his hands remind Scott that the only constant in his life is that people want to take it from him. 

Maybe they are all tempted by the belief that the most meaningful thing they can give is their lives. There have been times, even recently, when Theo’s own body felt too heavy to support. Tempted by sinking after years spent just barely keeping his chin above water. Their existence doesn’t offer them life vests. Theo thinks of Liam putting himself in front of a blade so he wouldn’t have to. His chest hurts. They could all use survival lessons.

"What she wanted was a trophy. And although your corpse would've made a great one, that doesn't mean she'd be done playing her game,” he shrugs. 

Theo is well aware he’s the last person Scott needs a lecture from. Scott probably knows even better than him that history is blood. Lineage is blood. The beginning of their stories, blood. None of them made it here, to this house, into this pack, through peaceful means. They are descendants of violence. Nature. Nurture. Take your pick. Either way, it has embedded itself in their way of being. 

"Too many people want to see you dead," Theo says, the words loaded with all the unfinishedness of their shared history. "Don't make it easy for them." 

There are no clean exits here. Over Theo’s shoulder Scott stares out into a living room full of collateral damage. 

*

Theo’s already fledgling school dance enthusiasm sprouts legs and walks away at the sight of a purple, velvety bowtie. His ability to resist the urge to flee the mall entirely was already hanging by a thread after the duo of Alec and Hayden goaded him into trying on the gaudiest suits first. For "fun."

Paisley-patterned red. Sparkly navy blue. Emerald green velour. They’re like the devil and angel on Theo’s shoulders, except both devils, gleefully conspiring against him. 

Liam lucked out going to the department store on the other side of the mall with Mason and Corey. Theo’s pretty sure he got stuck with the short end of the stick in this divide and conquer plan. 

Then there’s shoes, cufflinks, ties, boutonnieres and shit. David offered up his credit card to cover the expenses. Said to consider it an early graduation present, which at first seemed overly charitable. But now Theo’s rethinking the whole thing. Free suit or not, embarrassment is not a gift.

“Okay, no more. I look like a fucking casino dealer. At this rate I’m going in a t-shirt and pajama pants,” Theo says, hanging a red bowtie from the rack of rejected suits outside his dressing room.

“You’re way too vain to go anywhere in pajamas,” Hayden rebuts. At Theo’s dry look, she adds, “I mean…noooo, don’t give up yet. Or else this will be like the world’s most disappointing episode of Say Yes to the Dress.”

“Well it’s more like Fuck the Tux, actually.” Alec cracks.  

“I hate you both.” 

What he hates more is that it’s a senior prom. As in, the rest of the group will not be in attendance. And—in Hayden’s words—even though tickets are easy to come by and there will likely be no real enforcement of the seniors-and-their-dates-only rule, “Do you know how expensive formal wear is? No one wants to pay for prom twice, sorry.” 

Hayden hands him two more hangers—an inky black suit, a charcoal grey dress shirt—and pushes him back into the dressing room with an order of, “Try it. I think this is gonna be the one.”

Theo doesn’t try it on. He instead sits on the bench beside the large, unforgiving dressing room mirror and lays the suit across his lap. In the halls at school, after people grew bored of recounting the thrill of almost dying at the hands of their hunter parents and the tense conversations that followed, prom chatter became a communicable disease. Who are you taking, what are you gonna wear, which afterparty are you going to, did you hear that Samina rejected Miles Cackovich’s promposal after the softball game?

They’re lucky, the humans. Bullets and werewolves and hunters are still novel and exciting to them. Something to gossip about and then brush aside to make room for other breaking developments. 

Theo has thought long about the logistics of prom, formed a vague set of expectations based on the information provided in the invitation that was mailed to the house. Dinner served at the banquet hall downtown—choice of a chicken, beef, or vegetarian meal du jour—the dance held in the large, open space across from the dining room—no theme, themes are too gauche—one complimentary photoset then any pictures from subsequent trips to the designated photo station have to be bought from the photographer’s website, and 7pm until midnight, after which everyone’s gotta go the hell home or crash an afterparty.

He is marginally embarrassed to admit he spent an hour sifting through pages of results for a google search of “what is prom like?” while Liam snored beside him last night. Theo has made a lot of plans in his life, both short and long-term, and none of them ever involved making it to the end of high school nor going to a school dance. 

He is trying very hard to be human now that the town has welcomed him as a monster. He isn’t sure that he’s any good at it. 

Alec and Hayden’s idle conversation outside the dressing room is interrupted by new arrivals. Mason, Corey, Liam, and the scent of soft pretzels and cheese sauce from the food court. Beyond the dressing room door, he hears a disgruntled attendant remind the group that food isn’t allowed in the store. Mason and Corey apologize, polite as ever. 

But, Liam. He slips beneath the dressing room door with a small shopping bag in his hand and half of a soft pretzel clenched between his teeth, something like a garbled “how goes it?” drifting from his lips. He tears off a chunk of the pretzel and offers it to Theo, but polishes off the rest when he only gets a mildly disgusted look in return.

“That suit,” he says, “I’m no expert, but I’m pretty you’re supposed to wear it, not use it as a blanket.”

“Funny.” 

Liam takes one glance at his sullen expression and asks, “Okay, who died?” 

And although he hadn’t felt particularly mournful prior, Theo thinks about how the last time he wore a suit was to the funeral of a grandmother whose name and face and suffocatingly loving gestures he can’t remember, and how Tara threatened to push him toward the front of the church and shut him inside the coffin with the mummy a mortician made of their gram but then Tara saw the open casket with her own two eyes and stayed quiet the rest of the day like death bared its teeth to her and whispered see you soon. So maybe that’s why suit shopping is a drag. 

“Oh, wait,” Liam says, forcing himself onto the small bench beside Theo. “Me. I’m the one who almost died. For you. Which is why you’re gonna take me to prom.” 

His lips spread into a grin so far from morbid it remakes Theo. He feels pathetic in the best way. Like affection owns him. Liam and his stupid smile and the pretzel crumbs on his t-shirt and the faint, yellow smudge of cheese sauce on his chin and his prom excitement. It’s gross. All of it. 

Theo kinda loves it. Him. 

He swipes a thumb across Liam’s chin and says, “You gonna keep milking that forever?”

“Depends,” Liam hums. “How long is it gonna work on you?” 

Forever. Probably. 

Instead, he says, “Get out. I have a suit to try on.” 

“Why’s it taking you so long? I just let Mason and Corey hand me shit until they decided I looked swoonable.” 

“Swoonable?” 

Liam shrugs. “Their words, not mine. Put it on, s’not like you stripping isn’t something I’ve seen before.” 

Theo’s cheeks aren’t heating up. They are not. It’s just the cramped dressing room and Liam and his soft-pretzel-cheese-sauce breath puffing against the side of his face that’s making them warm. Only that. 

From the other side of the dressing room, Alec loudly complains about how slow this is all going. He doesn’t have a leg to stand on. This would have taken half as long if they’d bothered giving him decent options from the start. 

“Out,” Theo repeats. 

“Wait, wait, I’ll leave, just gimme a second,” he stands and rifles through his small shopping bag. “Mase said this tie wouldn’t go with my suit, but it was too cool to pass up so I got it for you.” 

Liam drapes it across Theo’s lap. The tie is matte black and mostly plain, but just below where the knot would be there is a small embroidery of two golden-eyed wolves facing off—one a cloudy grey, the other a dark, leaden shade—their red lips pulled back into a snarl, fangs on display. 

*

Liam picks at his lukewarm chicken piccata and side of eggplant parmesan, drags a fork through the remnants of a salad doused in Italian dressing while he chats with two of his lacrosse teammates and their dates that opted to share a dinner table with him and Theo. 

So far, prom is like this: eat, small talk, long for the boy beside you, look at others, look at each other, think about dancing, wish you were the only two people in the room. 

Theo does a bad job at listening. Even worse at joining in on the conversation beyond a few murmured mhms and yeps. 

Liam’s fault, really. 

His hair is loosely gelled back, though a few strands have freed themselves from the rest, gracing the skin of his forehead. His suit is a deep, midnight blue with black lapels. Beneath it, he wears a pleated white dress shirt with glossy black buttons running down the length of it and a black bowtie. And as if that’s not enough, the cologne he’s wearing creates a magnet-pull between Theo’s nose and Liam’s neck. Each slice of the ceiling fan’s blades through the air above them sends another cloud of bergamot-sandalwood-Liam hurtling in his direction. 

Swoonable is a good word for it. 

Theo feels like the lovesick wolf in those Looney Tunes episodes. All hungry and wanting, tongue lolling out, heart-eyes bugging from his head. He bites his lips into submission. It’s pathetic. He has to remind himself he’s a fucking catch, too. 

After getting dressed—before pictures and all the incessant cooing from Jenna and David in between camera flashes—Theo was a piece of meat. Which is to say, Liam looked at him with eyes wide as an empty stomach and an appetite to fill. In Theo’s bedroom, Liam stepped closer, circled arms around his waist while Theo adjusted the boutonniere on his lapel, and he whispered, “Guess I never really asked you, but it’s only fair I return the favor. Wanna go to prom with me?” 

“I think I can make time in my schedule.” 

Here, his eyes are greedy and honest, have a habit of wandering Theo’s way even while his conversation directs itself elsewhere. None of the put-upon coquetry most of the couples in attendance will use as a precursor to their afterparty bedroom hookups or rented hotel room rendezvous. Happy, horny, bland, and normal. It’s almost something to envy. Theo and Liam have spent months killing themselves to get here. And it’s quiet—a hand on a thigh beneath the table, knees brushing together, honeyed grins reserved for each other—but it shows. Small victory. 

Teammate #1—Zach or Zane or Zzzz because every time he opens his fucking mouth Theo’s just about ready to doze off—invites his date out of the dining room for a dance soon after the other couple slips out. Julie. She’s a senior at the all-girls Catholic school one town over; Theo remembers her name because of her interest in his choice of tie, how she wondered if wolves were his favorite animals, to which he said “something like that.” 

Beside their glasses of water, they each have a cup of punch with a half-melted layer of rainbow sherbet on top that looks like pastel pond scum. Liam takes a long sip and it leaves a foamy mustache behind. He raises his arm to his mouth, all habit as he moves to wipe away the punch’s remnants, then falters. Manners overtake him. He snatches up his napkin and spares his suit jacket. His gaze drifts out toward the exit, eyes lingering on the dance floor space across the hall. 

“Okay,” he says. “Wanna dance?” 

*

The two of them can hardly make it into the ballroom before being greeted by classmates from all directions. Take a few bullets for some people you hardly know and suddenly everybody’s your friend. It is then that Theo remembers the only times he voluntarily attended any school function he’d been dressed as a plush, maroon cyclone. And the only dancing that involved was to the tune of Sid the Cyclone—clap, clap, clapclapclap. His confidence expires. 

The ballroom is bathed in soft purple light, has silky white fabric draped from the ceiling. There’s a small photography station with a twinkly light backdrop, metallic streamers, and an arch made of purple and silver balloons all in front of a seemingly bored photographer fiddling with their tripod. Tulle-topped tables with tea lights in the center line the walls of the room. A projector over the dance floor paints the varnished wood with a fuzzy image of Sid that grins despite the feet trampling all over him. Prom-goers mill about the ballroom, tripping on dress trains and stumbling in heels. Everywhere fond, sentimental discomfort. 

They took a photo. A few, actually. All gloriously uncomfortable. The photographer suggested Theo sling a friendly arm over Liam’s shoulder for the first picture and then mostly stifled his oh moment when the arm gradually drifted downwards over the course of the three complimentary photos—shoulderblades, small of back, waist. He asked if they wanted a fourth, like an apology for his assumption. So they went full cheese. Chest-to-back, Theo’s arms around Liam’s hips, Liam’s arms resting atop his. The kinda thing that screams prom. 

Populating the fringes of the room are punchbowl lurkers casting unfavorable glances towards the swaying mass of bodies on the dance floor, probably in attendance just to check a box on their high school bucket list rather than out of an appreciation for Top 40s hits, teachers-turned-chaperones dressed up in formal attire, and awkward slow dancing. The faint scent of alcohol clinging to a smattering of students’ breaths isn’t unnoticeable. Theo wonders how many people have snuck in liquor in their parents’ flasks tucked into a clutch or stuck in a suit pocket to spike their own drinks and make this night as fun as the movies say it’s supposed to be. 

The two of them are standing. Hovering, really. Shoulder-to-shoulder, eyes not on each other but on the clusters of people scattered around the floor. Google searches don’t really help with this part. Liam’s scent is a vaguely citrusy mixture of apprehension and nerves. And, personally, Theo is more comfortable looking dead than stupid. 

Although, for someone who nearly died to get Theo to take him here, Liam’s a little lackluster in the enthusiasm department. But the two of them didn’t dress up just to friend-zone each other in a room full of nonfactors. 

It’s a slow crawl, the way Theo’s pinky finds Liam’s. How their fingers quietly bump, twitch, clasp together. If Theo closed his eyes right now he’d mistake this feeling for home. 

He steps out into the flock of bodies and Liam isn't far behind. Up close, Theo can see the silver glitter dusted on the floor. It’ll stick to their soles. He’ll probably never stop finding flakes of it on the inside of his truck. They try to settle, but what was an upbeat, bubblegum pop track gives way to something soft, slow, and lilting. You’d think there’d be a gradual transition into this sorta thing. 

Theo says, “Do we—”

“This song’s so—” Liam cuts himself off, shakes his head. “Sorry. You go.” 

“I, uh. It’s nothing. Just…here.” 

Theo steps closer, and they reposition themselves, a more stilted mimicry of all the couples and friend-dates around them. He hopes Liam can’t hear the skittish rabbit of his heartbeat over the music. He hopes he looks less foolish than he feels. But then he wonders if Liam will bother going to prom next year, and if so, whether he’ll be slow-dancing with someone other than Theo, someone better at this. Hopes that Liam doesn’t, but then feels selfish and ridiculous at the thought. 

On the far side of the ballroom one of the balloons in the arch pops. They flinch, and both their heads swivel, all instinct and hypervigilance. 

“I thought—thought that was…” Theo trails off into a laugh. Half relief, half dread. 

Liam’s grin is tight, meek. Too understanding. 

“Yeah. Me too.” 

There’s this thing that followed them home that night, after the war. Something they both felt but wouldn’t put to words for fear that they’d speak something worse into existence. Doubt. It crawled beneath the covers and curled itself around them and whispered promises of “this isn’t over” into their ears at night. The weeks since have been spent holding their breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and periodically reminding themselves to exhale relief.

Maybe this is it. The shoe. But not just one; a whole bunch of them shuffling around a ballroom meticulously decorated by the senior class board, each step crushing skepticism into dust. 

Do-over. They have another go at the whole normal-couple-slow-dancing thing. Liam steps on Theo’s toes. Theo returns the favor. Self-consciousness only halfway thaws with the realization that everyone’s mostly too wrapped up in themselves to care much about what the two of them are doing. By the time they figure their bodies out, the song has changed. Something cloyingly upbeat. 

Theo says, “We’re kinda bad at this, huh.” 

Give them something monstrous. Give them a gunshot-riddled elevator. Give them a long hallway with a handful of people that wish them dead. Give them something to take down in unison, and they’re good. The way they feel about each other has been raised in captivity. It doesn’t quite know how to behave out here, surrounded by much tamer, lukewarm affection. 

Liam’s smile stretches into something more genuine. 

“The worst.” 

Theo lowers his voice to ask, “Is it the boyfriend thing or the werewolf thing for you?” 

He’s not all that dense. Knows that Liam’s first school outing as an unabashed werewolf in a town unleashed from Monroe’s fear-mongering also happens to coincide with his first in which he’s touting Theo as his date. 

Theo thinks back to outside the house, before the two of them left for the dance, their neighbor—Mrs. Greeley, who spends weekends loitering in her own front yard under the guise of pruning hydrangea bushes when she’s really just eavesdropping on the cul-de-sac activity, a one-woman neighborhood watch—called the two of them handsome and commented that their dates must be “very lucky girls.” They faltered, the both of them, ignored the second half of the statement and mumbled weak thanks for the first. 

“Maybe both.” 

Liam’s eyes wander. Finstock—leaning against the wall beside a refreshments table with another bowl of scummy rainbow punch and a meager offering of chips and dips—jabs a finger in his direction, flashes a wide grin, and curls his fist into a thumbs-up like he’s cheering on a goal and not a painful attempt at high school dance normalcy. Stiff-postured slow dance. Indecisive hands alternating between the shoulders and the waist. 

“Definitely both,” he sighs. “You?”

“It’s the dance thing. In general,” Theo says. “I’ve never been to one before.” 

“Wait. Ever? Not even, like…homecoming?” 

He tries to picture himself in this scenario any number of years ago. Can’t. There are some things that cannot be faked, and Theo thinks enthusiasm for overdone school social functions where the “getting ready” process is nearly longer than the actual event, may be one of them. You have to want it. 

“That would be a dance, Liam.” 

“Okay,” he nods, resolute in this. “Well, guess we gotta change that, right?” 

Liam disowns his shame and steps closer. There are worse things to be than a boy who is a werewolf in love with another boy who is half one. Theo wants this. The clumsy fairytale of it. Their lazy sway, more hugging than dancing to a song that doesn’t fit. Liam rests his head against Theo’s shoulder and his breath ghosts across his neck. Happiness is a form of resistance. 

Whole lot of screwing up they had to do to get here, but no one would know it. The two of them, kerosene and a box of matches. Compatible in the worst way. Theo can’t figure it out. This easiness with Liam. But this town’s full of unexplainable things and maybe the two of them are just a continuation of that tradition. And not all broken things are irreparable; sometimes shards and sharp edges come together to create mosaics. 

In the preserve, before the arrival of Monroe and her militia, there was talk amongst the humans in their chain of allies. Gossip, really, because that’s what people do when they’re awaiting their potential demise, they talk around the meaningful shit, not about it. Theo overheard it, not immune to the lure of high school rumors. Apparently, Ian asked Priya to go steady with him and Priya thought it was the “most romantic thing ever” but it was totally just a cover-up for the fact that Ian hooked up with Olivia—Priya’s best friend—the weekend before, and, maybe Priya saying yes was also a cover-up for the fact that she’d been crushing on Ian’s best friend Neil for much longer, and, listen, Theo doesn’t know their last names nor would he be able to pick their faces out of a lineup but he knows that their friendcest love quadrangle thing they’ve got going on is probably the most human bullshit he’s ever heard. And maybe everyone is blindly feeling their way through this world and doing a godawful job of it, and that’s why it matters. 

Theo and Liam are normal. They are here, together at prom after everything, and they are so fucking normal. 

They make it through 9 songs before Liam whispers do you wanna get out of here, and it’s the most romantic thing that’s happened this entire night, truly. 

“Not to cut your first and last high school dance ever short, or anything,” he adds. 

“No, please do,” Theo snorts. “You’d be putting me out of my misery.” 

“Afterparty?” he whispers. 

Liam’s got eyes like the dictionary definition of want and Theo knows that they are leaving but home will be the last place they end up. The night after the hospital, after Monroe died and Liam almost did, Liam went home with a bellyful of stitches that didn’t serve a purpose in his skin anymore. He let Theo undo him. All gentle-fingered, prying thread from unscarred skin. Theo lost count after eighty, but maybe lost is the wrong word, and it’s more like he chose to let the numbers escape him because every stitch remaining reminded him of what he actually almost lost. 

Theo feels undone like that. Split into a million little shiny pieces, the glitter stuck to the soles of their shoes as they head toward the exit. Pinky-locked, sidestepping their way through bodies without so much as an excuse me, unapologetic for their presence. He thinks the whole room could turn and watch them leave and he wouldn’t care. Not even a little. 

*

The two of them were overdressed for a pre-afterparty 7-Eleven run for a bounty of steak taquitos, chicken tenders, blue raspberry slurpees, and sour skittles. In the truck the foods go uneaten, abandoned in the front seat; slurpees melt and puddle in the cupholder. No one’s around so they’ll consider this semi-private indecency. Windows fogged up, shoes slid off, belts and button-downs undone, dewy bodies on the backseat, hearts beating improperly, wild-limbed reflection in the rearview mirror. Just them, loitering on the topmost level of the movie theater parking structure. Loitering in the moment of being a prom night cliche. Liam touches him like he is trying to line Theo’s skin with softer ghosts, undo the history of fingers that could only touch unkindly. And, god, is it deadly. Makes casualties out of his bad memories, reminds Theo he is his best as a body held, not harmed. 

Theo thinks of saying it then, when Liam is warm and heavy against him. The words that Liam’s martyrdom shouldn’t have had to teach him how to voice. His fingers slot into the grooves between Liam’s ribs and press—not hard, not enough to hurt, but firmly, enough to make himself known—and they fit. They fit, just like that. And Theo thinks he really might say it. The words crawl up from his chest, gain momentum in his throat, find courage on his tongue. 

But Liam’s phone buzzes and he sits up with slow reluctance, glances at the screen then peers past Theo’s head out the backseat window, and says, “Don’t be mad, but I invited Mason. And Corey. And Hayden. And Alec.” 

“Okay,” Theo shrugs, parts his lips to ask why Liam would expect him to get mad at that, but, then: headlights. Two bright beams gliding up the ramp to the top level of the parking structure. The sigh of an engine. “Wait, you invited them here?”

Not so much the place that’s the problem as the timing. They reek of each other. Obnoxiously so. Mason and Corey are supposed to hold the title of Most Annoyingly Affectionate Couple. And Theo and Liam are more undressed than not. A heads-up would be nice. 

The car nears, bathing the inside of the truck in white light. Liam raises a hand to wave but gets cut off by Theo dragging him beneath the window and out of the car’s line of sight until it drives past.

“Clothes, Liam.” 

“Oh. Right,” he says, although he’s slow to do any real sort of dressing, doesn’t quite match Theo’s haste. “And, yes, here, because my parents are home and I thought it’d be weird to have a party while they’re—”

“Party? It’s four of our friends who come over often enough to pay rent. That’s a normal Thursday night,” Theo huffs out. He tightens his belt, reaches down to the floor and blindly searches for his shoes. Slips them on only to belatedly realize he’s only wearing one sock.

“Point taken,” Liam relents. “Still—”

“Wanna pull your pants over your ass, maybe?” 

Liam obliges and slips on his dress shirt afterwards. 

“Zach invited us to his afterparty, not that you were listening, but—”

“You’re buttoning it wrong,” Theo interrupts, jerking his chin toward Liam’s waistline. The edges of the shirt are wildly out of alignment; he missed a few buttons. 

Liam rolls his eyes and unbuttons his shirt but doesn’t bother starting over. He grabs the suit jacket tossed over the center console and slips it on arm by arm, continuing, “But, anyway—”

“That’s my jacket,” Theo says. The car-full of party crashers is parking on the far side of the structure. Kind of them to grant some buffer space. His eyes snap back over to Liam. “What were you saying?”

Liam shrugs the jacket off and hands it to Theo. He picks up his own from the floor mat. Specks of glitter dust the sleeves of the suit. His bowtie is shoved in the pocket and he’d probably sooner strip down again than put it back on.

And, Theo’s tie. Well. Theo tries, but the interior of the car is dark and the rearview mirror’s too tiny to see much and he never was all that good at the whole process, and he thinks he really only wore the tie in the first place because Liam wanted him to, so when his fingers clumsily set about looping it around his neck this time, he gives up. Lets the loose ends drape over his chest and considers it good enough. 

“But, I figured you had enough of hanging out with him. Kinda looked like you wanted to jab a fork through your eye whenever he talked at dinner.” 

Theo’s eyes are fixed on the rearview mirror. He smoothes creases in his shirt, readjusts his suit jacket, combs his fingers through his hair. Desperate Narcissus trying to make his reflection look a little less disheveled. Liam can be the debauched-looking one. 

He turns his gaze over to Liam, grins wide and honest. 

“I thought about it.”

The car doors open and close on the other side of the structure. Footsteps follow. Theo snatches up the bag of greasy junk gone cold in the front seat and Liam grabs the watery slurpees. They scramble out into the night and don postures of nonchalance. 

Alec’s the first to reach them. Steps forward with a greeting on his lips, then pauses, eyes narrowed—bouncing from Theo’s face, to his suit, to the 7-Eleven bag in his hand, to Liam, to his…sorta-suit which has really been reduced to an open button-down and a rumpled suit jacket and pants with a smushed boutonniere, no belt, shoes only halfway slid on with the heel folded beneath his foot, to the slurpees in each hand—nose raised in the air. The posture is so doglike Theo almost makes fun of him for it, but instead, Alec lets out a long groan. 

“You guys are so gross,” then, “Give me one of those chicken tenders.” 

The rest join them. Mason’s holding a large plastic bag in one hand and a bluetooth speaker in the other. Hayden and Corey trail behind him with orange and pink neon glowsticks wrapped around their necks and wrists as jewelry.

Mason says in lieu of a greeting, glancing between the two of them. “Come on, spill. How was prom?” 

Liam takes a long, slow sip from his slurpee. He twirls the straw around in the blue slush, shakes the cup as if it’s more than just watered down syrup. “It was…cool.” 

His voice pitches up on the word “cool,” more question than answer. 

“I think Mr. Whittey showed up drunk for chaperone duty.” 

“And there was punch,” Theo adds.

Liam nods. “Oh yeah, lots of punch. With, like, ice cream on top or something.” 

“Sherbet,” Theo corrects. He takes a bite out of a steak taquito to give his mouth something to do other than stall and bullshit. The taquitos insides are a greyish-brown congealed mush of stringy “steak” and American cheese. He does not take a second bite. Alec reaches into the bag for more food and Theo hands it over to him entirely. 

“Sherbet, right.” 

“So basically what you’re saying is…nothing happened,” Hayden surmises, unimpressed. It’s probably anticlimactic after being subjected to Theo’s bitching and moaning over suits for over an hour. 

Alec, through a mouthful of cold chicken tender, chimes in with, “Sounds boring.” 

“Boring? No, no way,” Liam says. Another long sip. “We uh, ate. We danced. Took pictures. You know, prom stuff.” 

And Liam’s right. Any more detail beyond that and they’d be verging on sappy territory. Theo will not talk about the way the soft banquet hall lighting turned Liam’s eyes liquid, how even he was momentarily lured into the rapturous thrill of high school milestones, nor will he wax poetic about feeling like he and Liam were the only two people in the room, the only two people in the entire world. 

“Yeah, I bet,” Mason grins, all smug and knowing as he gives a pointed look at Liam’s attire. “Prom stuff, huh.” 

Liam goes sheepish. He draws the unbuttoned sides of his shirt together, one wrapped over the other like a bathrobe. Futile. The breeze pulls it apart all over again. 

“In all honesty, the money used to splurge on catering and the banquet hall instead of the gym probably could’ve been reinvested in basic school security,” Theo says. “It was alright.” 

“BHHS? Security? Impossible,” Hayden snorts. “The only reason their college acceptance rates are solid is because of the horrifying number of students from each graduating class that either disappear or die before the end of the year. And everyone left over is banking on college as their ticket out of here.” 

“Dark,” Liam grimaces. 

Corey says, “But it’s true.” 

Theo jerks his chin in Mason’s direction. Says, “What’s in the bag?” 

Mason crouches down and pulls out a battery-operated disco ball dotted in rainbow LED lights, a mini strobe, a packet of glowsticks already torn open, a handful of pre-inflated mini beach balls that scatter in all directions once freed from the bag, a bag of electric tealights, and a “dance floor” that Theo’s pretty sure is just a neon checker-printed plastic tablecloth. “Decorations. Every afterparty needs decorations, right? Or alcohol, but we’re lacking in that department, so decorations it is.” 

He hands the items to Hayden, Corey—who snags Mason’s speaker and calls dibs on music privileges—and Alec with authoritative poise, and they go about decorating their quiet corner of the empty parking structure like little worker bees. Mason stands, only mildly apologetic. He shrugs.

“Turns out there’s not much in the way of party stores open this late on a weeknight,” he says.

The end result is pretty much what one would expect from a smattering of cheap neon-themed party decorations strewn around the unintentionally brutalist architecture of the Beacon Hills Cineplex’s parking garage. The disco ball illuminates approximately a six-feet radius with rotating dots of blurry, rainbow light and the tealight candles flicker with a warm, yellow glow in the dark spaces the disco ball can’t reach. The strobe is an eyesore that they turn off after five minutes of incessant flashing. The glowsticks that don’t end up wound around their wrists, necks, ankles, waists, a chain of them connected to make glowing neon halos atop their heads, end up on the ground, crackling beneath their feet and illuminating the concrete. And because Mason’s insistent that they make use of the dance floor he bought, Corey puts on music to make the idea of dancing on the rooftop of a mostly empty movie theater parking garage more palatable. 

He says, “Sorry, I just queued some songs from a random person’s Prom Night playlist, I don’t know what this one is.” 

But no one skips it. No one turns it off. No one changes anything. Some silent, collective agreement to shed what they know and dance into the unfamiliar. Humans always say what you don’t know can’t hurt you and maybe what that really means is their world has been built from scar tissue, scabs, and recognizable danger, but for this brief, foreign moment they can feel unblemished in this town known for wolves and the things that kill them. No one walks around wearing fireproof clothing all the time. Sometimes you have to accept the possibility of catastrophe and live anyway. This is how they survive. Inelegantly crushing the worst of things beneath their feet and making something bright from it.

It’s nice. 

Theo takes the lid off his slurpee and tilts the cup to his lips to gulp down the remnants, but the blue slush that misses his mouth spills over the rim and down his chin, neck, pools in his collarbone, and dampens the fabric of his shirt. Liam is quick to claim clean-up duty: one warm mouth roaming down Theo’s neck. It’s fucking gross and will undoubtedly leave a sticky trail of slobber and syrup behind, and Theo tries to communicate that, but he feels Liam break into a smile against his skin and his words curdle into a low, contented rumble. And he tips his chin back. And his throat is Liam’s. 

They part only when Liam tosses his suit jacket into Theo’s trunk. He grabs hold of both ends of the tie hanging limply over Theo’s chest to yank him closer. He asks, “Think you have one more slow dance in you?” 

Theo rolls his eyes but even that motion feels a little dreamy and stricken. “Twist my arm, why don’t you.” 

“Don’t have to,” Liam says, hooking his arms around Theo’s waist. “You’d probably do it for me.” 

“You saying I’m whipped, Dunbar?” 

“Not in so many words.” 

They’re looser here. Less eyes. The plastic tarp of the dance floor crinkles beneath their feet. They step on a tealight and it cracks and splinters apart. Then, a glowstick, but it just fluoresces brighter. Corey, Mason, Hayden, Alec—they’re all bodies in orbit around them, breaking into their line of sight but doing little to draw their attention away. Someone says “awwww” and Theo flips them off behind Liam’s back. 

Theo spent the majority of high school studying new ways to hurt; bled more places in this town than he’s smiled in. He wonders how much less he would’ve fought against kindness had he known that the world would soften itself for him with time. He wants more of this. Rooftops and unspectacular dances and awkward photo-ops and Liam. Fears it’s too late to be greedy. 

“Wait, oh my god,” Mason cuts in, “I almost forgot about the thing.” 

“Dude. Go get them,” Alec urges. 

Liam cranes his neck in their direction but Mason’s already scampered off toward the car. He asks, “What things?” 

“The thing,” Hayden repeats, cryptic and eager. “You’ll see.” 

Mason returns with an armful of junk but tells Theo and Liam to turn around and close their eyes before he’s close enough for them figure out what any of it is. They oblige. After a few seconds punctuated by the sounds of the group rifling through whatever The Thing is, Mason clears his throat. They turn around. Hayden, Alec, and Mason have got something hidden behind their backs while Corey’s loading film into the instant camera Mason brought back from the car. 

“We figured tonight presented us with a rare opportunity to humiliate—er, I mean, celebrate, the both of you,” Mason says, rocking back on his heels. “Therefore, we have taken it upon ourselves to now pronounce you…prom kings. Kings of prom?” 

A pause, grimace. 

“Eh. It sounded better in my head. Anyway, cue fanfare.” 

Mason places oversized paper crowns on each of their heads. Hayden and Alec stride forward and offer both of them a plastic trophy shaped as a shooting star, covered in gold paint that flakes off beneath their fingernails. Capitalizing on Theo and Liam’s moment of pure bewilderment, they drape matching pink feathered sashes over their shoulders. Birthday Princess is emblazoned on the front in a sparkly purple cursive script. Although on each sash, the “Birthday” has been crossed out and replaced with PROM in thick, black letters that smell of fresh dry erase marker. They cheer, which is really just a smattering of applause and a few scattered wolf whistles. 

“These crowns say Burger King on them,” Theo points out. 

Corey shrugs, raising the camera to his face. “Your only other option would’ve been the fuzzy pink princess tiaras they had at the dollar store. Say cheese.” 

“At least those would’ve matched,” Liam quips before turning his grin toward the camera lens. Flash. Liam plants one on Theo’s cheek like the absolute sap he is. Corey places the photo on the ground to develop, takes another. Flash. Theo raises his trophy proudly, obscuring Liam’s face. Corey places the second photo beside the first, brings the camera to his eye once more. Flash. Theo’s crown has slipped down over his eyes, and Liam uses the momentary blindness to remove his own sash and wrap it around Theo’s neck like a garrote. 

A car rumbles to life somewhere on the level beneath theirs and they all pause as if they’d forgotten this rooftop doesn’t belong to them. But they shake off the self-consciousness and devolve once again. The whole lot of them are sharing the remnants of chicken tenders and steak taquitos and sour skittles because no one brought any food or drinks and Hayden’s wondering aloud if she should make a snack run and if the liquor store two blocks south really cards minors because even if they can’t get drunk it’s still nice to pretend. And Mason’s dismayed by the sparse party decorations but Corey and Liam are telling him it’s alright since a parking garage is a shitty, imperfect place for an afterparty anyway so maybe that makes it even better. 

Alec unsticks himself from the rest of them, sidles over and flicks the edge of Theo’s crown. 

“Reenacting your first date after prom?” he says. “Somewhere beneath that cold exoskeleton of yours—”

“Exoskeleton?” 

“Yeah. Like a bug,” Alec explains like it’s the most intuitive comparison in the world. Theo’s got the survivability of a cockroach, though, so maybe he’s onto something. “Whatever. I was saying, beneath that exoskeleton…is a romantic.”

Theo balks at the claim. “No way. Take it back, you ass, that’s a lie.”  

Alec lets out a loud bark of laughter, and when his half-step backward sends him stumbling over a pile of glowsticks, Theo feels properly vindicated. But Alec softens. Says, “No, but really. I’m glad to see it. You look happy, man.” 

It’s the kind of honesty that stifles. He offers a quiet thanks in response but his voice sounds thick and abashed. He has to look away, sweeps his gaze out over the parking structure’s ledge. Beacon Hills is almost pretty from up here. 

“I am,” he says. 

When Theo shrugs off his suit jacket to toss it in the trunk with Liam's, he pricks his thumb on the pin of his boutonniere—a small rose dyed dark blue, its petals gone dry and brittle over the course of the night—but nothing could hurt him right now. Liam is wandering over, tugging him into another clumsy rendition of a slow dance, he’s king of rooftop prom, and nothing could hurt him. Their bodies melt together to make up for all the future distance. Liam’s hands settle beneath his shirt, fingers branding warmth against his waist. Theo feels it in his guts. Convulsive terror. This thing that starts with an L and fits them like a glove. He’s joy-destroyed, walking on air. 

Liam’s smile breaks wide open; lips, teeth, and tongue stained just as blue as Theo’s discarded boutonniere. He says I love you and Theo murmurs an “I know” against his lips. Liam, unsatisfied, says it again and Theo believes it. And his whole body is an echo. 

“I love you, too.” 

The music stops, bathing the rooftop in an abrupt hush. Corey’s doing. He’d switched over to his camera to take a video of them rocking back and forth with the sleepy cityscape beyond their shoulder. He apologizes but Theo doesn’t think he needs to. Liam’s head rests in the crook of his neck, fingers lazily tracing the embroidered wolves on Theo’s tie. Some silences are best left unbroken. 

*

Endings don’t ask for permission. They just happen. On a sunny, bright, boring Thursday morning while the 9th through 11th-grade classes were in session, Theo walked into the Beacon Hills High School auditorium trailing behind a sluggish line of other seniors to collect his cap and gown, returned to his truck with his graduation ceremony outfit draped over his arm, and left. No fuss. No contemplation. He left, and did not consider then that it would likely be his last time walking the halls until he was back home, splayed out on his bed. And, then, when he did consider it, he rummaged around for sadness in his chest but found none so he rolled over and went back to sleep instead. 

Graduation was the real goodbye. Theo, one of many in a sea of maroon robes occupying rows of folding chairs in the courtyard. One long, dull ceremony uninterrupted by personal tragedy or supernatural disaster. Theo was salutatorian. And, normally, being second best would give him a complex but he’ll blame the placement on all the crises he had to avert this year. He opted out of giving a speech because he didn’t have much more to say than “thank fuck it’s over.” Spent nearly two hours half-listening to class speakers, taking a mental tally of how many students stumbled up the stage on their way to collect their diplomas, making casual character judgments based on his classmates’ choice of cap design—his was plain—and resenting the mp3 audio of Pomp and Circumstance playing through the same speaker system used at prom. They moved their tassels from the right side of the brim to the left, tossed their caps into the air, and the tie between adolescence and adulthood was severed. The courtyard was full of happy families, everywhere around him echoes of “Smile! One, two, three….” 

He went home achy-cheeked and annoyingly sentimental.

But this, the grad party Jenna and David and Liam and the pack insisted on throwing him, it’s just one huge public display of affection. Theo would’ve been fine with pizza delivery and a movie night. He’s convinced these people are hellbent on making him fucking crumble. 

Chris Argent volunteered his house, which is the weirdest part of it. He and Theo, they’re cordial, but not particularly close. Not hosting-a-graduation-party close. Even still, his living room’s been consumed by shades of Caltech colors. Orange and white balloons, napkins, plates, tablecloths, cake. Theo would assume this was a creamsicle-themed party were it not for the poster sized print-out of the Caltech Beaver taped to the wall as a backdrop.

“No more photos. Ever. I’m all camera’d out,” Theo grunts, letting his face go slack from its perennially camera-ready grin. “I’ve been photographed more in the past month than I have over the course of my entire life.” 

Liam licks a spoon clean of the orange and white icing from his second piece of cake. Says, “You’re not wrong. I’m pretty sure my mom is thinking about taking down my baby pictures in the living room to replace them with your prom, graduation, and senior photos.” 

“That was my plan all along. Next on my list is getting you kicked off the inheritance—”

“Excuse me, if I could have everyone’s attention for a moment,” Chris requests. The group quiets, and Sheriff Stilinski along with an unfamiliar woman dressed in business attire—she smells like a were, so he supposes they’re in safe company—join him at the front of the living room. 

Liam pulls Theo out of the corner, drags him forward. Heads swivel. The grins plastered on everyone’s faces put him on edge. Not the we’re so happy for you type of smiles, but the there’s an inside joke here and you’re on the outside kind. Uncertainty makes him itch. He doesn’t have a good track record with group gatherings in which he’s the odd man out. The unsuspecting one. 

“Liam, what is this—”

He gets shushed. Then, more gently, “Just listen.” 

“My daughter Allison started drafting her college application essay before she’d even finished her freshman year. She had a plan. She had dreams that went well beyond the hopes I had for her,” Chris pauses. His eyes lock onto a scuff mark on the tip of his boot, then raise again to meet the faces before him. “But she lost her life protecting the people she loved. And I know, if she was given the chance, she’d do it all over again.” 

There’s one big, solemn hush that swallows the room whole. 

“In the years since her passing, I’ve wanted to memorialize Allison and her dreams in a way that she would have appreciated,” he says. “The family business had been a point of contention between us for a long time, but she instilled in it a code that she lived and died by. We protect those who cannot protect themselves.”

Argent’s voice goes watery and Theo can’t listen to it. Cotton in his ears. 

He didn’t know Allison in a way that mattered. Only in retrospect. She was a name in a file. She was a weak point to get at Scott. She was the kind of person that would’ve wanted to protect the pack from Theo. 

“That being said, Theo, if you could step forward, please,” Chris continues. “Argent Arms International has partnered with the Beacon Hills City Council and the Sheriff’s Department to create the Allison Argent Memorial Scholarship Fund for graduating seniors who demonstrate a concerted effort to protect the wellbeing of their community and those within it. And it is our honor to present you with the inaugural award.” 

Clapping. A whole lot of clapping and a room full of people gathered here with the intention of making sure his calendar stretches beyond the summer. He staggers forward on autopilot with a head full of white noise. City Council President shakes his hand. Sheriff Stilinski claps a hand on his shoulder and squeezes. Chris Argent hands him a thick, weighty piece of cardstock with gold embellishments and seals and words that Theo’s eyes are too fuzzy to read. Argent gives him one firm, meaningful nod. And people are clapping. He thinks his mouth says thank you but his head means are you sure? Another picture. An insincere smile that cuts across his cheeks like a knife. Something inside of him crumbling. 

Theo sits and he eats another slice of cake and he washes down the cloying sweetness of buttercream with even sweeter orange soda and he thumbs the space where his name is printed on the scholarship and he halfheartedly accepts congratulations and he wraps the string of an orange balloon around his finger until it turns purple from lack of circulation, everything around him distant and dreamlike. 

Chris Argent settles down beside him on the couch. And he doesn’t talk, but he’s the kind of quiet that is prodding and expectant, so Theo blurts, “I appreciate it. Really. But—and I mean, all due respect—out of everyone here, I don’t think I…” he stumbles over the words, tries to reshape them into something less ungrateful. “There had to have been better candidates. Scott would probably be—”

“Scott nominated you.” 

Theo’s eyes leave Argent to find Scott, where he's unabashedly listening from the corner of the room beside Stiles—who’s sucking helium out of balloons and doing a mediocre impression of Alvin and the Chipmunks until he gets a headrush—hands in his pockets, an easy, crooked grin on his lips. 

“And I supported his nomination,” Chris says, scratching at the scruff along his jawline. 

He doesn’t give a reason and Theo doesn’t ask why. He’s a coiled spring. He’s unworthy. He is wondering how he will fuck this up like everything else. His throat feels clogged with river water and moss and a decade of mistakes. He never had a dog but he knows you’re not supposed to reward one for bad behavior. He stares down at the scholarship certificate. $20,000. We protect those who cannot protect themselves.

“We all have pasts. Yours doesn’t have to define your future.” 

And he stands, crossing the room to insert himself between Melissa and Deaton in the huddle of adults beside the fireplace. On the mantel, a framed picture of Allison with her wide, dimpled smile looks over all of them. 

Theo doesn’t stay long with the weight of Argent’s words. Dips out through the kitchen onto the back porch breathing lungfuls of crisp air to dispel some of the tightness in his chest. “Who demonstrate a concerted effort to protect the wellbeing of their community and those within it,” Argent said. He thinks it’s an accolade he’ll have to grow into. For now, it seems only loosely applicable and ill-fitting. Like the Burger King crown sitting on the desk in his bedroom.  

The patio door slides open and shut. Featherlight footsteps draw nearer until Jenna bumps shoulders with him on the deck, pulling her sweater tighter over her small frame. She sighs, light and airy. “Well. I guess you’ll have to stop moping about student loans now, huh.” 

Theo shrugs, tries to smile. “I don’t know. I’m starting to think orange isn’t my color.” 

“Oh, hun,” she laughs, loud and honest, startling the night. Her voice settles over him like warm hands. “Orange isn’t anyone’s color.” 

Her eyes are bright even beneath the blanket of stars and Theo sees so much of Liam inside of them. 

“Did you know?” he asks, his voice a hoarse whisper. 

He means about the scholarship. He means about his calendar. He means about himself, his past. All of it. 

“Sometimes, I think this place will create a million reasons to keep a person stuck here,” Jenna says. It’s the closest she’s ever gotten to admitting that Beacon Hills has claws that werewolves aren’t the origin of. That humans feel it, too. She turns to him, her mouth settled into one thin, determined line. “This town’s not big enough to hold you, Theo. Don’t make yourself smaller for it.” 

*

Aida asks, “Are you at all familiar with Sartre?”

“Vaguely,” Theo says.

“He once wrote, ‘Freedom is what we do with what is done to us,’” she continues. “What would you want freedom to look like for yourself?” 

Theo mulls it over, fingers brushing over the reversible sequins on the throw pillow in his lap. Maybe his expression is too telling, disinterested, because she grins and says, “Go ahead. You can tell me if you think that’s a load of crap.” 

“No, it’s not that,” he says, shifting in his seat. “It’s just—if I’m honest, that kinda makes me feel like a load of crap.” 

And that would be putting it nicely. What Theo means is, he can almost stand himself if he detaches. If he glosses over his past with buzzwords like subjugation and control and no choice. Some days he gets by on a mantra of not your fault not your fault not your fault. 

To think of his past and call it freedom. Well. That feels like sinking. Tearing off a bandage and replacing it with a new wound. Your fault. A hand wrapped around his ankle tugging him deeper, a spiritless voice rattling in his ear: you could have done things differently, you could have done them better. 

“How so?” 

Theo curls his hands into fists, crescent-mooning his palms with blunt nails. “I’m not exactly the poster child for making the best out of shit that’s been done to me.” 

Life told him he was better off monster than boy. And he believed it. For so long, he believed it. Look at the cages we trap ourselves in.  

“Can we try something?” Aida asks, as if feeling the shift, his quiet regression. His composure brittle as spun glass. She crosses one leg over the other as she leans forward. “I’d like you to imagine you’re standing in front of your child self. Whatever age you were the last time you felt like a child.” 

A child, as opposed to what, he wonders. A slaughterhouse, maybe. Killing floor. 

“What do you think he needs to know? What do you think he needs to hear?” 

“That…” he trails off. Fumbles to voice his answer.

To know: It will be hard, but the bad won’t last forever. You will conflate what you’ve been taught with who you are. Violence is not social currency. Lessons can be unlearned. You will cause pain, but you do not have to break yourself to be good. The ghosts don’t leave but you can live with them. You will be offered warmth again. You won’t have to spill your own blood to feel it. 

To hear: You’ll be okay. The bad won’t last forever. Really, you’ll be okay.

“I can’t—I don’t know how to say it,” Theo says after a long moment of strangled silence. Sometimes reticence descends on him hard and fast and Aida will either push him through it, or work around the unspeakable thing. Stet, she says. Let it stand. He knows she means leave the subject be, but sometimes when she says it, he pictures his words growing legs and walking away from the conversation. Stet. They’ll come back when they’re ready. 

“That’s alright,” Aida says. “It’s okay. Let’s circle back to imagining yourself instead. Close your eyes, if you’d like, and picture yourself then.” 

Theo obliges, eyes shut tight to fend off the pressure building behind them. And he sees himself. Round cheeks. Wide, trusting eyes. Pale, sickly pallor from a childhood lived between bouts of illness. A mop of dark hair hidden beneath hats even on warm days, scrawny body always scrambling to keep up with others. 

“Yeah,” he rasps. “Okay.” 

A stranger, now. Life will twist a person into a warped, unrecognizable version of themself. He started as a baby and ended up a monster. A person lingers beyond the span of a lifetime. He can remember himself as a child, but the person he might be in other people’s memories terrifies him.

“See him, Theo. Can you forgive him?”

*

The summer months brought no funerals, no bleeding, no broken cries. Just laughter. Laughter, and breathlessness, and a blanket of heat that they thought would last forever. Time went toothless, a slow melt. Saccharine and sticky and warm like hard candy left in a hot car. 

But when the heat broke, so did their time together. 

“You drive.” 

Theo tosses the truck key into Liam’s lap. He’s sitting on the steps leading up to the porch, cheeks red and forehead glistening after a half-hour of lugging boxes from the house to Theo and David’s trucks. Liam swipes a hand through his sweat-damp bangs and twirls the key ring around his finger. 

“Me? Do you plan on making it there in one piece?” Liam snorts. 

He’s selling himself short. A summer of long drives with the windows down and radio blaring, fulfilling the mandated hours for his Drivers Ed course, has done him well. He’s more conscientious on the road than Theo is himself. 

“You have your permit on you, yeah?” Theo asks. Liam’s head bobs in confirmation. His bangs flop back over his forehead and stick. “Okay. Good. Just humor me.” 

“Sure, I guess. But why?” 

A shrug. Then, honesty. 

“Don’t think I can make myself leave.”

You, Theo didn’t say. But it was there. 

Five-hour drive from Beacon Hills to campus. The scenery beyond the passenger window was pretty. Maybe. Or, the glances Theo got of it were, at least. Mountains and valleys. Wild horses and grazing cattle dotting wide, open fields. America the Beautiful shit. But Liam—road-fixated, back straight, good student with his hands at 9 and 3, because “10 and 2 is outdated, did you even take Drivers Ed?” only ever breaking his focus at stoplights or when spurts of dense traffic tempt his gaze in Theo’s direction—and his profile, the slope of his nose, the lazy curve of his lips, was a better view.

They lingered at pit stops, took time idling between gas station aisles looking at novelty sodas and trying on unflattering sunglasses, but never bought anything beyond gas and snacks since the only thing they were really looking to spend was time. Together. They stopped for a meal more filling than trail mix and potato chips at Roscoe’s and stayed to share a slice of sweet potato pie even though they’d both gorged themselves past satiation on chicken and waffles. Stretching the hours out as far as they could until Jenna’s reminder texts—on the road in 5min ok?—put them back on schedule. 

It’s after move-in, after the trucks have been emptied of boxes and his dorm room starts to resemble a new home, when hours have dwindled to minutes, that Theo finds it. The sadness in his chest. Strangers mill around them: overeager freshmen, teary-eyed parents, and cheery RAs. David and Jenna are wrapped up in conversation with Theo’s roommate Adam’s parents and Liam’s tight grin occasionally slackens out into a mopey expression like he has momentarily forgotten that this is a goodbye that he’s supposed to be happy for. They can only talk so long about all the things Liam promised to come down to campus to see or do before excitement wanes and the impending distance settles between them as a physical presence, heavy and thick like all of the summer's hot and humid days combined. 

Give us an elevator, Theo thinks. Give us a long hallway, he thinks. Give them the small, enclosed safety of his truck. Not this awayness. It’s unfair. Sometimes Theo feels as if he’s only just figured out the strange beast of their togetherness and the word love is still a foreign language on his tongue. Sometimes there are days where he is anything but steady until he hears the melt of his name from Liam’s lips, once curse, now benediction. The first half of their story is struggle. It’s hurt. It is deceit. Let them be good for just a little while longer. 

Tick. Liam shoves his hands in his pockets, grabs the truck key and holds it out to Theo. Tight smile again, but it only makes it halfway up his face. The same one that crawled onto his lips when they pulled up to the dorm and Theo joked, “This is probably going to be the least deadly thing we’ve ever done. Saying goodbye.” 

Tock. Theo steps closer. His heart beats like an alarm. He shakes his head and closes Liam’s fingers around the key. 

“Keep it. I won’t need it on campus,” he says. “I’m sure it’ll come in handy after you ace your driving test.” 

“Theo.” 

It’s his stop-bullshitting-me voice. Liam is scavenger hunting for the punchline in Theo’s offering. 

“Plus, the parking fees here are ridiculous. You’d be doing me a favor, really,” Theo shrugs, but it falls short of nonchalance. Come and see me, he doesn’t say. But it’s there. It’s always there.

“You’re serious?”

Tick. They do an awkward sidestep to move out of the way of a student hurriedly hauling luggage behind them to make their move-in time slot. Liam runs his thumb along the curve of the key. When he looks back up at Theo, his eyes are nervous, alive, wanting. 

“Serious as wolfsbane poisoning.” 

You think you hate the place you call home until you realize it’s been a person all along, and that distaste was just a consequence of pronouncing its name wrong. Of a simple misattribution. 

Tock. Theo latches onto Liam’s wrist and tugs him down to the curb outside the residence hall. It’s clumsy, clunky—that’s them, clunky, so fucking clunky—the way his head flops down onto Theo’s shoulder, squirms and nestles itself in the nook of his neck. Like a jaw out of alignment, crooked teeth. 

“You know, a pinky promise originally meant that whoever broke it would have to cut off their finger,” Liam whispers. He lifts his head, holds out his hand, balling all his fingers into a fist except the pinky. “Swear it.” 

They knock knuckles, then soften, pinkies clasping together. Clunky, clumsy, snaggletoothed, cumbersome fucking them. 

“I swear on the survival of my left pinky finger,” Theo murmurs. 

Theo had been a doorway for so long, all unwanted entries and exits. He closed himself off to avoid the intrusions. But Liam has a presence—insistent, unyielding, always an outstretched hand—that so gently wrecks him. What was a stony monument to struggle has been reduced to rubble. Quietly, he hopes to remain this soft forever. For his barricades to stay broken wide open. More demolition site, less concrete wall.

“It’s yours, Liam.”

*

Liam picks up on the first ring. No casual greeting nor small talk. There’s shuffling on the other end of the line, an anticipatory breath, then, “Did you get it yet?”

“How has your day been, Theo? What’ve you been up to, Theo? Have you killed your roommate yet because of his morning routine of setting 15 alarms and snoozing all of them?” Theo huffs out, no heat, all fond exasperation. Liam’s been riding him about this all day. A package he sent. “No, I’m still walking to the mailroom. You know it’s in a different building, give me a fucking second here, yeah?” 

He quickens his pace the rest of the way to the mailroom having contracted Liam’s excitement. He’s still working his way through the glorious treasure trove of snacks Jenna and David sent him in a care package last month but he’s lacking in anything that feels distinctly, tangibly Liam. The pictures on his wall are nice, but two weeks into the quarter he resorted to stretching out one of the t-shirts he’d stolen from Liam’s room and using it as a pillowcase because he missed his smell, and even that’s begun to fade. He’s not whipped. Call it homesickness. Their schedules are incompatible more than not and they’re still learning each other with all the distance. 

“You’ve been good to me.” That’s what Liam had said, when the finality of a goodbye sunk in, when the need to get back onto the road toward Beacon Hills to get some sleep before his lacrosse scrimmage in the morning and Theo’s housing orientation activities were pulling them in opposite directions. “Go be good to yourself.” 

He is trying. He thinks he’s doing an alright job of it, mostly. 

“Fine,” Liam sighs. More shuffling. The dull thud of a car door slamming shut. There’s something both frantic and eager in his voice when he says, “Just call me before you open it, okay? Seriously. You have to call me first.” 

Theo turns his voice into the verbal equivalent of an eyeroll. “Yeah, I’m sure you’ll be waiting by the phone. Call you in a few.” 

“Okay. I’ll see yo—talk to you soon.” 

The mailroom attendant slides a large box across the floor toward Theo. It is solid, as if it's been filled with bricks. The outside is sealed in a thick layer of packaging tape and has a red warning sticker slapped on the top that reads FRAGILE: HANDLE WITH CARE. Theo heaves the box up into his arms and, maybe, just a little, laments the fact that the box smells more like a distribution center and cardboard than Liam. But right below the label in small, deliberately neat letters—like Liam couldn’t risk being misunderstood—there’s a sharpie-ink addendum. 

All my love.