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[-6]: you said, you’re sublimating, but i was already gone
Derek is leaned up against his Toyota and Malia had, apparently, given up on standing and flopped onto her back in the grass by the time Scott pulls up to the Preserve’s main entrance.
They’re not talking, which isn’t a surprise. Scott’s never brought it up and probably never will—more than aware that some wounds never fully heal—but the two of them seem to share some Hale family connection, this unasked-for and mostly unacknowledged ability to just be around each other, and while it’s certainly come in handy during the times that the two of them have fought and nearly died together, mostly what it means is that they can sit in silence in a room together and never seem alone. It’s a strange, alien thing to Scott, who grew up with Stiles as a best friend, but it’s—comforting. It’s a strange, alien thing that comforts the strange, alien thing that Scott now lives with inside his head, his ribs; the places where all the supernatural whatever had settled after it’d flowed into his veins from Peter’s bite.
Malia tips her head to look at Scott when she hears his dirtbike stop, starts pushing herself to her feet. There are twigs in her hair and bits of grass clinging to the back of her shirt and Scott grins at her, immediately and helplessly, grins wider when Malia frowns at him, confused. Off to the side, Derek straightens out of his slouch and rolls his shoulders, settles onto the balls of his feet; he moves with an easy grace, a born-wolf grace, and Scott finds himself thinking he would have known.
Just like Derek knows, brow furrowing and eyes narrowing, that Scott’s distracted, that his head’s not on Monroe, or her disappeared hunters, or the logistics of their upcoming patrol. Scott grimaces at him, a little embarrassed and a little—something else—and answers Derek’s unspoken question before he can speak it; unsure why, exactly, it feels so important that he does.
“It’s nothing,” Scott tells him, and hooks his helmet over his dirtbike’s handlebars, “I just asked Theo to stay.”
Malia—up on her feet and having wandered her way closer to Scott—squints at him, “He said no?”
Scott—who’d reached forward thoughtlessly to pluck a twig out of her hair—stops, blinks, his hand still hovering over her head, “What?” It takes him a moment to put her question in context, realize that he had, in fact, given an incredibly unhelpful and detail-sparse explanation, “Oh, no. He said yes.”
He finishes pulling the twig gently out of her hair, drops it and then can’t help putting his hand right back, tangling his fingers carefully in the tangled mess of her haphazard ponytail, tugging lightly. She frowns at him and darts a hand up to take hold of his wrist but doesn’t let go of it once she’s pulled his hand away, just keeps watching him, narrow-eyed and thoughtful in that wide-open, blunt way of hers. Scott feels something warm squirm in his chest and darts forward to kiss her, close-mouthed and quick.
“So what’s the problem, then?” Derek asks, looking tolerantly resigned to their antics when Scott remembers and glances over at him.
Scott blinks, has to rewind the last few seconds again to connect Derek’s question to its genesis, Scott’s I just asked Theo to stay and his apparently obvious distraction. He can feel his nose scrunching up as he thinks about it, can feel the purse to his mouth and the squint to his eyes. Malia’s face splits into an amused grin at his patently silly expression and he has to lunge for the escaping end of his thoughts, the explanation threatening to float away like all the unattended balloons at Beacon Hills Day every year.
“I don’t know, exactly,” Scott answers, turning to smile apologetically at Derek as he says it; Derek just huffs a laugh, and Scott smiles, continues, “Something was just weird about the way that he agreed.”
“Like evil weird?” Malia asks, sounding curious but with an edge to it like she’s prepared to be something else, too, “Or plotting weird?”
“What?” Scott replies instantly, thrown, then: “No, nothing like that. Just...weird.”
The edge of whatever that had entered Malia’s shoulders, her voice, fades right back out and she tips her head thoughtfully one way, then tips it thoughtfully the other as she studies him. Finally she shrugs, starts stepping backwards—perfectly balanced on the uneven ground, that same born-coyote grace of Derek’s in her easy movements—gently dragging Scott along with her using the hand she still has clasped loosely around his wrist.
“Okay, well,” She says as she goes, “Can we talk about it later, then? Trail’s getting colder.”
She drops his wrist with a grin, then, eyes flickering blue and anticipation kicking up the spice of her scent, her limbs already shaking loose with the excitement of the coming run. Scott grins at her again, just as wide and just as helpless, and nods, laughs in delight when she grins back and pivots on a heel and takes off, just lets go. Derek takes off like a shot after her, maybe more-than-a-little cousin rivalry in the burst of speed he uses, and Scott laughs again, quieter and under his breath, shakes himself loose of the lingering questions in the back of his mind, the stunned-startled look on Theo’s face when Scott had asked him to stay and the too-quick way he’d eventually said okay, his pulse skipping.
“Later,” Scott promises himself quietly, and then he takes off after Malia and Derek, too.
[-5]: carve you can’t avoid vacuous truths on my tombstone
Scott’s head is still stuffed full of strategies, still tripping over what-ifs and worrying at maybes when he gets back from Derek’s to find his mom standing over the couch in the living room and frowning down at an impeccably folded blanket set in the middle of it. He reaches out with his senses unthinkingly, automatically, a little paranoid, still; a little helplessly hyperaware. But it just smells like Theo and Scott feels his brow furrow before he remembers Theo’s heavy eyelids during the pack dinner last night, the depleted-battery smell of him and the way he’d been burning hotter than usual; he’d been healing. He’d been healing and then he’d fallen asleep, Scott remembers; he’d passed right out right in the middle of the controlled chaos of the rest of the pack.
Mystery solved, Scott calls a quick hello to his mom and starts up the stairs, thoughts immediately clicking back over to Argent’s latest intelligence, the way he’d drummed his fingers against the rough wood of Derek’s table and said it could be nothing but it could be something, which meant: they had to go. It could be nothing, but if it was something then it could be Monroe.
Except his mom says, “Scott,” just his name and nothing else, the end of it left trailing like there’d maybe been more after it that she hadn’t, for whatever reason, ended up saying. So Scott stops, turns and jogs back down the steps, swings back into the living room using the door jamb as a pivot point, immediately lets it go with a sheepish wince when the wood groans in protest.
But his mom doesn’t even notice, just squints at him over her shoulder, “You were the one who asked Theo to stay, right?” She says, and Scott recognizes the tone, knows instantly that she’s not asking so much as asking; looking for confirmation of a fact she already knows, setting the stage for the rest of the conversation to follow.
“Yes?” Scott answers, the end of the word tipping up into a question without his say-so, a little thrown but also a little—chagrined. They’d never really talked about Theo or the gaping wound he’d left in Scott’s abdomen, the one that’d lingered for days and the one that would have put Scott in the ground if his mom hadn’t refused to give up, but Scott’s thinking now—maybe they should have? Scott’s spent so long stumbling from emergency to emergency that sometimes he forgets how to operate in the lulls, in the quiet moments when everyone finally has time to exhale, but, well—maybe finding out her son is a werewolf could be handled in a casual sort of way, but inviting her son’s attempted murderer over for dinner requires more of a family meeting.
He’s opening his mouth to say something to that effect, though he’s still wondering, how exactly does one phrase something like that, when his mom frowns down at the blanket again and asks, “What exactly did you say to him?”
Scott blinks, thought process derailed and then immediately splitting in two, one half of his brain trying to recall what, exactly, he did say to Theo, the other curling up in a puzzled question, an unexpected-call-out-during-class panic. What, exactly, had he said to Theo, and why, exactly, did it matter? It’s not a trick question but it feels like one, and Scott feels a flare of frustration and then, instantly, a second, frustrated that he’s frustrated. In front of him, his mom watches him silently, and where her scent had been easy, distracted, a little curious—it’d been easy, and distracted, and a little curious, Scott realizes, too many seconds late for the realization to be of use—it twists up, gets heavier, and Scott grimaces.
“Everything okay?” She asks, in a tone that simultaneously manages to acknowledge the reality that okay is relative, and never more relative than in Beacon Hills, while also genuinely asking: is he okay. And Scott is, relatively, and so is she, relatively, and in that instant that fact seems so miraculous, so startling, given everything that’s happened, that Scott just smiles, and nods, and means it when he says:
“Yeah, everything’s okay.”
And she smiles back, and nods back, says good and reaches down to gather up the blanket, carry it back over to the wicker basket containing all its companions by the TV. The movement sends a puff of scent into the air— Theo’s scent—and Scott remembers her first question, frowns.
“Why’d you ask about Theo, before?” He wonders, and feels a twist—muted, but there—of anxiety between his ribs as he does, as his mom starts to head for the stairs, still in her scrubs and clearly wanting out of them, “Is something wrong with him?”
But his mom just sighs, and pauses by his shoulder, taps a gentle hand over his heart as she smiles softly at him and says, “I don’t know, kid. Is there?”
It’s not much of an answer but it’s all she’s going to give him, apparently, her hand falling away from his chest as she starts walking again. Scott stays where he is, brow furrowed, and stares at the blanket she’d put away, the fleece still smelling like Theo, like the pack; like Theo and the pack. Was something wrong with Theo? Just about everything had been wrong with Theo, at one point, but last night what had been wrong was exhaustion, and hunger, and the fact that Chris had shot him for training purposes, which Scott can say from experience does not make it hurt less.
His phone buzzing against his leg has the approximate effect of an air raid siren going off; Scott jumps and swears and jumps again when his mom shouts language! from upstairs, mostly ironically and over the sound of the shower starting up. Scott grins at the ceiling and then looks back down at his, Chris’s, Malia’s, and Derek’s group text, Chris’s 0600 departure and Malia’s baleful string of unimpressed emojis, Derek’s offer to bring coffee.
Scott throws in a promise to pick up a half-dozen of the maple-glazed donuts from Emmalee’s Bakery that Malia likes as he wanders towards the stairs, the blanket—and its questions—still behind him.
[-4]: the sign said, danger: deflection possible, but that seemed overly optimistic
After awhile, watching everyone try not to watch Liam at the hospital after the attack on Nolan gets exhausting.
Scott knows he should say something—he’s the alpha, he should say something—but there’s something to the frenetic way Liam paces around the waiting room after Scott’s mom knocks Nolan out, something that goes beyond those first few chaotic weeks right after Scott had been forced to turn Liam, something beyond a lack of control. Because Liam isn’t out of control of the shift, his eyes-mouth-fingers still perfectly human from where Scott’s sat, hunched in a chair with his phone pressed against his mouth, watching-not-watching Liam complete another circuit from wall to wall. Liam’s in control of the shift and out of control of something else, and Scott doesn’t know what it is.
He looks back down at his phone, finally, at the thick chunk of text he’d sent Theo earlier, an update on the pack and their various locations. He’d gotten used to sending the status reports of sorts to Argent—whose cup did not runneth over with patience at the best of times—and it’d been half a thought, less, to send one to Theo; it’d seemed like the kind of thing he’d appreciate, clear and concise like all the marks copied down onto his giant wall map. Liam’s shoes squeak on the linoleum as he completes another rotation and Scott grimaces, rereads what he’d sent Theo to give himself an excuse not to look up. An hour after sending it, it seems dry, bloodless, a little cold, especially considering Theo nearly died making sure that Nolan didn’t, and Scott winces but can’t think of anything to say, do, just locks his phone and straightens back up.
Liam must take it as some kind of signal, or at the very least an opening, because he suddenly stops in his pacing and zeros in on Scott. He’s got the world’s worst poker face and even if he didn’t, his scent’s a riot, hot and stinging and making the inside of Scott’s nose itch. Wrinkling it helps some but makes him look like child, which Scott knows, and he’d maybe be embarrassed about that but, well—he’s kind of long past being embarrassed by much of anything. And besides, it’s Liam, who probably comes second only to Stiles in the McCall pack unintentionally-clumsy rankings.
Liam doesn’t look clumsy now, though; he looks furious. Scott would maybe be more worried—he still has flashes, sometimes, of how exactly Liam had looked that night in the library when Hayden had been dying; the night that Liam had tried to kill him—except that the fury is clearly directed somewhere other than Scott himself. It’s not exactly better but it’s at least less likely to end in awkward pack holidays and his mom throwing more medical supplies at Liam’s head.
“Why didn’t he call us?” Liam finally bursts out, and while he doesn’t specify who he’s talking about, Scott knows he means: why didn’t Theo call Corey, and, Mason, and me.
Scott knows he means: why didn’t he call me.
Scott grimaces, and looks away, because Liam still sounds furious but he’s got the world’s worst poker face, and Scott’s known him long enough now to hear the fear in his voice, and the confusion—childish and a little lost—and the hurt. And more than that—more than knowing—Scott can feel it in his bones, in the half-primal part of himself that he’s never fully understood, that he’s only ever seen the hazy outline of; the part that bit Liam: the part that made him. Scott can feel the vulnerable parts of Liam like they’re vulnerable parts of himself, this dull ache between his ribs that he can’t shake; that he isn’t, actually, sure that he wants to shake.
“I don’t know, Liam,” Scott finally tells him quietly, though he—maybe does. Liam isn’t the only one who’s been thinking why didn’t he call them, except Scott knows something Liam doesn’t know; Scott can remember telling Theo they deserve a shot at a normal senior year. Flinching, Scott forces himself to meet Liam’s eyes, aware even as he says it how completely asinine it sounds: “I guess he didn’t want to involve you.”
Liam just scoffs, his scent kicking up with anger; he throws his arms wide to seemingly encompass the hospital, and himself, and Corey and Mason somewhere in it, “Yeah, great plan. Look at us, not involved at all!”
His voice goes a little high-pitched at the end, almost a little shocky, and Scott’s immediately hit with the conflicting urges to both straighten up protectively and hunch back down over the tight-tighter feeling in his chest. He doesn’t know what to tell Liam but he wants to tell him something, if only because Liam so clearly wants him to, his eyes stuck on Scott’s face and some of his distress showing through the cracks in his pissed-off sneer. He doesn’t know what to tell Liam and saying I think it’s because I accidentally asked him to would be both speculation and probably a lie; Scott isn’t sure his asking was accidental and he’s also not certain that that’s the reason why Theo did it.
“He should have called us,” Liam spits out, yanking Scott from his thoughts, and from the way he’s watching Scott it’s almost like he’s daring him to disagree.
And Scott—wants to, suddenly, immediately and with a fervor that catches him off-guard. He’s not glad that Theo almost died but he’s fiercely glad that Liam and Mason and Corey weren’t there for the worst of it, that for once it wasn’t them facing down Beacon Hill’s latest threat; that for once it wasn’t his pack. Almost instantly that thought catches, grows teeth and bites, and Scott’s still staring, stunned, at Liam—who stares back at him, apparently surprised by Scott’s surprise—when Mason and Corey reappear from wherever they’d disappeared to.
“Ev—erything okay?” Mason asks slowly as he notices Scott’s and Liam’s wide-eyed staring contest, his arms full of vending-machine packages that are one startled movement from spilling over and scattering.
“Uh. Yeah,” Scott starts, not entirely sure that it is, but entirely sure that he doesn’t like the way that Mason’s scent—and Corey’s behind him—have starting to twist up with uncertainty, “Yeah. Everything’s fine.” Then he stops, his eyes flicking helplessly back to Liam, “I mean—is it?”
Scott can see Liam’s jaw clench, can see the question in his eyes—Scott maybe not the only one who can feel the other’s vulnerabilities like a wound—but Liam must smell the same thing Scott does, or something, because he forces a smile onto his face as he looks over at Mason and Corey and agrees, “Yeah. Yeah, everything’s fine.”
But Mason just says, “You were ranting about Theo again, weren’t you?,” though it isn’t really a question so much as a statement shoddily dressed up in a question-mark. He says it wryly and without any heat whatsoever and Scott finds the scratching thing inside of his chest settling as he watches Liam color, as he watches him deflate and dart an embarrassed look at Mason, his hand coming up to scratch at the back of his neck.
“Yeah, so?” Liam responds weakly, finally, and Mason just grins, shifts the crinkling mass of empty-caloried junk in his arms until he can get ahold of a bag of Skittles, lob it at Liam’s head. Liam catches it effortlessly and just rolls his eyes, but his scent starts to level out; his pulse starts to slow.
“C’mon,” Mason instructs him, tipping his head towards Nolan’s room, “Ms. McCall set up a cot in here, you can rant about how the ratio of red Skittles to orange is some conspiracy again instead.”
Mason’s voice is gentle—probably even more so than he likely realizes—and it’s so clearly an out, but Liam seems grateful for it, all his directionless anger just draining out of him. He glances over his shoulder at Scott, but it’s only for a second, and then he follows Mason and Corey back into Nolan’s room, fingers already playing over the top of the candy package, though he doesn’t open it. Scott watches him go, his own fingers playing over his phone, and after a few seconds he unlocks it, looks down at the screen.
It’s still open to his text thread with Theo, to the status report Scott had given him, just as dry and bloodless and a little cold as it’d seemed five minutes ago. Scott reads it again, and then again, and then he types out thank you just below it, and hits send before he can think too hard about it.
[-3]: repressed, you repeated, and re-pressed the door close button, i said you were—
Yelling at Theo after their failed trap for Monroe is, Scott realizes, entirely unfair and entirely misdirected. It’s made worse by the way that Theo’s clearly waiting for him to do just that, his expression just this flawless blank and even his scent clear of anything ragged, anything that the anger and grief and exhaustion churning away in Scott’s gut could catch on. But there’s something wrong with the way Theo’s apartment smells, Scott had noticed it the instant he’d stepped inside, and it frays the last of Scott’s already tattered control; it frays it, and seeing Liam sitting close enough to Theo for their arms to brush just shreds it.
Unsurprisingly Theo doesn’t respond, but Liam does, and Scott’s taken aback—actually, physically taken aback, his body stepping one foot back instinctively—when Liam snarls at him. Scott stares at him for a speechless moment, but on his next inhale he catches it, that same amorphous wrongness to the scent of the air snarling up his lungs, and Scott feels his hackles rise, feels that animal whatever swell in the back of his brain, the low spaces between his ribs. He has the single, clear realization that this isn’t about him and Liam anymore, that it’s about alpha and beta, but it just—doesn’t change anything; he snarls back.
Except twenty minutes after Derek disappears with Theo, and twenty minutes after Malia disappears with Alec, the scent of Theo’s apartment starts to shift, the burn of it not quite so acidic anymore, and in the middle of Liam’s caustic commentary on the relative merits of Scott’s leadership skills, Scott—finally puts his finger on it. Twenty minutes after Alec had trailed Malia out the door, the overwhelming burr of his scent overlaid on top of Theo’s, on Liam’s and Corey’s and Mason’s and the rest of Scott’s pack, finally starts to fade. Oh, Scott thinks, all his righteous anger just curdling into mortification.
Scott can’t think of any graceful way out of the hole he’s dug himself and it’s not like Liam’s going to offer him one, and so the confrontation ends about the only way that it can end: Liam snarls I have to get to practice and leaves the whole tangled, unresolved mess just lying on Theo’s floor between them when he storms out. Great work, true alpha, Scott snarks at himself, and drops his head back, just tries to breathe. He can still smell Alec’s scent—the scent of another alpha’s beta, sat smack in the middle of Scott’s territory, left with Scott’s pack without a second thought—but now the whole thing seems silly instead of catastrophic, and he sighs.
His only saving grace is that later, after Theo has reappeared and demurred Scott’s apology, after Malia has popped back up with Alec in tow, and Scott has forcefully overridden his suddenly-defensive instincts, when Malia tells Alec that Scott had assumed Alec would be staying with them, it’s the absolute truth. Scott’s instinctive and exhausted reaction to Alec today aside, he’d taken one look at the kid in that warehouse a few days ago, hurt and terrified and with absolutely no clue what was happening to him, and Scott had thought: yeah, I remember that feeling. He’d thought that and then he’d thought, maybe history doesn’t have to repeat itself, and that’d—been that.
So Scott leaves him there with Theo when he leaves, Alec practically vibrating with relief and excitement. A part of him knows he should go home once he’s stepped out the door, but instead he kisses Malia goodbye and jogs up the few flights of stairs to Derek’s, slips in through his unlocked door. Derek’s sat on his couch, bleary-eyed and clearly drained, but his scent isn’t; it’s a little hot and it’s a little bitter, and for a brief, bitter moment of his own, Scott wishes he wasn’t so familiar with what grief smells like. Derek glances up at him and Scott tries for a smile, barely manages a grimace, and eventually gives up and goes to sit next to him on the couch.
“Theo asked about Erica and Boyd,” Derek explains quietly and without prompting once Scott has dropped, groaning, onto the cushions next to him. He must either see Scott’s brow furrow or catch the change in Scott’s scent, his pulse, because he adds, “It wasn’t malicious, he wasn’t trying to be an ass.”
He leaves it at that, though, and so Scott leaves it, too. Instead he exhales out heavily and lets himself sink farther back into the couch, blinking long and slowly as he stares out over the stretch of floor in front of him, the rough brick of the wall opposite. There’s a part of himself that wants to claim that he doesn’t know why he came up here, but—he does. He does and so he sucks in a deep breath and then tips his head, looks at Derek when Derek senses his gaze and looks back.
“You knew what that was, earlier,” Scott half-states, half-asks, “The reason I…”
Scott trails off but Derek just smiles wryly and finishes, “Went off like a cheap rocket?”
Scott grimaces at him and Derek bites back a wider grin. That single flash of teeth is an answer in and of itself and Scott huffs, though he couldn’t, if someone asked him, say how much of his annoyance is genuine and how much is a put-on, an act, a seizure-of-the-moment to be annoyed at a relatively benign irritation rather than a life-threatening one. Derek seems to get it, anyway, because his expression sobers some.
“I would have warned you if I’d thought about it,” Derek tells him quietly, “But it’s—”
“—not something someone like you normally has to think about,” Scott cuts in, meaning, something that a born-wolf would normally have to think about, and he knows he’s right when Derek makes a face and then nods, once.
They lapse into silence after that, and Scott—question answered, suspicion confirmed—thinks that he should go, let Derek get some sleep, get some sleep himself. But instead he just shifts deeper back against the couch and crosses his arms over his chest, doesn’t look over when Derek glances at him, his curiosity clear on his face.
“Theo said something weird to me, when I was dropping Alec off,” He starts, and then stops.
It’s not a great way to open a conversation but Scott’s too tired to think of a better way, and besides Derek doesn’t tense or otherwise seem alarmed. He just gives Scott a thoughtful look and says, “Weird like before, when he agreed to stay?”
And Scott looks over at him and realizes yeah, exactly like that, and so he nods, and opens his mouth to keep explaining, and then stops and closes it again. But Derek just waits, and after a few seconds Scott sighs, rubs a hand roughly over his hair and then drops his hand back down.
“He said something about a deal that he and I made,” Scott finally finishes, and when he looks over at Derek, he’s frowning.
“Did you...make him a deal?” Derek asks, sounding like he’s a little baffled as to why he’s having to ask Scott for confirmation about whether Scott did or did not make someone a deal, when Scott—should definitely know that. Except:
“I don’t—think so,” Scott says, though with how uncertain he sounds that could mean just about anything, completely justifying the skeptical look on Derek’s face, “I mean, I didn’t mean to, anyway.”
He groans and drops his head back against the couch, covers his face with his hands. Derek’s silent for a few seconds, and then he shrugs—Scott can feel the couch move—and says, “You could, you know, ask him about it.”
“Yeah,” Scott agrees quietly, and doesn’t move, “I could.”
He jerks some when he feels the couch really shift as Derek stands, and when he drops his hands and looks up at Derek, Derek looks both helplessly amused and a little good-naturedly irritated; the way people look when they’ve been asked for the kind of obvious advice that means the asker already knew the answer. Before he can stop it Scott’s mouth curls in a grin, and Derek snorts a quiet laugh, shakes his head.
“Maybe get some sleep first,” He advises, and heads towards his spiral staircase, the World’s Most Impractical Staircase, according to Theo and now the rest of the pack, and Scott laughs too, and tips over on the couch, closes his eyes against the glare of the midday sun streaming in through Derek’s windows.
“Yeah,” Scott tells the empty air of the first floor of Derek’s apartment in front of him, “Okay.”
[-2]: the instructions said bury several inches deep, so we did
Scott wakes up early the morning after Thanksgiving, too accustomed to Chris’s early starts, and spends a moment lying in bed next to Malia—still sound asleep next to him, having never made any attempt to adapt to Chris’s drill-sergeant schedule—and feeling sorry for himself. But in the next moment he sucks in a huge breath, holds it burning in his lungs as he absently picks it apart, one scent after the other, until he’s separated it out into each pack member. Each one is whole, and healthy, warm and deep with sleep, and Scott smiles helplessly at his ceiling. Then a heartbeat catches his attention, too fast to be asleep, and Scott frowns, slowly untangles himself from Malia.
Lydia looks up from her laptop when Scott pads into the kitchen. There’s a half-empty cup of lukewarm coffee by her left elbow and a tupperware container full of leftover cranberry sauce by her right, Scott grinning when he spots it, and Lydia rolls her eyes. Something catches in Scott’s chest when she does it and it takes a second to place the feeling, but it’s—memory. It’s several memories, infinite memories, all the times that Stiles has done the exact same thing in the exact same way. The grin on Scott’s face starts to soften when he realizes and so he turns away to hide it, grabs a mug from the cabinet above the coffeemaker and pours himself a cup.
“Refill?” He asks Lydia quietly once he’s gotten his expression under control, and holds up the coffee pot demonstratively when she glances over.
She nods, mouth curving in a small smile, and so Scott tops her mug off, replaces the coffee pot and then joins her at the table, looking curiously at her laptop screen as he does. Then he blinks, eyebrows rising, and blinks again, because the only thing he can say for sure is that it’s definitely math, it’s just—completely beyond him. Lydia makes a sound, a bitten-off laugh, and Scott laughs quietly too, props an elbow on the table and ruffles a hand through his hair, tips his mug towards her in a salute, the movement meaning impressive, and don’t let me interrupt, but mostly: better you than me. But after a second she takes him up on it and refocuses on the screen, though she does it only after taking a sip of her refilled coffee; after nudging the tupperware container closer to him with her elbow.
Scott drifts a little, then, lulled into a drowsy half-asleep haze by the rhythmic clack of Lydia’s keys, by the comforting scent of the full house and his sleeping pack within it. Upstairs he’d held the air within his lungs and searched out each pack member by scent, untangled them one by one, and this time he focuses his hearing, listens to the quiet symphony of their heartbeats beating unsteady time and then slowly starts to pull them apart, identify one after that other. It occurs to him, after awhile, in that far-off, half-conscious kind of way, that he usually only does this in the middle of crises, that he usually has to do this in the middle of crises, a half-panicked census in the midst of everything else. Grinning, Scott picks out the next—Corey—and lets the rest of the barbed thought go.
It’s because he’s sunk so deep into the sounds of the house, the heartbeats of the pack, that the creak of Theo’s footsteps on the hardwood floor leading into the kitchen doesn’t startle him. Instead he slowly eases open his eyes, already frowning thoughtfully when he catches sight of Theo in the middle of fumbling his hoodie-zipper up, his eyes sleep-swollen and his movements uncharacteristically clumsy. Lydia stops and looks up at him too, Scott can see her out of the corner of his eye, and Theo freezes when he looks up and sees he has their attention, his expression clearly showing his surprise and not a little—apprehension, Scott wants to say; he thinks it might have been apprehension—before he locks it down.
“Where are you going?” Scott asks him, and Theo gives him a strange look.
“Patrol,” Theo tells him, glancing at Lydia as if for help, “Same thing I do every morning.”
Beside Scott, Lydia just huffs a small exhale, which mostly gets drowned out by Scott squinting at Theo and saying, “It’s the morning after Thanksgiving.”
“I didn’t realize Monroe and her goons took holidays off,” Theo replies, and while a certain amount of snark is there, he mostly sounds half-asleep, his voice burring and the edges of his syllables softer than usual.
This time it’s Scott who rolls his eyes. “Take the morning off. We’ll go later,” Scott tells him, and it’s not an order—or not a red-eyed one, anyway—but Scott’s willing to insist if he needs to.
As it is he doesn’t; Liam appears in the doorway behind Theo, his hair a mess and his eyes only half-open, his t-shirt and sweatpants sleep-rumpled and creased. He looks irritated at being awake, and Scott’s about to ask, except that Liam reaches forward and nudges Theo in the hip—it’s possible he was reaching for his arm and just missed—and scowls.
“Why are you awake?” He demands, and nudges Theo again when Theo glowers and tries to knock his hand away, “There is no good reason to be awake right now.”
He doesn’t seem to be interested in applying that same logic to Scott and Lydia, but Scott doesn’t plan to hold it against him. Instead he just meets Theo’s eyes when Theo darts a look at him, looking a little panicked, of all things, and makes a shooing motion with his hands back towards the living room.
“Later,” Scott repeats pointedly, and motions again.
Theo opens his mouth and then closes it again in relatively quick succession, and then whatever he was going to say—if he was actually going to say it—gets lost as Liam takes advantage of Scott’s explicit permission to give up on politeness and just grab Theo’s arm, start dragging him back into the living room. Scott doesn’t manage not to laugh but he at least manages to do it quietly, but when he looks over at Lydia—expecting to see the same wry amusement—she’s looking at him shrewdly.
“What?” Scott asks, the humor immediately draining from his expression; he’d been around it enough to recognize Lydia’s uncomfortable truth face.
“Are you ever going to talk to him?” She replies, and Scott frowns.
“Talk to...who?” Scott asks, and makes a face right back when she makes one at him.
Sighing, Lydia clarifies, “Theo, Scott. Are you ever going to talk to Theo?”
“Talk to Theo about what?” Scott says, genuinely confused.
But Lydia just studies him for a few long, dragged-out seconds, her eyes searching his face. Finally she inhales in a deep breath, lets it out slow and careful and deliberate, her eyes falling shut. Scott watches her, feeling weirdly guilty, but when she opens her eyes back up, she’s smiling gently.
“Give it some thought,” She suggests, and reaches forward and closes her laptop, tucks it under her arm as she stands.
But Scott just grimaces, following her progress as she snags her mug and the tupperware container, puts the former away in the dishwasher and the latter back in the fridge, “What, no banshee hint?”
Lydia just huffs a quiet laugh and drops a hand on his shoulder as she passes him on the way towards the stairs, squeezes it as she says, “This is something for the true alpha to figure out for himself.”
Scott watches her as she goes, brow furrowing, and keeps watching the empty doorway even after he hears her set her laptop down in the guest bedroom, when he hears the shower start up. After that he lets his attention fall away, his cheeks puffing out as he deliberately fills them with air, lets it slowly leak out. Except his attention falls absently back to the living room, and he finishes blowing out the rest of his lingering breath, stands and pads over to the doorway.
Nolan’s still dead to the world on the couch and Alec is cocooned up inside the blanket he’d claimed on his solo air mattress, but it’s Theo that Scott ends up looking at. It’s Theo and Liam, since it’s hard to look at one without the other, Theo flat on his stomach with his arms folded beneath his pillow, Liam close enough to his side that it takes Scott a moment to separate out whose limbs are whose. Are you ever going to talk to him, Scott repeats Lydia’s question silently, and frowns thoughtfully at the hood of Theo’s sweatshirt, which he apparently hadn’t bothered to take off, at his shoes left haphazardly by the edge of the mattress, like he’d toed them off carelessly, already half-asleep or maybe like he’d done it while being harassed by Liam.
Give it some thought, Lydia had advised, and so Scott leans against the doorway, and does.
[-1]: transference, noun, the dictionary said, highlighted and underlined
An hour after his mom sends everyone home from the hospital, Scott makes Liam take a break from staring restlessly at the door into Theo’s room and forces him into the shower of the empty room beside it. Liam doesn’t want to go, tries to fight him on it, but Scott has spent the last seven hours watching Liam absently rub at his forearms, has spent it listening to his breathing stutter on certain inhales, shudder on certain exhales, and Lydia’s brisk clean-up earlier aside, Scott can still smell Theo’s poisoned blood on Liam’s skin, which means Liam can, too. Alec watches them go when Scott eventually gives up on arguing and gets ahold of Liam’s arm, starts dragging him forcefully away, but he looks—relieved. He looks grateful.
Scott plants himself inside the bathroom doorway once he’s tossed Liam inside, stands with his arms crossed and an equally immovable expression on his face until Liam finally works his jaw and jerks an about-face, strips off his shirt. When he reaches for the waist of his sweatpants Scott gets a hand on the door handle, pulls it closed and leans against it as he listens to the water start up. There’s a certain amount of hypocrisy happening here and he knows it, his own hands still smelling of blood—human blood, hunter blood, but blood nonetheless—but it’s not the same, and—Scott knows it.
Liam’s in and out within five minutes. He yanks open the door once he’s done, Scott straightening a half-second before the movement would have sent him flailing back into the bathroom, and when he turns to look at Liam, Liam is glaring back. His forearms are red, though, and while some of it is undoubtedly from the heat of the water, most of it is from Liam scrubbing at his skin; Scott could hear the half-frantic scratch of it even buried under the sound of the water. Even as Scott watches the redness fades, Liam’s healing kicking in like it was erasing an injury, but glancing up at Liam, seeing his still-pinched expression, Scott knows the damage isn’t gone, not really.
“Satisfied?” Liam snaps, and Scott wants to say no, but instead he just exhales quietly, pivots so that he’s no longer blocking Liam in.
Liam pushes past him, and Scott means to let him go, he does, but: “Liam.”
Scott can hear the way Liam sucks in a frustrated breath, can hear the way his knuckles creak as he clenches his fists, but he stops in the doorway. He stops and then turns back around to face Scott, gives him an impatient look when Scott doesn’t immediately speak. And Scott clearly should have thought more about this, should have let Liam go back to his self-imposed vigil in front of Theo’s door, but Lydia hadn’t been the only one staring at Theo and Liam in the rearview earlier, hadn’t been the only one who’d watched the way that Liam had folded over and pressed his forehead to Theo’s breastbone, to his heart underneath; she hadn’t been the only one to hear Liam whisper please.
“I’m sorry,” Scott tells him, finally, and nearly winces at his own shredded, exhausted voice, “He shouldn’t have been alone. I shouldn’t have left him alone.”
Liam’s irritated expression goes surprised, and then puzzled, and then winds right back around to irritated again, Liam looking away and his jaw starting to work. Scott stares at him, confused. He’d expected a lot of things but not annoyance, not frustration; not the way that Liam’s scent has gone hot and sharp with anger. For a few seconds Liam just stands there, his pulse kicking up and every exhale harsh through his nose, and then he shakes his head, looks back at Scott.
“Great,” He replies, the word bitten-off and short, “So you’re sorry for the part of this mess that wasn’t your fault, and when he wakes up in a few hours, he’s going to be sorry for the part of it that wasn’t his fault, and the both of you are going to just keep trying to solve everyone else’s problems but your own.”
“Liam...” Scott says, bewildered and a little stung.
And maybe it’s his obvious confusion, and maybe it’s something else, something caged within Liam’s own ribs, but his frustrated glare only lasts a few more seconds, and then his expression goes pinched with regret, his shoulders slumping. He brings his hands up and covers his face, takes one deep breath in and then another, and then rakes them up and through his hair, drops them down by his sides.
“I’m sorry,” He murmurs, and when he meets Scott’s eyes he really looks sorry, “This has just been—a really long day.” He flashes Scott the world’s most unconvincing smile, the curl of it three-quarters a wince. After a beat he gives up and lets it turn into the grimace it’d clearly been originally, exhales heavily. Then he holds up one forearm, says, voice gone achingly sincere, “This was a good call, thanks for making it.”
Scott nods dumbly, still too thrown to say anything else, and Liam licks his bottom lip, pulls it between his teeth before he gives Scott another half-pained smile and turns back for the door, leaves Scott alone in the empty room. It’s instinct and habit—maybe a little hypervigilance, not yet faded—that has Scott stretching out his hearing to follow him, to track him as he goes back to the corner of the waiting room, back to where Scott and Derek had forced him, earlier, and drops back down into his seat. Three chairs away Alec shifts, glancing at Liam maybe, and Scott can imagine the sympathetic smile on Alec’s face, the survivor’s guilt lurking underneath; he sighs, and pushes the thought away.
But that just gives the memory of Liam saying and the both of you are going to just keep trying to solve everyone else’s problems but your own the opportunity to rise back to the fore, and Scott closes his eyes and sucks in a deep breath, holds it for a few long, burning seconds. It fills his lungs with the scent of hospital, with the harsh bite of antiseptic and sharp tang of medication, with sickness and death and healing; with the scent of Liam and Alec in the waiting room, and Scott’s mom and Liam’s dad in with Theo. Opening his eyes back up, Scott considers for a few moments, and then he heads for the door to the empty room, turns and heads for the door into Theo’s.
His mom and Liam’s dad are in the middle of prepping Theo for his next round of treatments and so Scott stays in the doorway, doesn’t step inside. Instead he just watches as Liam’s dad checks the various lines connecting Theo to the machines next to him, as his mom double-checks the dosage, the fit of the oxygen mask over Theo’s mouth; as she checks his pulse. Their movements are easy, practiced, endlessly professional no matter the fact that their patient is personal, and Scott leans his head against the door jamb, a little inexplicably—jealous.
So you’re sorry for the part of this that wasn’t your fault, Liam had said, and Scott wonders at the necessary corollary, at what part was his fault. He’s going to be sorry for the part of it that wasn’t his fault, Liam had said, and Scott bets that he’s right— knows he’s right—except that he doesn’t know which part Liam means. The both of you are going to just keep trying to solve everyone else’s problems but your own, Liam had finished, and Scott inhales quietly, stretches his hearing back behind him for Liam and Alec, keeps his eyes on the steady rise-and-fall of Theo’s chest, and exhales just as quietly. And then he does it again.
[0]: the note you’d left said i’ve realized something but didn’t tell us what
Scott doesn’t know why he goes back to the warehouse after Stiles’ dad tells him that they’d cleared it as a crime scene, that they were turning it back over to the owners, but after he leaves the station—after he flashes the Sheriff a quick smile and dodges a deputy coming through the narrow hallway with a boxful of paperwork—he gets in the Jeep, and gets on the highway, and goes back.
There’s still crime scene tape over the doors but the ends of it are frayed from constantly being taken down and put back up, and Scott catches a trailing end of one strip, rubs it between his fingers before letting it go, pulling the doors open. To human noses the place probably smells fine, if a little antiseptically astringent, but to Scott it still smells like gunpowder, and wolfsbane, and blood, and death, and he wrinkles his nose, works his jaw as his mouth tries to flood with saliva; as his instincts try to lengthen his fangs. The worst part is the way that he can still smell Theo, mostly the toxic reek of his formerly poisoned blood, but also just his scent, seeped into the furniture from his sweat, maybe.
Except that once Scott finishes coming through the doors and looks up fully into the warehouse proper, he realizes that the reason he’s smelling Theo is because Theo is here, standing a few feet away from the dark patch of floor where they’d found him collapsed and coughing up black blood; the place where Liam had put his hands on Theo’s skin and shouted we can’t just let him die like this. Scott blinks, thrown, and then blinks again, because Theo is—wearing a sheet and nothing else, one corner of it draped over his shoulder like a toga and the other held in place with an arm across his chest. The sheet is something that he’d clearly retrieved from the CSI supplies the FBI left behind, Scott can see the disturbed items on the table next to him, and his bare feet are sticking incongruously out of the bottom.
“Hey, Scott,” Theo says eventually, after Scott has done nothing but stare at him in confusion for a good few seconds. His voice is wry and knowing and absolutely, entirely aware of the absurdity of his current situation; he looks like he’d thought of waving before realizing that with his current outfit that’d end in disaster.
“What are you doing here?” Scott asks him. He nearly adds without any clothes, but figures that question is pretty firmly implied.
“I could ask you the same thing,” Theo shoots back easily, and shifts one shoulder to resettle the slipping sheet.
Scott just gives him a narrow-eyed look, no flash of red needed, “As the only person in this room currently wearing pants, I think I get to go first.”
Theo laughs and shrugs one shoulder, the gesture clearly meaning fair enough. Strategically it’s not a sound move since it causes the sheet to slip again, and this time Theo has to grab it, drag it back into place. He doesn’t look embarrassed, though, and Scott wonders if he’s just—beyond embarrassment. At least here, in this place, where he’d been kidnapped and tortured and nearly died. Maybe after that unplanned toga parties in front of your friends—in front of your alpha, Scott firmly reminds himself—seem laughably insignificant. Scott has—experienced the same thing, himself.
But as Scott looks closer he realizes that Theo may not look embarrassed, but he looks something. Out of sorts, unsettled, lacking his usual laconic air. He looks like someone who got of bed this morning intending to go one place, and instead ended up here, wearing nothing but a sheet he found lying around and standing close enough to where he’d nearly died that his bare toes are almost touching the place where his blood had stained the concrete. So Scott waits, closing his mouth from where he’d been about to repeat his question.
Theo must hear the click of his jaw coming together or else he’d already been about to answer, because he sucks in a deep breath, looks down at the patch of blackened concrete and then up and over his shoulder at Scott, tells him, “I hurt Liam last night.”
“What?” Scott asks, surprise and an immediate, rising surge of anger turning the question into half a demand.
Theo grimaces and shakes his head, rolls his shoulders beneath the sheet and quickly continues, “It’s not like it sounds. And he’d probably be pissed at me for saying it like that, but…”
Scott had taken half a step forward—the movement more than a little an instinctual threat—but as Theo trails off he stops himself. He forces himself to stop, and breathe, and when he does he takes in a lungful of Theo’s scent and realizes with stark, startling clarity that if Theo had actually done any lasting damage to Liam he wouldn’t smell softly regretful or frustrated. He probably wouldn’t smell like anything at all, Scott finds himself thinking, because if Theo had hurt Liam, the first thing he’d do is put himself back in the ground. But that—just leaves Scott with more questions, so he frowns at Theo, opens his mouth to insist on the rest of the explanation.
But Theo beats him to it, murmurs quietly, “I woke up from a nightmare. A nightmare of being here, with—with her, and I—didn’t know where I was when I woke up, at first.”
The rest of the story is easy enough to picture, after that, and so when Theo trails off Scott doesn’t push him, because it’s also easy to picture Liam’s reaction: he’d probably be pissed at me for saying it like that. And besides, the winding thread of distress that starts to weave its way through Theo’s scent distracts him, yanks at something between his ribs. He’s still thinking of something to say when Theo takes in another of those huge breaths, exhales it out again.
“I didn’t mean to come here,” Theo confesses, “I went to run a four-legged patrol—” Scott nearly interrupts to ask why he’d been running a patrol when Monroe is dead, but stops himself, since he’s pretty sure he can hazard a guess, “—and I...ended up here.”
He swallows a few times, Scott can hear it, and then he clears his throat and pivots on one heel to face Scott head-on. If the movement was meant to inspire confidence it backfires, since the sheet gets caught under Theo’s other foot and he has to make a bit of a wild grab for it, haul it back up and into place before he can give Scott too much of a show, twitch it quickly back around his waist. Scott bites back a laugh but can’t quite smother his smile, and Theo gives him a dry look but then huffs out his own quiet, amused sound.
“So, only person wearing pants in this room,” Theo starts, and flashes him a cheeky grin when Scott’s expression goes unimpressed, “Your turn.”
It makes sense that Theo would ask it, both because it’s still an open question and Scott had never said, and also because it makes a perfect distraction, an acceptable segue away from Theo’s nightmares and unintentional road-tripping. Even still Scott doesn’t know what to say, hadn’t expected to run into anyone here and so hadn’t bothered to prepare an explanation in the time since he left the Sheriff’s station. But Theo had been honest with Scott, painfully so, and so Scott—does the same.
“I don’t know,” He tells Theo, and shrugs when Theo’s brow furrows softly, surprise and confusion and maybe a little concern, “I went by the station to check in with Stiles’ dad, and he mentioned they were turning it back over to the owners tomorrow.”
Scott stops, looks around the warehouse: looks at the empty vat that had held the wolfsbane Monroe had used to drug Theo, looks at the barren cart where all her tools had sat before the FBI had taken them for evidence; looks at the stained-black stretch of concrete next to Theo’s bare left foot. When he swallows and looks back up at Theo, Theo is looking back, expression gone somber even above his ridiculous sheet.
“I guess I just wanted to see it,” Scott finally concludes, “Like this, I mean. Like—”
He means to keep going, say like we’d won, or like it’s over, but instead he just trails off. It doesn’t seem to matter to Theo, who just nods like he’d heard what Scott didn’t say, glances around the warehouse himself. There’s no sign at all on him of what happened to him in this place, no scar or lingering wound to document that he’d been tortured here, nearly died here, and looking at him all Scott can think of is Liam in the hospital when Theo had still been recovering, fresh out of the shower with his forearms scrubbed clean of Theo’s blood, staring Scott straight in the eye and saying and in a few hours he’ll wake up and be sorry for the part that wasn’t his fault. Theo has a lot of things to be sorry for but this isn’t one of them, but for Scott it—might be.
“Theo, I—need to apologize again,” Scott tells him, and meets Theo’s eyes when he looks at him strangely, “For not telling you that you were part of the pack. For not realizing that you didn’t think you were. I don’t know how I couldn’t have realized. How I couldn’t have known.”
Theo’s mouth rounds in a silent oh, but he doesn’t say anything, immediately. Or he doesn’t say anything, but his face does, his expression taking on that half-reluctant, half-resigned grimace that Scott had gotten used to recognizing from across Theo’s table during strategy sessions. It meant I know something you don’t know, and it also meant I wish I didn’t.
Theo must notice Scott studying him because he narrows his eyes right back, says, “What?”
Scott just rolls his eyes, gives him an unimpressed stare, “All these months, you think I don’t recognize your ‘I have a theory’ face?”
Theo grimaces again but he doesn’t deny it, just pulls his gaze away from Scott and purses his lips, pulls them between his teeth and then releases them on a puffed-out exhale. It’s a surprisingly open series of movements, wordlessly communicative, and Scott realizes where he’s seen a similar—a nearly identical—series of expressions when he realizes he’s seen it on Liam. The thought nearly makes him smile before he gets it under control, remembers Theo’s as-yet unstated theory for why Scott spent several months missing something that, looking back on it now, practically every other member of his pack had picked up on.
It takes a few stops and starts, Theo opening his mouth and closing it again, but eventually he sighs and murmurs, “You did know,” and gives Scott a heavy-lidded, sympathetic smile when Scott stares at him, startled, “You just told yourself you didn’t.”
“What?” Scott says, but there’s a prickling sensation inside his ribs even as he says it that means maybe, “What do you mean, why would I…?”
“Because you were pissed at me,” Theo tells him, and for all that his statement is blunt it’s also entirely free of judgement; it is, in fact, saturated with understanding, “You still are.”
“No. No, I wasn’t. I’m not. Why would I be…?” Scott starts to deny, except that Theo gives him the driest look that it’s possible for one person to give another person, and Scott cuts himself off, because there’s being obtuse and then there’s being obtuse, and Scott—doesn’t really want to be the latter. Instead he grimaces, tries, almost a little petulantly, “A lot has changed since then.”
“And a lot hasn’t,” Theo counters gently, and Scott really doesn’t know how they got to this point in the conversation where Theo is comforting him.
He gets caught up in that thought but Theo drags him right back out of it when he laughs in clear disbelief, his head shaking when Scott looks over at him.
“You are a ridiculous person,” Theo tells him bluntly, but his tone is warm and open and inviting him to share the joke, “I can smell your guilt from over here.”
Scott just blinks at him and Theo laughs again, but then his expression sobers and he glances back down at the stained concrete next to him, prods it with a bare toe.
“Scott...I’m going to spend the rest of my life making up for the things I’ve done, and even then I’m not going to succeed,” Theo finally tells him, looking back up to meet his eyes, and Scott doesn’t know what to say to that so he says nothing. Luckily Theo doesn’t seem to be waiting on him, just gives him a quick, there-and-gone flash of a smile and adds:
“Whatever I do now, it isn’t going to change what I did then. You can be grateful for the former and still angry about the latter. Scott—” He says, and then hesitates, “You can be angry and still be a true alpha.” He stops, smiles, then finishes quietly, “You are angry, and you’re still a true alpha.”
Scott can’t keep meeting his steady gaze but the rest of the warehouse is a minefield. Everywhere Scott looks there’s evidence of something terrible, another tragedy that started and ended in Beacon Hills, another trial his pack was forced to endure. Just like—just like a year ago when it’d been Theo they’d had to endure, when it’d been Theo who’d used his talents—the same talents he’d later turn to helping them catch Monroe, to protecting them—to string them up like marionettes, to turn them on each other with a disturbing, horrifying ease.
Scott realizes he’s clutched one hand over the center of his stomach—the exact location of the place that Theo had shoved his clawed hand and killed him—and when he looks up, Theo is watching him, the look in his eye knowing, regretful, and Scott grimaces, goes to drop his hand, except—except that while he’s sorry for putting that look on his face, there’s a part of him—a part that he’s been ignoring for a long time—that thinks good. Theo sees that, too, Scott can see him seeing it, but instead of flinching back or hunching in, he just smiles, close-mouthed and genuine, the corners of his eyes crinkling. Scott stares at him, baffled.
“I’m just relieved,” Theo tells him, and there’s a warmth to his voice that helps banish some of the chill that had crept into the room, “Knowing that even true alphas like you aren’t quite perfect. Gives the rest of us screw-ups hope.”
Scott nearly opens him mouth to say I’m not perfect, even the voice in his head depressingly petulant, but then he looks at Theo’s crooked smile again and—stops. He just stops, and finds his own lips stretching in a wide—and wider—smile, and finally looks away as a quiet laugh breaks loose. Theo huffs a laugh too but he doesn’t move away from the stained patch of floor, just keeps holding his sheet wrapped around himself and toeing it with an idle foot. And Scott watches him, and thinks of them both coming here, to this place where horrible things had happened, but where they had all happened, past tense, the both of them—all of them, everyone back in Beacon Hills, too—safe and whole and working their way towards happy, or something like that it.
And so this time it’s Scott who opens his mouth, who rescues Theo from his own thoughts, who says: “Theo,” and waits until Theo looks up at him to murmur, “C’mon, let’s go home.” Theo’s expression flickers with surprise and Scott smiles at him, this time, adds, “There’s nothing for either of us here. But there is something back home. So let’s—go home.”
Theo stares at him for a moment longer, and then he smiles back, and nods, and says, “Okay,” says, “Let’s go home.”
[1]: rebuilding in progress, thanks for your patience, you wrote, and taped the paper up below the closed sign on the door
When Scott pulls the Jeep into the Preserve’s main entrance, Liam is sitting on the lowered tailgate of Theo’s truck.
He’s got his arms braced behind himself and his feet kicking against the open air, and his expression as he watches Scott and Theo pull up is a little thoughtful, more than a little irritated, and—hidden beneath both of those things—softly concerned. Beside Scott in the Jeep, Theo mutters a muffled half-swear and grimaces at Scott when Scott glances over at him. He doesn’t smell apprehensive, though, or even particularly worried. He smells, mostly—Scott taking in as subtle a breath as he can—a little...bemused; a little heartbreakingly grateful. Scott puts the Jeep in park behind the truck and raises his eyebrows at Theo, half in solidarity and half in admitted, amused glee; the schoolchild feeling of hearing the teacher screech someone else’s name. Theo rolls his eyes, and huffs, straightens his stolen-crime-scene-sheet, and gets out.
Scott follows him just in time to hear Liam say, “Starting a new fashion trend, there, Raeken?,” but even as he says it he’s hopping down from the truck bed, coming forward to meet Theo halfway. Last night Theo had accidentally hurt Liam and Scott’s willing to bet that this morning Liam woke up to an empty bed, took a handful of moments to be royally pissed off about it, and then came here to wait, because he—understands Theo: and in a few hours he’ll wake up and be sorry for the part that wasn’t his fault. Even as Scott watches Liam’s actions cease to match his words, Liam reaching forward with one hand to tug lightly on the sheet by Theo’s waist. Theo intercepts it before he can manage it, but he doesn’t let it go.
“Hilarious,” Theo comments dryly, but Scott can see his fingers tighten around Liam’s in a gentle squeeze, “Are my clothes where I left them or did you move them out of petty revenge?”
“Hey, thanks for the idea,” Liam chirps back, meaning he hadn’t, in fact, moved them, but that next time Theo annoys him by running off without a word, he definitely will; Theo’s shoulders fall as he sighs, realizing this, and then he leans forward and kisses Liam quick before side-stepping him towards the forest and, Scott presumes, his hidden clothes.
Liam watches him go for a bit, and then he turns back around to watch Scott, instead. Scott raises his eyebrows at the scrutiny but doesn’t protest it, just leans against the side of the Jeep, hands in his pockets.
“You okay?” Liam asks after a second.
Scott’s first, immediate instinct is to agree without thinking; he’s not dying and he’s not aware of anyone else dying, either, which has, at certain points in his life, been the bar for okay, but then he stops, and gives the question some genuine thought. But after some reflection it turns out that surprisingly he is okay, and so he smiles at Liam, nods.
“Yeah,” Scott tells him, “I’m okay.” Then he squints at Liam thoughtfully, asks in return, “ You okay?”
He can see Liam realizing what he means, and can see— he’d probably be pissed at me for saying it like that—the irritation resurge in Liam’s expression, smell it in his scent. But he just huffs, longsuffering, and darts an annoyed look over his shoulder at where Theo disappeared off to. It softens, though, almost immediately, Liam’s eyes still on the tree-line and Theo somewhere behind it, and the irritation fades as quickly as it’d come.
“Yeah,” Liam murmurs, turning to face him again, “I’m okay.” Then he looks at Scott shrewdly and asks, “Is he okay?,” the question encompassing not just the fact that Theo had ran off alone this morning as a full-shift wolf and come back a few hours later human-shaped and with company and wearing nothing but a sheet, but—everything else, too.
And usually Scott would shrug, or demur, or raise his eyebrows and say he’s twenty feet away from you, ask him yourself, but. You did know, Theo had said, and had been all sympathy when he’d added, You just told yourself you didn’t. And Scott does know, at least here, right now in this moment, and so he says, “He’s okay, too.”
“Great,” Liam says, voice a little dryly amused but mostly relieved, “So we’re all okay then.”
“Seems like,” Scott murmurs, but knows that he’s already lost Liam’s attention because Theo is coming back out of the trees, fully dressed and sheet folded and tucked under his arm. Liam turns away from Scott and doesn’t let Theo stop a reasonable distance away when he tries, just hooks his fingers in Theo’s belt loops and pulls him the rest of the way into himself, Theo giving off a startled oof as they collide. He darts a look at Scott but Scott’s just grinning, tolerantly amused, and so when Liam flicks his ear in retaliation for being ignored and stretches up to kiss him, Theo—kisses him back, their audience be damned.
Scott leaves them there by Theo’s truck snarking at each other, but halfway home he switches directions, takes a left on Halpine instead of a right. Malia’s father’s car is missing from the driveway when Scott pulls in but Scott still parks off to the side, leaves his usual spot open as he steps out. Inside the house he can hear a burst of music, the creak of furniture; Malia realizing that he’s here and taking out her headphones, standing up from her desk. She pulls open the door before he can knock on it, squints at him.
“I’m angry,” He tells her, half an explanation and half an announcement; a declaration.
Malia’s brow furrows and he can see her test the air, confused because his words aren’t matching his scent, and Scott grins, steps forward so that he can start crowding her back from the doorway, back into the house. She goes without protest, stepping nimbly back without looking, and the second the door clicks shut behind them Scott kisses her, licks into her mouth when she instantly drops it open for him with a curious, humming noise.
“I’m angry about a lot of things,” Scott continues when they break apart, and Malia leans back against the wall they’d found while they’d kissed, studies him.
“I’ve known that. I’ve known that for a long time,” She finally tells him, and Scott feels his expression slacken some in surprise before it crinkles right back up with—with delight, “You never did, though.”
She doesn’t ask the obvious question—what changed—and Scott wonders at that before realizing: she’s trusting him. If it was something she needed to know she’s trusting that Scott would tell her, that’s what that conspicuously absent question means, and Scott didn’t so she doesn’t. And that realization hits Scott between the ribs like a sucker-punch and he surges back into her, takes her mouth again.
“I, uh. I might be something else at the moment, though,” Scott tells her, and grins when she laughs, loud and delighted; grins when she kisses him, hard and forceful, and takes his hand, leads him towards the stairs.