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As much of a romcom cliché it is crossing over into creepster behavior, Theo Raeken climbing to the second floor of the Geyer house and into Liam’s bedroom window is a more common occurrence than one would think.
Had Theo slunk into Liam’s room about twenty minutes ago, he would have caught the younger boy hard at work on his Spanish essay, some one-page double-spaced thing about his favorite hobby and why he enjoys doing it with the extra requirement that he use at least five of the vocab words from the new word bank. As it is, Liam has given up on trying to steer his attention span in any academic direction—it’s ornery even on his best days—and he’s flat on his back, starfished on his unmade bed, tossing a rubber band ball up at the ceiling while Queen blasts in his headphones.
It’s the smell, then, and embarrassingly not the sound, that alerts him to Theo’s presence. Liam’s pulse doesn’t stutter or pick up; instead, he lifts his head infinitesimally, his own arm frozen mid-throw, and he spies the rumpled figure of Theo with one ripped jean-clad leg slung over the windowsill.
Theo looks almost…surprised. Taken off guard, perhaps is a better way to put it. As if he’d driven all the way out here from wherever the hell it is he stays in the mysterious corners of Beacon Hills, climbed the gutter and crawled across the flat end of the roof with that characteristic quiet drilled into him by a lifetime of silence, and then slid open Liam Dunbar’s window without actually expecting Liam Dunbar himself to be on the other side.
They lock eyes for a moment. Theo with the rubbed-raw sole of his Converse an inch above Liam’s carpet, one hand braced on the window track and the other above his head on the bottom of the pane, and Liam with his mouth hanging open a second before it snaps shut because the rubber band ball plummeted on its circuit from the ceiling and he had to scramble to catch it.
“You smell weird,” says Liam. “Why do you smell weird?”
Theo doesn’t reply. This should be the first thing that tips off Liam’s suspicion—the fact that Theo can’t even muster a shadow of a snarky rejoinder—but Liam is still nonplussed, absorbing the sharp ginger-like edge to Theo’s scent, an amalgamation of all the negative emotions Liam has ever smelled in a single enclosed room.
Fatigue. Fear. Disgust. Anxiety. Resignation. Liam can't reliably pick any of them out at the drop of a hat, being a bitten instead of born werewolf with slightly higher priorities in Beacon Hills than training his werewolf nose. But what his gut instantly screams at him is that it’s badbadbadbad.
It’s only when Theo attempts to place both feet on the carpet and has to sway there for a second before moving, as if he’s not completely there, that Liam actually sits up, alert, suspecting that the chimera may be hurt.
The distance to Liam's bed is two steps at most. Theo clears it before the younger boy can jump up and grab him or steady him or—do something useful of that sort. Without uttering a word, Theo clambers on one knee first onto the edge of the mattress, then on both knees, and the bed dips and creaks with their uneven weight as Theo reaches for the corner of Liam's duvet and pulls it up and slips underneath.
Liam stares. Theo ignores him, shuffles closer to him on the bed with his hands still clutching the edge of the blanket. He winces once and then disappears below the cotton.
“Theo?” Liam whispers.
Theo doesn’t answer. The crown of his head is just visible over the edge of the duvet, the tufts of his bangs falling over the hem and rustling with subtle movement as he takes shallow breaths. It seems he’s gearing up to say something, to finally reply to Liam, but seconds pass and it’s becoming clear that no sound will escape his mouth any time soon.
Liam bites his lip with a frown. Theo didn’t even bother to toe off his shoes and kick them in a corner of the room, as he does every time he climbs through Liam’s window and they tacitly decide that he’ll crash there for the night. Now that Liam is concentrating hard enough, he can also make out the rapid pace of Theo’s heartbeat, pattering like a rabbit’s as it runs. His own pulse quickens in time with Theo’s.
“Theo. Hey,” Liam tries again in a murmur. He reaches forward and gently pulls down the blanket to see the chimera’s face.
Theo must really be out of it, because he doesn’t react fast enough to keep the shade of the blanket over his face. In that split second that the light of the room lamp illuminates the planes of his face, Liam can read the pain etched all over it.
“Shit. Where are you hurt? Theo, you gotta answer me. Were you attacked? Was it—was it hunters? Why didn’t you call me?”
As the frantic questions pour from his mouth, Liam disentangles his legs from the blanket on the other side of the bed and shifts closer, his fingertips hovering just over Theo’s shoulder, his arm, unsure where to lay his hand that might not hurt the older boy.
Theo grunts. After drawing in a breath that sounds more like something between a rattle and a sigh, he mumbles, “No.”
“No?” Liam repeats. He’s trying his best to keep the hysterical note out of his voice. “No, what? No how? Theo. Theo.” He settles for poking Theo in the cheek, since that’s the only discernible surface of Theo’s body in the dim light of the room that definitely isn’t hurt.
Theo doesn’t explain. Instead, after half a beat of frightening silence, he fumbles for the blanket again and scoots his body down the bed so he’s buried under the covers again. Liam furrows his brow in confusion until a second later, when he feels the top of Theo’s head bump into his hip. Theo’s unkempt hair brushes across the bare skin of Liam’s side just above the waistband of his sweatpants, where his shirt rode up in his effort to close the distance between them.
Only now does Liam find the wherewithal to reason with himself that if Theo were truly hurt, the stench of the blood in the air would have been unbearable by now. He relaxes a smidge, but still can’t help the note of concern in his voice.
“Theo, you gotta tell me what’s wrong.”
The pressure of Theo’s head against his hip increases infinitesimally in response.
Liam obeys his instincts and lets his hand brush across Theo’s head. The moment his palm comes in contact with Theo’s skull, a jolt of pain shocks Liam. It’s so potent and blinding that for a minute he can only sit there, gritting his teeth and keeping the curse locked behind his teeth.
“Jesus,” he ends up swearing anyway on an exhale, when the first wave of pain has washed over them both and he can blink back his tears and focus again. He looks down once more at Theo, understanding.
“Jesus,” he whispers again. “Theo, why didn’t you tell me you had a migraine?”
It takes a bit, but Liam patiently waits for the reply. Finally, Theo shrugs and says, his voice raspy, “S’not new.”
“Okay, that’s the stupidest answer I ever heard for not telling me you’re in pain,” Liam chides him. He’s still got his hand firmly planted across the back of Theo’s head, his fingers buried in the strands of soft hair and twitching to comb through them. The tension bleeds out of Theo’s body and his form goes limp with relief as the rest of the pain seeps out in a steady stream into Liam’s system.
“That’s rich,” Theo slurs into Liam’s thigh. “You…telling me what’s stupid.”
“Yeah, which is why you should really question where your brain cells went right now,” Liam retorts with quiet fury. He almost wants to curl his hands into fists and smash them into something—bend something impossible or snap something till it lies at his feet in smithereens—but then he remembers that this is Theo, and Theo has grown up around the sharp edges of jagged teeth and pricking needles, and the last thing he needs right now is for one more person to fail to be gentle with him.
So Liam draws in deep breaths—gulps them, inhales the scent of Theo along with the air, and finds small relief in the fact that the chimera now smells simply tired and comforted—and he relaxes his knuckles against Theo’s skull.
He begins, instead, to card his fingers through Theo’s hair in random patterns.
The linear strokes turn into swirls and then figure eights. He feels like his calloused fingertips are far too clumsy to be entrusted with a task like this, but then he glances down again at Theo, watches the way the shadows dance over his cheekbones as his dark eyelashes flutter and his lips part with more even puffs of breath, and Liam thinks—this is okay. This is just right.
Soon enough, he’s drawing different things now beneath Theo’s locks, traversing the space all the way from the back of his head to the bare skin of his temple and back in his five-fingered massage.
Theo blinks, slow and content, and snuffles a little as he shifts so his cheek is now resting on Liam’s thigh where the younger boy sits cross-legged.
“Did you just draw a lacrosse stick on my head?” he asks.
“Shut up,” Liam whispers on the beat. “Shut up, no I didn’t.”
“You did,” Theo exhales. “And a…fish head?”
“A wolf head, you dick,” Liam mutters.
Theo hums, lips stretching tight in a self-satisfied smirk that tells Liam he doesn’t even find it necessary to acknowledge the ridiculousness of his explanation. Liam feels something unclench in his chest then, something go limp and—fall back into place, he thinks. Theo’s all right. He’s okay. Or at the very least, he came here because he knew this was where he would be all right, and he’s trusting Liam to touch him and not harm him so he can heal.
As Theo curls his body in further so his knees are flush against the side of Liam’s calf, the beta notices with a startle that Theo’s hand is clutched in the fabric of his sweatpants. He could probably mock him about it. Poke fun at the rare display of childish affection. But Liam doesn’t.
Instead, he lets his free hand drift down to cover Theo’s, and to press down, down with just the slightest bit of pressure, until the warmth of his palm has completely enveloped the familiar and ever-present chill of Theo’s skin.
A low rumble emanates from Theo’s chest in return.
“D’you know what caused the migraine?” Liam ventures to ask.
Theo shrugs as best he can in his curled-up position.
“You said they’re not new. When did they…when did they start?”
Theo’s eyes blink open and land unseeing somewhere on the hill of Liam’s knee. “When I was nine,” he replies, and Liam doesn’t need any further explanation to put the pieces together.
He would have pointed out that werewolves have supernatural healing abilities. That shifters are supposed to be immune to physical ailments. But with Theo’s single sentence, he recalls how Theo—isn’t a true werewolf at all.
He supposes that getting sliced open and injected with G-d knows what pseudoscientific substances of miraculous transformation would have at least one pesky side effect.
“Have you had them since you came back to Beacon Hills?”
Theo hums in the affirmative.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Theo shrugs again. “Today was just really bad,” he whispers.
Not really an answer in itself, because it still begs the question why Theo doesn’t trust Liam to tell him about the problem to begin with. Liam remembers, then, that trust is about as alien to Theo as a word in any foreign language. He changes tack instead. “You should eat something.”
Theo’s scent sours. Liam can’t understand it, at first. As much as Theo ribs Liam for inhaling food like it’s his last meal, the chimera himself would never refuse food.
“M’fine.”
“Theo.”
“Really.”
Liam’s ministrations in his hair pause. He tugs softly at the strands, compelling Theo to open his eyes again and look up at him. Liam wonders why he’s suddenly afraid to ask the words that are resting on the tip of his tongue, and yet he can’t avoid them any longer. “Have you been eating?”
Theo meets his gaze solidly, obstinately. Not because he has the response that Liam wants to hear, but because defensiveness has made him defiant even in his silence. As Theo’s lips press into a line, Liam knows his answer.
“I’ve told you,” says Liam, feeling like something in him is breaking all over again, “you’re always welcome here. And not just to crawl through my bedroom window when you need to crash.” He pauses to calm his lungs around a shuddering breath. “You’re welcome all the time.”
Something in Theo’s expression crumbles at that. He hides his face in Liam’s lap, burrowing deeper and tucking himself smaller against the werewolf’s side. It amazes Liam sometimes how Theo can stand so tall and fill a room to bursting with his presence when he’s on his feet, but at times like this, times like now when the truth of how he drifts without a home or purpose is confronting him, he shrinks back on himself like he’s no more than the nine-year-old boy stolen away by the Dread Doctors.
Come to think of it, he hasn’t had a home for the past decade. No wonder he recoils from change now, Liam thinks, the realization hitting him like a thunderbolt.
“It doesn’t have to be a whole thing, you know,” Liam tells him quietly. “It doesn’t have to be a big deal. Not if you don’t let it.”
He pauses, letting the words hang thickly in the air, wondering if Theo gets the metaphor. That coming in through his bedroom window and daring to crawl under Liam’s covers for comfort didn’t have to be a big deal, either. Because he was lonely and in pain, and he had nowhere to go except to follow his instinct to come home to his anchor when he needed him.
Theo doesn’t answer for a long time, but something has changed in the rhythm of his breath: grown heavier, somehow, with intent. He lies there, blinking slowly and breathing in and out, air fanning out over Liam’s knee.
And then slowly, tentatively, he lifts a hand to latch onto Liam’s where it nestles in the strands of his hair.
It’s a clumsy thing, this first venture into holding hands; neither of them can really be sure it’s hand holding, really, except for the fact that when Theo’s fingers slip he grapples to cling to Liam’s knuckles for firmer purchase. And Liam—he responds without missing a beat, and he lifts first one finger and then the other to interlace with Theo’s against the warmth of the chimera’s scalp, and he gives him a squeeze to reassure him of everything else unsaid where words have failed him.
Theo looks up at him, eyes claimed by both gold and silver by the lamp and the moonlight, and he whispers: “Okay.”
“Okay?” Liam breathes.
Theo nods. His lips move against Liam’s fabric-clad thigh with the movement, almost as though by accident, by universal design, a part of his soul is trying to kiss Liam’s. “Okay.”
Liam is overcome by a tenderness so sweet it aches. His grin is stupid and soft and blinding.
“Okay.”