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forgiveness: the release of any resentment or right to vengeance; forgoing another’s indebtedness. Mechilah
The day Liam calls Theo good is the day Theo grabs his car keys, bids the Dunbar-Geyers his normal morning-rough goodbye, and drives straight to the train tracks.
He doesn’t head there immediately, of course. It’s in the same direction as the community college where he has calculus and speech communication today. The difference is that today, he slows down by the Beacon Hills Technical College sign in garnet and smoky gray letters—and then lets his hand drift away from the turn signal and presses on the gas pedal to forge ahead instead.
“Why are you blushing?” Liam had asked him that morning, limbs and lips intermittently intertwined with his under the sheets.
He’d just called Theo beautiful. Theo considered the word with a wary and unwarranted gravitas as Liam’s eyes danced, lake blue and dappled, in the prodding fingers of six a.m. sunshine.
“I’m not,” Theo denied. “Blushing, I mean.”
Liam’s hand was pressed knuckles-first against the dip in Theo’s sternum between his pecs. He didn’t move his fist, just budged his thumb to loop the soft pad of his finger over the skin of Theo’s chest where his heart lay. He didn’t say anything, just smiled a little helpless thing and tapped his thumb twice against Theo’s heart, as though daring him to challenge how well Liam had memorized the cadences of his truth.
“Try again,” Liam whispered after a while.
“You called me—that,” Theo said honestly enough.
Liam’s expression remained immutable. “It’s true.”
“It’s—” Theo shook his head against the pillow. The scent was so very warm and he hated to mar it now with the sourness of his insecurity.
But Liam was in a mood to probe. To push. “I don’t understand. I call you a lot of sweet things every day. Why are you blushing now?”
“You call me hot,” Theo reminded him. As the light in Liam’s eyes turned unimpressed, Theo amended, “...sexy too. Attractive.”
“Wow. Way to make me sound like I’m totally not objectifying you.”
“Okay, fine. You call me attractive and clever all the time, and I don’t blush. Psycho, too.”
“That was one time.”
“One time too many, darling,” Theo smirked at him, snapping at the opportunity for an easy deflection in the conversation.
“We agreed we would never talk about it again.”
“Kinkshame yourself all you want, then. Have it your way.”
“You’re deflecting. Your scent literally smells like deflection,” Liam complained. He rapped his knuckle softly against Theo’s sternum. “You do blush when I call you stuff. Not those other things, because those are…I don’t know. But I saw you blush when I called you pretty last week.”
Traitorously, Theo’s cheeks warmed. Liam tapped his thumb against his skin in quiet triumph.
“That’s different,” Theo said mutedly.
“I know,” Liam rejoined, snarky but gentle. “Why, though?”
“It’s not…it’s not…” Theo sighed. “It’s just weird.”
Liam’s eyes searched him, roving back and forth for a few silent seconds. He sucked his bottom lip in between his teeth. Evidently he found something in the side profile of Theo’s face and the downturn of his gaze that partially satisfied him, and he wasn’t going to push this avenue of the conversation today. “Okay,” he relented.
“Okay?” Theo parroted, confused.
“Mm-hm,” Liam hummed. He snuffled into the pillow a few inches closer to Theo’s face. “I believe you.” He pauses. “So…how would you feel if I called you that again?”
“What, pretty? That’s old news, pup.”
Liam barely bothered to roll his eyes. “Not that. I meant, what if I called you good?”
The sting was sudden and blinding in Theo’s eyes. There was no way in heaven or below he would be able to lift his head to meet Liam’s softly caressing gaze on him.
“Your heartbeat sped up,” Liam observed in the absence of any verbal response from his boyfriend.
“Don’t,” Theo choked out.
But Liam could be bullheaded in his affection: so painfully suburban and normal and obviously raised by parents who’d impressed upon him the importance and the necessity of meaningful compliments.
“You were good,” he insisted fiercely. “You stayed up night after night doing all that research and poring over the letters they left behind. You went back into the Doctors’ lab to search for the dictionaries and you freaking taught yourself German just to be able to translate the documents for clues. You didn’t rest, even when I told you to, and said it was more important to parse the letters because lives were hanging in the balance. And when you—when it was time for the raid, you…” The first infinitesimal crack in Liam’s composure appeared at this juncture. Not unexpectedly, since it had only been two nights prior when Theo had flung himself bodily in front of Scott and Stiles as a human shield and taken a spear straight through his diaphragm for it.
Liam tried to finish his thought. A click as his mouth opened and shut told Theo he’d failed.
Theo didn’t say anything. He was breathing slowly, carefully, pouring nearly all his concentration into controlling any biological responses to the trajectory of this conversation.
Finally, he collected himself into something coherent enough to offer a gruff reply. “Their backs were turned. They needed someone to block the attack. It was instinct.”
“Instinct? So…is that the sort of fighting technique the Doctors taught you?”
Theo was rapidly beginning to dislike where this talk was headed. “I don’t mean instinct as in what was trained into me as a teenage supersoldier, Captain America,” he bit out. “You can keep your theories to yourself. I was using the word in a more figurative sense.”
Liam obviously wasn’t buying any of his bullshit.
“Okay…so. It was figurative instinct that made you jump in front of Scott and Stiles.”
“Yes.”
“It wasn’t a conscious, deliberate decision.”
“No.”
“So what I’m hearing is that all sense of self-preservation drilled into you from age nine just evaporated when you saw two packmates in mortal danger.”
“Don’t make it sound like I’ve lost all my intelligence.”
“So it was a deliberate decision, then. You actually defied your instincts?” Liam’s brows scrunched up and his nose is quick to follow, recreating that classic Dunbar look where he’s feigning incomprehension but he already knows he’s close to talking Theo right into a circle.
Theo hated it.
“Come on out with it, then,” he seethed. He was staring straight up at the ceiling, ignoring the flush of heat at the side of his body from where Liam lay. “Spit it out. Call me an idiot. Tell me I’ve gone soft and idiotic in the past year.”
“What I’m saying,” Liam enunciated, not falling for the distraction, “is that if you did that—if you saved Scott and Stiles’ lives—out of pure instinct, then something in you is good. If you did it as a conscious decision that defied everything you’d been taught before about combat, then…well…that also proves you’re good.”
Theo was stuck. He felt frozen, lungs seizing, and the stability of the corners of the room around him weren’t quite so immobile anymore. He was hurting and pacing in a cage and he was trapped.
So he did what he always does best. He unsheathed his claws through his words.
“Thanks a lot, Dunbar. I really needed that glowing recommendation straight from you so I could finally pass inspection from the McCall Pack Forgiveness Committee.”
With that, he unlocked his limbs and heaved himself up, shrugging off the warmth of Liam’s touch on his skin, and scrambled to his feet as he left Liam squawking and spluttering in incoherent protest behind him. Theo was still butt naked, but he didn’t care. He snatched yesterday’s pile of clothes from the desk chair and beelined for the door.
“Theo, wait—that’s not what I meant—”
“Save it.”
“Where are you going?”
“Class. I’m going to be late.”
“It’s literally six fifteen and your class doesn’t start for another two hours.”
But it was too late. Theo had already shimmied into his underwear and jeans, jerked open the door while thrusting his head into the neckline of his hoodie, and slammed the damn thing behind him while Liam was mid-sentence.
—
atonement: reparation for an offense or injury; repair of a relationship fractured by wrongdoing; wiping away of all sinfulness. Kapparah
Theo read a poem in eighth grade, once. It was by Robert Frost. He hadn’t cared much for the teacher—nor for his classmates; they’d all been an insipid bunch that he almost wished the Doctors would collect faster if only to turn them into something more interesting—but the way the instructor had stopped to read aloud the verses had given him pause and impressed upon some small and still-soft part of his brain.
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”
He’d mouthed the words to himself as he dragged a tarpaulin-swathed body behind him from the exit of the lab to the heart of the forest in Colorado where they were staying. The body, he knew, lacked an arm and part of his skull. Unfortunate collateral when the subject didn’t know how to follow instructions and stay still.
Theo had grown tired of puking his guts out when this part of his nocturnal duties came up. Nowadays, he bundled the bodies efficiently in tarps and trudged into the woods nearby and set about digging with fingers and claws as he hummed the tune of that one cartoon he always saw on Saturday television growing up.
This time, the poem was fresh in Theo’s mind and it afforded him a respite from the desperation for some other distraction as he dug. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, he said to himself, and the words felt soft and the vowels rang round and true in his mouth. And I have promises to keep.
Such vast stretches for miles and miles of Colorado forest for him to choose from for a digging spot. He hadn’t gone far, just far enough that the stench of the labs no longer warred with the scent of death from the tarp behind him or overlapped with the smell of despair on his clothes. But there were yet thousands upon thousands of miles before him of untouched flora and fauna: heaven-high pines creaking in their trunks; elk lowing as they crushed the underbrush softly beneath their hooves; a lone wolf racing to the top of a crag to howl high and keening from the pack that had separated from him.
There was something intensely comforting in the idea that here, he and the forest and his grisly secrets were one and the same. That everything he’d ever made to bleed, by his hand directly or by accident, would return to the earth that made it in the first place.
Those were the minutes when he daydreamed traitorously not about being special—the host for the Beast—the perfect subject and the favorite soldier and the most prized superspy—but instead about finding a small, dark hole in a quiet neck of the woods where he could get down on his hands and knees and curl up inward on himself and go to sleep in a kind of fall-bitter warmth and never wake again.
There are still woods that oversee the train tracks where the industrial district of Beacon Hills peters out.
Or rather: the train tracks lie cold and still, and the woods exist looming over them as they have existed for decades and even centuries before man could ever swipe the claw of his pickaxe in the gruesome power of the earth.
Theo sits in the bed of his truck as he surveys the train tracks that run for miles beyond his field of vision to his left and to his right. He has been out here for almost fourteen hours. Maybe. No one’s counting.
He has his arms curled around his knees, his chin resting in the valley between them. He closed the driver side door before clambering up onto the tailgate. Better to remove the temptation of seeing the door still open and springing for it at the last moment before the blare of the train horn obliterated him.
He thinks about the woods again now as he faces them. He thinks of how they’re still lovely, dark and deep, no matter whether they are the trees of Colorado or Montana or Washington or here, in Beacon Hills. He thinks of how the eerie stillness speaks of a death that exists so close to the life it hides in its shadows. He thinks of his daydream from his hole-digging days, of finding a hole for himself and lying there until the earth ceased to resist his wrongness in contact with the soil and instead accepted his broken offering for what it was.
His father used to say that bad grass lives the longest. No, that translation isn’t quite right: the bad grass takes the longest to fold and die.
He’s always thought that was an idiotic saying. Bring a mower or a scythe to the grass and it would stop sprouting again beneath the blade.
But he was wrong, oh, he was such a child back then.
He’s known blades. He knew the photosynthetic light of love before then, and it didn’t make the bad grass good. He got acquainted with scalpels. Maybe carving out all the good to isolate the evil inside would finally reveal his purpose.
Turns out he wasn’t either. Too good to be evil; too corrupted to return to the boy who existed before the creek.
Bring a mower or a scythe to the grass and cut it over and over and over, and it’ll just spring back up without direction, only malice and spite. Existing because no one else wanted it to.
It needs to burn. It needs to freeze. It needs to—fold and know its place, and there it needs to remain.
The train horn calls. It sounds a few miles away.
Scott and Stiles were in danger two days ago. They’ve always been in danger, but that’s not the point. They were in danger and Theo could see it, how the universe had aligned to offer him two birds to strike with one stone.
He’d taken it.
Thrown the boys back to save them. Thrown himself onto the end of the spear to spare everyone from himself.
Only—it didn’t take.
He’s parked the truck horizontally across the tracks. Made sure to get the perpendicular angles just right, because nobody wanted the position of the truck being just diagonal enough to minimize the impact of a freight train on his former home or his body.
Less than two miles away now.
He can’t help but wonder, selfishly, if he’ll return to the place that Liam pulled him up from, when this is all over. On the heels of that, he wonders if arranging his death so his body is cleaved in two will preclude Tara from having him back in her morgue. No whole body to play with, no complete limbs to lead a merry goose chase through the möbius-strip hallways of the hospital.
Or maybe that will be adding another sin to the weights already piled on his side of the scale. Maybe that would warrant a new and more bitter punishment entirely.
He’s too tired to think. He’s too tired from thinking.
At the very least, he’ll resemble the handless and the headless he buried, the ones he watched eviscerated and dismembered.
He’ll resemble Tara in the cracked-open, prey-ribbed monstrosity he’d left her.
The train horn whistles again. Theo unfolds himself from around his knees and leans back on his elbows first. Then he straightens out his limbs, makes sure his arms are straight out at his sides with no more attempt at defense.
He thinks of that hole again and how comforting it might be. The truth is, he doesn’t deserve to be swallowed up by the earth as a whole being. He stopped being one ten years ago.
The steam of the train and the chug of its engine and the grate of its wheels against the rust-smeared tracks are all humanly audible now. He swallows and keeps his eyes open and fixed on the stars above. He doesn’t have an altar, doesn’t have a prayer. The cold, hard bed of his truck will have to do.
The sound of the train and the thrum of the tracks and the shriek of the horn and drumbeat of his heart and the horror of someone screaming are all that are present now.
He shuts his eyes. Less than a thousand feet now, and shrinking fast. He allows himself one more selfish thought, that he only wishes he could have told Liam—
Something slams into him with the weight of ten boulders.
Metal crunches and everything screeches, hot and heavy and dark and unforgiving. He can’t hear anything. Can’t feel anything, either, all his extremities gone numb. The back of his skull collides with something and hot blood blooms over his scalp. He can’t see.
The screaming never stops. He simply fades away from it and loses consciousness.
—
He is not in the ground. He is on top of it.
Nor is he in the morgue. He’s warm, almost unbearable so. He’s also wet.
Theo struggles to drag his eyes open. There’s not much light above him to make a difference. He almost thinks, with no small amount of dark humor, that he must be back inside the body locker.
Except—
That is a face above him.
That is the face of a boy with pupils blown so wide that the blue of his irises are like Saturn-rings around them. His eyes are wet, and his cheeks are wet, and so are his lips and neck and the rest of him, from tears and blood and sweat alike.
This is not the hell Theo thought he would open his eyes to.
“Don’t move so much,” the boy tells him. “You cracked your head on the ground.”
The boy sounds so much like Liam. Theo wonders how hell will cook this one into something different than his nightmares where he guts Liam Dunbar just like he gutted Scott McCall. Because right now, he doesn’t have the urge to unsheath his claws, much less sink them into anyone’s flesh.
The only urge he has right now is to sink further into Liam’s arms and watch his face contort beautifully above him and whisper to him that it will be all right.
“Do you know who I am?” the boy asks.
Theo couldn’t nod even if he wanted to. But he knows him. Hello, other half of my heart. It’s me.
“It’s okay if you don’t.” Liam’s voice is shaky. Just as trembling as the hand he brings up to course through the strands of Theo’s soaked hair. “You took a really hard hit to the head. You’ll heal, don’t worry.” The boy smiles bravely, even if he sounds like he’s quaking. “And if you develop, like, retrograde amnesia or even old-fashioned amnesia, I’ll be here to introduce myself to you.”
The boy’s arms tighten just a little bit more around Theo. He’s warm. So, so warm.
“Fuck,” Liam chokes out even from behind his smile. “You’re okay. You’re okay, Theo. You’re okay, you’re okay.”
That’s when the first whine bursts out of Theo’s lips. Something hurts. Something’s not right.
He’s beginning to realize, second by horrified second, that maybe—he is still alive.
Liam bursts into another tearful litany of shh, shhh and you’re okay, you’re all right.
Theo’s lungs gasp and shudder back to life for the first time since he’s awoken. His vocal chords find his voice with a guttural cry. “Liam?”
Liam chokes again. “Theo. Oh, G-d. Theo.”
“Liam.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck...”
“Li-am…”
“I’m here, baby. Shh. I’m here.”
“What…?” Consciousness and coherence are rapidly filtering back into Theo. The train. The truck. The stars—the screaming—
He twists in vain in Liam’s arms to look behind him where he’s vaguely aware of wreckage on the ground. Liam tightens his grip on him and forces Theo’s gaze away from the single, heart-shattering glimpse he caught of his truck—what little was left of it—blown to smithereens in the wake of the unstoppable freight train.
“Don’t look,” Liam whispers. He mistakes Theo’s whimpering for regret for his truck. “Shh. Shh. It’s okay. It’s just a truck—we can help you find a new one. You’re safe. You’re alive.”
And G-d damn it, if that isn’t the very thing that wants to tear a bone-deep howl from Theo.
In the midst of his blubbering, Theo must end up saying something that sounds halfway like I’m sorry.
Liam clutches him to his chest even tighter, if it’s at all possible. “No,” he whispers fiercely. “No. This is not something you apologize for. I—I’m sorry it took me so long to figure it out. To find you.” His thumb finds the crest of Theo’s shivering bicep and pushes circles into the skin below the ruined cotton there. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
He pauses. His breath shudders. Theo is still shaking in sync with him.
“I know now why you did it,” Liam confides. “The—throwing yourself over Scott and Stiles. I know. I know.” He weeps. “I’m sorry.”
“You need to stop apologizing,” Theo manages to croak out.
“You never needed to kill yourself to atone for anything.”
But, Theo thinks, that’s the one and only way it’s ever worked.
He doesn’t say this. Some things are better left for Liam to puzzle out on his own. This is something that Liam will never understand. Liam loves him—and G-d, every particle in Theo’s being loves Liam—but this is something Liam should never gather the experience appropriate enough for him to understand.
“You were just a boy,” says Liam. His eyes gone diamond-shaped in premature grief. “You were just a boy.”
Theo has heard this before.
“You lost a decade of your life.” Liam’s palm cups Theo’s cheek now. “You lost countless more underground.”
A part of Theo knows this is true.
“You went in scared,” says Liam, “and you came out terrified.”
He dips his forehead to touch it to Theo’s. Blood mingles with sweetness and sorrow.
“Don’t you realize it now? You were a boy then, and you came out a boy still. You—you are just a boy.”
Theo weeps. Like a sledgehammer, he understands.
Like snow in the lovely woods, dark and deep, he clings to Liam and he weeps.
“I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding
mother,
then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls.
And so I learned—that a man in climax was the closest thing
to surrender.”
—Ocean Vuong, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”