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Liam stared at the painting, studying the bold strokes alternating between rectangles of color. He nodded and then turned to Hayden and said, “I don’t get it.”
Hayden rolled her eyes.
“It doesn’t look like anything.” Liam protested.
“It’s abstract,” she responded, testily. “It’s not supposed to look like anything!”
Scott stood a few feet behind him, and he couldn’t help but smile. He smothered the chuckle, because that would be mean.
“So, I’m supposed to look at it and do … what?”
“Feel something!”
Liam sighed. “Right now, I’m feeling confused.”
As tumultuous as those two were being in the gallery, all-in-all Scott had to rank this trip as one of his better ideas. It had been eight months since Monroe had fled from Beacon Hills. In the meantime, the pack had been too busy and scattered to be much of one. Liam had held the fort down in Beacon Hills while finishing his junior year. Hayden had been adjusting to a new city and the strain of being separated from her friends and her alpha. Scott had been busy taking part-time classes at U. C. Davis while trying to track down and neutralize the remains of the Amateur Hunter Army.
His mother had once told him that he could save people’s lives, but he couldn’t save them from life. She said that life was full of struggle and she was right, but, in a different way, she was very wrong. He couldn’t save people from sadness or frustration or drudgery or even fear, but he could remind them that there was more to life than those things. This weekend, he had persuaded his betas — his werewolf betas — to come with him to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. If cornered, they would probably say that he had whined at them until they gave in. It was worth the humiliation.
Hayden and Liam’s attitude toward each other had totally defrosted before the first hour had passed. Scott didn’t think they would be getting back together as partners, but they were already friends once more. They were still pack.
He smiled widely. “That’s because you’re acting like you’re taking a test.”
Liam turned back to look at him. “What do you mean?”
“You’re looking at it as if it’s a puzzle to solve, and you have to find the clues in order to figure out what it means. Close your eyes.” Scott put his hands on Liam’s shoulders.
“Okay.” Liam didn’t sound too sure of himself.
“Now, empty your mind.”
Hayden smirked. “Shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Hey!”
“Stop.” Scott winked at her. “I’m trying to teach here.”
Hayden stuck out her tongue but didn’t say anything more.
“Okay, Liam, are you prepared?”
Liam nodded.
“When I tell you to open your eyes, don’t do anything but react to what you see.”
“Is that all there is to it?”
“Well,” Scott said. “Appreciating abstract art takes practice, but this has to be the first step.” He squeezes Liam’s shoulders reassuringly. “Remember, there is no right way to react to it. Open your eyes.”
Liam did as he was told, while Hayden remained silent. When his beta opened his mouth to make a report, Scott covered it with his hand. “Tell me next time.”
They spent another hour at the museum. When they came out, the sun was beginning to sink towards the Pacific Ocean. The sky had cleared with only a few puffy clouds chasing the seagulls.
“What next?” asked Hayden.
“My plan is dinner at a restaurant of your choice and then we go see Age of Ultron.”
Liam pumped his fist.
“Thank you for doing this,” Hayden ignored Liam’s enthusiasm. “But I kind of have to ask why?”
Scott cocked his head to the side in confusion.
“Yeah.” Liam added. “Is there something wrong? Something big going down?”
“No.” Scott sighed. “Nothing like that. I just … I just wanted to do something fun with you guys.”
Hayden looked suspicious. Liam punched her — very lightly — in the arm. “Don’t ruin this. I wanna watch the Avengers.”
“Derek told me,” Scott admitted, “that one of his biggest regrets, when he had time to sit down and think about it, was letting me believe that being a werewolf was as … terrifying as it seemed to be when I was first bitten. He’s seen his fair share of trouble, but he’s also had years and years when nothing bad happened. All this stuff we’ve gone through so quickly isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. I wanted to see what that would be like. I wanted you to see what that would be like.”
“Okay, but I think we all know that things aren’t normal,” Hayden shrugged. “We’re not children.”
“I didn’t say that!” Scott protested. “I’m not your parent, either. But … it’s like abstract art.”
Both his betas made confused noises in tandem.
Rather than answer right away, Scott pointed out a restaurant and got consensus to eat there. It wasn’t the dinner hour, so they managed to get a table pretty quickly. The drinks had yet arrived but both of the younger people were looking at him expectantly. Scott hoped what he was about to say made sense.
“Sometimes, we react to stuff without thinking, like I was trying to teach Liam to do with the painting. It doesn’t matter how much you understand that things are not ordinary if that’s all you’ve experienced. Eventually, part of you will always associate being what we are with pain and fear. At least, that’s my feeling about it. I don’t want you to think of being with the pack as something that only happens when someone’s trying to kill you.”
“I don’t know about that, but if this lets me see Age of Ultron and you pay for it, I’m all for it!” Liam gave him the thumbs up.
“Boys,” muttered Hayden. “So you never did anything like this when you were part of the Hale Pack?”
“I was never part of the Hale Pack.” Scott said immediately. He winced at the speed of his reply. “It’s complicated.”
“No, it’s not,” Liam protested. “They were assholes. You met Peter that one time, Hayden. He was a complete asshole. He bit Scott without his permission. You didn’t know this, but Theo wasn’t the first guy to try to get me to kill Scott.”
Hayden took a sip of water. “Scott bit you without your permission, if I remember, and you like him. Even if Theo did try to kill you, he has — somehow — become an ally.” She still wasn’t totally okay with it.
“Scott bit me so I wouldn’t fall off a roof and die. Peter bit Scott at random to help him murder people. He’s a total asshole.”
“You really need to a larger vocabulary, Liam. And you could also say that Theo was a pretty big asshole to everyone.”
“Yeah, but the difference is he admitted it!” Liam said defensively. “He stopped acting as if he never did anything wrong!”
“Guys. I’m glad you don’t think I’m like Peter, but when I say it’s complicated, I’m not making excuses for anyone. The Hales lost a lot — almost everything — and that type of loss can do things to you, especially if you feel that the loss is all you have left.” He looked down at his plate. “I recognized what they had gone through, though it didn’t mean what they did to me was okay or that I owed them something. The bite didn’t obligate me to be part of their pack, just like you aren’t obligated to be part of mine.”
It shouldn’t have meant anything, but the fact that both Liam and Hayden looked absolutely offended by that remark made Scott very happy.
“Derek’s told me so much about them …”
“When?” Liam scrunched up his face.
“There’s this thing called e-mail and texting, Liam,” Hayden answered for Scott. “Which I know you aren’t familiar with because you never bothered to respond to mine.”
Scott interrupted before they could get started on another argument. “Yeah, we e-mail a lot. Did you know that the triskele, their pack symbol, goes back six thousand years?” He took out a pen and drew it for both of his betas.
“I actually do,” boasted Liam. “It means a lot of other things, too. It’s one of the oldest symbols out there.” He began to talk about the ancient Greeks and how they used it.
“What did it mean for the Hales?” Hayden ignored Liam’s enthusiastic digression.
Scott tapped the three sections: “Alpha, Beta, Omega. I really like that they don’t identify any of those states with a specific branch of the symbol. It means that it’s not about one being any better than that other. Derek said it was meant to remind them they could all rise to one or fall to another. Betas can become alphas, but alphas can also fall to betas or even omegas.”
“So it’s a warning?” Liam queried.
“You know, at first I thought that too, but that doesn’t make any sense. They used that as a symbol for their family, so I don’t think it was about fear. I think it was about what they chose to protect. They’re an old family, an influential pack. They founded Beacon Hills. I think it stood for their legacy, some of which was good and some of which was bad.”
“Peter said something about that.” Liam grumbled. “Right before he threw a bench at me.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. Peter may have been completely twisted by the fire, or he might have always been a little ruthless …” Scott ignored his first bitten betas snort. “But even he recognized that his family had accomplished great things.”
“I like that.” Liam nodded and smile, though there was a touch of sadness. “Satomi chose the stacked rocks for her pack symbol, and she taught her betas how to do the same and how to use them to send messages. I looked it up.”
Scott felt a little sad. Part of Liam was probably still mourning Brett and his pack mates.
“It’s supposed to teach patience, balance and concentration, and it’s also supposed to increase their awareness of their surroundings. I guess it was her way of passing down the wisdom she learned.”
“Probably.”
Hayden looked up. “What does yours mean?”
Scott startled at the question, even though he probably shouldn’t have been. “Huh?”
“Your pack symbol. I mean, our pack symbol. What does it mean?”
“Well, that’s complicated.”
Hayden and Liam looked at him expectantly. It seemed that they weren’t going to let this go anytime soon.
“It started, I guess, the night I was bit. It happened close to the Nemeton, and somehow it connected us. So, when I wanted to reward myself by getting a tattoo.”
“Reward for what?” Hayden wasn’t going to make this easy for him, was she?
“I was dating a girl named Allison and we broke up. She wanted space, so I didn’t contact her for several months over the summer.”
“So it was a reward for not stalking her.”
“Hayden!” Liam was scandalized.
“In my defense, she was my anchor. It can be tough to let those go.” Scott scratched at the back of the neck. “But we didn’t break up because we didn’t like each other; we broke up after some really bad stuff happened and she … we needed to deal with it.”
Hayden, in an exaggerated manner turned her head to slowly look at Liam, who seemed torn between suffering acute embarrassment and defending himself. Scott pushed on to distract them once again.
“I had been drawing the pattern for a while before I got the tattoo, but I realized later that it represented the rings on the Nemeton. I was pissed off for a little bit, because I felt I had been pushed into things, manipulated again, but that’s not true. The Nemeton didn’t cause what happened to me, it reacted to what happened to me. It must have felt something about us that night, about me and Stiles and Allison, because it connected us.”
“That sounds creepy. Are you sure?”
“The next day at school, I overheard Allison talking to her mother on the phone. Of everything I could have heard on my first day as a werewolf, why would it be that conversation? I think it was because we were already connected by being out there in the woods that night. I was hurt by Peter, sure, and changed by him, but Stiles still tried to protect me from being found by his dad and getting in trouble. Allison saw me in the road and insisted that she and her mother check to make sure I was okay.”
Liam frowned. “I don’t get it.”
“That night we acted as pack does. A pack protects each other; we look out after each other, especially when one of us is hurt. The Nemeton saw something in the three of us. Something powerful. It saw that we belonged together. And we did, and we do, even if … we get angry with each other.”
Suddenly, Liam and Hayden couldn’t meet each other’s eyes.
“You know that scientists can learn about what happened to a tree by looking at its rings? They can find out when there were droughts or when there were good years. It can identify when there was a forest fire. The tree keeps growing, but it doesn’t forget what happened. It remembers.” Scott drew the concentric circles on the napkin. “My pack is still growing. It’s still getting stronger, even though there are going to be droughts. Even though there’s going to be fires. Even though we’re going to lose sometimes. But we’re not going to forget what we mean to each other, are we?”
“So that’s why you chose it?” Hayden asked softly.
“When I carved it in the tunnels for others to see after Theo and the Doctors split us up and I determined that I’d get us back together no matter what, I … I just felt like it was the right thing to do. The meaning I just explained? That came later, when I had time to think. But the feelings behind it are real. They always have been.”
Gratefully, the waitress arrived with their meal, giving Scott a chance to collect himself. He did remember. He had to stop himself from touching his arm. He would remember everything.
Liam put his salad fork down with a clatter. “I want a tattoo. Instead of the movie, we should get tattoos.”
“Yeah. I want one, too!”
“Uh,” Scott began. “We can’t.”
“Come on!”
“First, your sister will kill me, Hayden, but then your father, Liam, will bring me back to life so he can kill me again. But that’s not the point.” Scott shook his head and explained to them about what was necessary for a werewolf to get a tattoo. They were shocked … for a minute.
“Where you are going to get yours?” Hayden asked Liam. “I’m thinking about my ankle. Or maybe my wrist.”
“How about my neck?”
“Your neck?” Hayden scoffed. “You’re a huge baby. You couldn’t get it there.”
Liam was offended. “Shows what you know, I could totally do it.”
Scott chewed on a crouton as they started to argue. He should put his foot down, but … he didn’t want to. It warmed him in places he hadn’t known about.
They wanted to remember, too.