Chapter Text
It starts with the hospital, like everything in Theo’s life seems to now. Always the hospital, trapping him in an endless loop of his own personal horrors, trapping him in a building full of nothing but Ghost Riders and a werewolf who hates him, trapping him with an army of Hunters after he let himself into the trap on purpose to try and save that self same werewolf.
It starts because Liam texts him ‘r u bust' at 3:27pm on a Tuesday, followed two seconds later by ‘r u busy’, still no punctuation, and Theo just sort of stares at his phone - it’s a miracle it’s even charged - for so long that the screen dims and darkens.
It’s been three weeks since the hospital, since Monroe and the Anuk-ite and ‘you lost’ and Theo digging a bullet out of his shoulder in the back of his bullet riddled truck, ignoring the way his hands shook with the phantom sensation of black pain lines snaking up his arms and the look of relief on Gabe’s face when death stopped hurting, even if only for a moment.
It’s been three weeks. The Hunters are doing a fairly decent job of pretending they’ve moved on, but in this, at least, Scott is being smart, being vigilant, and the pack are doing their best to be prepared for whenever Gerard and Monroe decide to get their shit together and come back for round two. The Normals of Beacon Hills are doing an admirable job of pretending they don’t know what went down less than a month ago, that they don’t know about the supernaturals in their midst at all, and Theo’s been watching it all with a detached sort of interest and thinking ‘so this is what wilful ignorance looks like’.
Theo…doesn’t really know why he’s still here, in Beacon Hills, alive. Part of him expected Scott to order him returned to the Skinwalker prison as soon as the immediate threat was over, as soon as he was no longer useful, a weapon to pull out of the very depths of the bag - rock bottom, one might say - in a moment of desperately needing to be in two places at once. That he called Theo in lieu of literally anyone else says something, he just hasn't figured out what yet. Not trust, that's too far, too much too soon, but maybe a grudging respect, a tentative olive branch, maybe a distant hope that he'd say yes in hopes of ingratiating himself with the pack again by helping Liam - again - and end up getting himself killed in the process, problem solved for everybody.
No such luck, for any of them.
Whatever the semantics in the moment, in the aftermath, now, it's become apparent the Alpha is still too concerned with Monroe’s Hunters to be overly worried about a former enemy turned reluctant ally turned distant acquaintance you call when the chips are down and you need someone you don’t care about to run into the fray and take bullets for the someones you do. Theo’s okay with that, thinks maybe it’s what he deserves, more than, maybe. He’s less okay with knowing he was speeding towards the edge of the county line, had finally made up his mind to leave this horror show of a town, when Scott called and asked for his help, asked him to save Liam, just buy us time.
He’d barely paused to think before swinging the truck around and putting his foot to the floor, mapping the quickest way to the hospital, to that stupid idiot who can’t keep himself out of trouble, and since then he hasn’t quite been able to work up the nerve to leave again, not with Hunters circling them like sharks and some sort of tenuous connection forming between him and one other being on the planet. Liam brought him back, maybe not with the intention of letting him stay in the beginning, maybe just because of what they thought he had, what he'd lost somewhere between Tara dragging him underground and Liam pulling him back out, but then he broke the sword and met his eyes with something other than contempt and rage and maybe Theo’s desperate but if Liam is willing to give him a second chance maybe he should be willing to try.
Scott has let him stay, too, in the aftermath, and Theo suspects there was some sort of exchange between him and Liam that Theo’s not privy too, but he also kind of doesn’t want to know, doesn't want to push what he knows is already a precariously thin line, doesn't want to overstep whatever invisible boundary has been set here and have them all clawing for his head all over again.
It makes sense; they’re at war, the McCall pack needs all the bodies they can get, because when it comes down to it they are seriously outnumbered, and by now, probably outskilled too. At the end of the day, Scott’s pack is a bunch of teenagers flailing about in the dark with a handful of abilities they barely understand, half of them distracted by trying to live actual lives, and one old Hunter desperately trying to teach them how to stay alive. Gerard and Monroe have amassed an army of children just like them, yes, but also an army of trained, adult Hunters, old hands with bones to pick and grudges to fix, and dumb luck is only going to serve the pack for so long until mistakes start being too big to ignore and people start dying.
Again.
Theo, though, he’s a soldier. Been fighting on the wrong side for ten years, maybe, but he’s still a soldier, and begrudging as they might be, the others aren’t stupid enough not to recognise it. He’s an asset, he has value in his skills, his knowledge, his mind; he's a weapon, handcrafted and tempered over years of trial and error, years he sometimes struggles to remember, years of learning some of the deepest, darkest secrets of the supernatural world and those things that exist within it, things like the Wild Hunt, like the Doctors, like everything they studied so meticulously to learn how to take it apart and put it back together as something else. Those years, that knowledge, makes him too much help to stick back in the ground, so they keep him around, for now. He doesn’t know when ‘for now’ will end, when they’ll decide they don’t need him anymore, but his flight is as finely honed as his fight, and he’s not going back in the ground, not like that at least, so the second he sees a flash of that sword he’s gone.
That’s what he tells himself, anyway.
His phone chirps, loose in his lax hold, and he blinks into the hazy afternoon sun coming through the dirty windscreen of the truck, glances down with a soft, rattling sigh because Liam, he learned very quickly, is a stubborn bastard.
‘Answer ur phone asshole’
He snorts, mouth pulling upwards independent of his mind, and thinks about all the things he could say.
‘Sorry, I have a busy evening of sitting in my truck waiting for someone to need me again planned'
‘Can’t make it, have to figure out which of the three 24/7 diners I go to for the free coffee deserves to be haunted by my presence tonight'
‘Sorry, my truck’s nearly out of gas and I have seven dollars, two dimes and a handful of pocket lint to my name’
What he sends is:
‘Write actual sentences like a human being. With punctuation.’
The little bubble that indicates Liam is typing shows up immediately, but he turns his phone off anyway, maybe just to hear it chirp five seconds later. It’s a nice noise in the steady silence of his truck, parked in some nondescript street in a nondescript corner of Beacon Hills, seemingly untouched by everything that transpired less than a month ago. He’s parked in the shade of a towering oak to avoid melting his face off in the summer heat, windows rolled down, because he can barely afford to drive from A to B let alone sit here blasting the AC all day.
He's waiting for a different text, actually, the one to tell him whether he succeeded in pretending to be a Normal Teenager well enough to crawl his way into a sorry excuse for a job, or if he's fallen apart so completely he can't even pull off the act of looking mostly put together for a complete stranger - a balding old man carrying the stench of a lifetimes' supply of cigarettes and giving off the impression he thinks folks in town have gone mad and hiring security for a mostly empty train yard is a fool's errand. Theo would maybe be inclined to agree, if he didn't know what he knows about Beacon Hills, but more importantly the old man hadn't questioned him when he said he was twenty five, hadn't asked to see his ID or asked for previous experience or even asked how Theo heard about the job, had just grumbled and coughed his way through a walk around the yard, showed him the gaps in the chainlink fences and the corner between two ancient shipping containers where the local punks like to hang around and smoke and then told him he'd get a message in the next few days if no one better applied for the job.
It had all been so mundane and boring Theo had almost forgotten, for just a bit, that he's living out of his truck and has barely a handful of change to his name.
He gives it a minute, watches a dragonfly buzz across his windshield, then picks up his phone just as it chirps again.
‘Good ur alive come to hospital’
Still no punctuation, but more words that are actually words this time. Then:
‘u text like a grandma’
Theo snorts, chuckles a little to himself to pretend, even in his own truck, that his jaw doesn’t clench at yet another summons to that fucking hospital -
-Tara crawls-walks-runs-appears beside him, behind him, her voice a distant whisper of his name as her hand plunges into his chest and takes back what he stole, over and over-
Theo sighs, drops his phone in the cup holder and turns the key in the ignition. It’s not like he’s got much else going on right now.