Chapter Text
Liam isn’t there to see how the argument starts, but he is there to see how it ends: Theo—frustrated, clearly stretched beyond the limits of his patience—snapping, “Corey, for fuck’s sake, just let me—” and Corey turning back around where Theo had been trying to lean around him, hissing, “I don’t need your goddamn help!,” one hand rising to flatten out against Theo’s chest and shove. Only his hand doesn’t stop when it hits Theo’s chest, but instead continues through it, the whole of it and his forearm up to his elbow suddenly gone oddly, ghostly translucent, like a photo with the transparency cranked up. He and Theo both freeze, wide-eyed and horrified, and then Theo makes this horrible choking noise, and blood speckles his lips.
“Oh my god,” Corey yelps, and yanks his hand back—the bulk of it just as suddenly solid again—and Theo stumbles back a few helpless steps, and then collapses onto the floor of the half-packed McCall living room. “Theo!” Liam shouts, and rushes forward at the same time that Mason does, Corey hovering stunned above them with his arm slicked red up to his elbow. Liam gets to Theo first, sliding forward on his knees and getting his hands around Theo’s face, turning it towards him. “Hey,” he says, “Hey, hey, hey,” because Theo is clearly having trouble concentrating on him, his eyes hazy and unfocused.
“I’m fine,” he tries to mumble, but Liam has his suspicions about that—beyond the obvious—because the fingers of his left hand feel warm and wet where they’re wrapped around the back of Theo’s skull, and taking them out to look at them only confirms what he’d suspected. “Try again,” he tells Theo wryly, and shows him his bloody fingers.
“Is he okay?” Mason asks from Theo’s other side, anxious.
Liam gets his hands wrapped around Theo’s arms, his shoulders, and levers him up. “He must have hit his head when he fell. He’ll be fine,” he adds, in the face of Mason’s—and Corey’s—pinched expressions.
“C’mon,” he tells Theo more gently, Theo’s arm hauled around his shoulders, and starts guiding him—Theo still stumbling, and uncoordinated—towards the downstairs McCall bathroom.
Behind him, Corey calls, “Liam.” Liam twists to look at him, best he can without accidentally dumping either himself or Theo to the floor. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what… I didn’t mean…”
“I know,” Liam assures him quietly, and then he keeps helping Theo into the bathroom.
---
“I’m fine,” Theo tries again, more strongly, once they’re inside and Liam’s gotten him heaved down onto the closed toilet lid.
“Yeah, well,” Liam tells him, crouched down and huffing as he searches through the cabinet under the sink for anything that hadn’t already been packed in preparation for the move, and that he could use. “You’ve got blood in your hair, so if nothing else.” He finds a sad-looking, threadbare rag, and figures that’ll do. He stands back up with it in hand.
Theo’s probing at the back of his head, wincing. Liam slaps his hands away, and then wets the rag he’d found before leaning over and around Theo to try and see what he’s doing. “Any idea what that was?” he asks after a moment, because however little any of them like it—and they all don’t like it—Theo is their resident expert on the Dread Doctors, and sudden unknown chimeric abilities seem—pretty firmly like a Dread Doctors thing.
Theo clearly agrees. He winces again as Liam cleans the worst of the blood out of his hair, and then moves to start trying to get to the skin beneath. “He’s probably had that ability all along, and just—” he bites off a hiss as Liam hits something particularly tender, apparently, “—had never been properly motivated, before.”
The attempted joke falls flat: Liam glares half-heartedly down at him. But then he shakes his head and returns to what he’d been doing, parting the hair over the part of Theo’s skull where the blood had seemed to be coming from, rag at the ready. Only—Liam stops, and frowns, and bends Theo’s head further forward on his neck—Theo making a pissed-off noise—and runs his fingers along—the several-inch long cut sliced through the back of Theo’s skull, and which—isn’t closing. Liam stares, and then drops back on his heels.
“Theo, this is still bleeding,” he tells him blankly, and Theo’s brows slam together, and he yanks a hand up to feel for himself. Liam watches, shock and a creeping sense of unease stealing over him as Theo’s expression blanks in turn, and then slowly tightens to mirror Liam’s own.
“Why aren’t you healing?” Liam presses, a slight edge of hysteria tinging his words. Theo stares back at him.
“I have no idea,” he says.
---
Mason drives them to Deaton’s—Scott and the others promising to meet them there, though they’d have to come across town from where they’d been dropping off the latest set of boxes at the new McCall-Argent condo—with Corey in the front seat twisted around to look at them, and Liam with Theo in the backseat, holding an increasingly wet towel to the back of Theo’s head as Corey apologizes, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I don’t even know how I did that—,” Theo interjecting tiredly every time Corey pauses for breath to say, “It’s fine, it’ll be fine. I’m fine.”
Liam isn’t sure he shares Theo’s confidence, but he holds his tongue and also the towel, pressing it a little more firmly against Theo’s skull.
Deaton’s with a patient when they get there. Or with a patient and the patient’s owner, Liam supposes, a leashed mastiff and a tiny woman on one side of the mountain ash barrier, Deaton on the other. All three—dog included—stop to stare at the clustered-close knot of Liam and Theo and Corey and Mason when they stumble in, their eyes lingering on where Liam’s still holding the clearly-bloody towel to Theo’s head.
“Hi,” Liam manages. “It’s, um. Something of an emergency.”
The woman’s eyebrows rise, her attention switching from Theo—clearly not Deaton’s usual clientele—over to Deaton himself. Deaton just gives her a serene smile, and tells her, “You’re all set. I’ll call when Andruil’s prescription has arrived.” He smiles down at the mastiff—Andruil, apparently—and then back at the owner.
The woman doesn’t seem to know what else to do in the face of Deaton’s blasé reception, and so eventually she—thanks him, absently, and edges herself and the mastiff past Liam and Theo and Mason and Corey. Deaton waits until the door clangs shut behind them, and then the smile falls off his face.
“What happened?” he demands, gesturing them back towards the exam room.
“It’s—hard to explain,” Liam hedges, shooting a glance at Corey, who’s pale and biting his lips and practically reeking of guilt, but who also looks determined to help fix it, whatever ‘it’ turns out to be.
Deaton just gives them all a dry look. “Well, I’m going to need you to try,” he points out, and helps Liam get Theo situated on the exam room table.
It doesn’t take Deaton long to determine that Theo is going to need stitches. “You’re joking,” Theo says, clearly displeased, and Deaton raises a single eyebrow. Theo scowls. “Seriously?” Liam asks him incredulously. “You’re pissed about the stitches, and not say, oh, your healing mysteriously not working?”
Theo’s eyes dart quickly over to Corey, huddled miserably back with Mason in a corner of the room out of the way, and then he looks back at Liam, and tosses his head defiantly. He’s so fucking transparent, seriously. “I’m sure it’s—whatever,” he dismisses aggressively. “A side effect of Corey’s new ability that’ll wear off soon.” He glares pointedly at Deaton as he says that last part.
Deaton isn’t fazed. “And in the meantime, you’re still bleeding.”
Theo falters.
“Is it your hair, you narcissist?” Liam demands, unimpressed. “The hair above it will be long enough to cover the shaved part until it grows back, don’t be a child.”
“Oh, you’re going to throw stones about acting like a child?” Theo shoots back hotly, but Deaton just raises his voice and orders, “Enough,” before Liam can actually reply. “Liam, in the cabinet above that table there—” he points, “—there is a sterile suture kit. Bring it over, please?”
He’s clearly separating them, but he just as clearly needs to, so Liam goes to retrieve the kit, feeling equal parts still irritated and embarrassed. Somewhere behind him, Corey timidly asks, “Is there anything I can do?”
But there isn’t, except to wait in tense silence with Mason and Liam as Deaton shaves a small strip of Theo’s hair from around the wound, and stitches it up with quick sure strokes, Liam’s hand around Theo’s wrist to siphon the pain. He finishes around the time that Scott and Malia and Derek spill through the doorway into the room, their eyebrows immediately shooting up.
“It’s a long story,” Liam preempts dryly, before they can ask.
Of course, they do have to tell it—again—and afterwards, the pack and Deaton all stand or sit scattered around the exam room, and stare at each other. “I mean,” Scott finally tries blankly. “Do you have any idea what may have…?” He trails off.
Deaton shrugs. “There are a number of things that can impact a supernatural’s healing. It’ll take a while to try and winnow down the possibilities.” It’d helped that he’d spent the intervening explanation performing a number of diagnostic spells and tests, Theo submitting to being poked and prodded and having multicolored powder blown into his face as Deaton chanted in incomprehensible Gaelic with extremely poor grace. Underneath his sneering temper his heart continues to beat fast and unevenly, though, and it isn’t long before Liam takes his hand, threading their fingers together and ignoring the dirty look Theo shoots him. Exam rooms and stitches and having his condition be diagnosed; yeah, no wonder he’s being a gigantic asshole. Liam squeezes his fingers, and Theo doesn’t look at him again, but he does tighten his grip around Liam’s hand, almost to the point of pain.
“So what do we do in the meantime?” Liam finally wonders, thinking: he’d get Theo out of here, take him home. Make him eat a home-cooked or possibly ordered-in meal with Liam and his parents, and then finish softening him up with a movie or something, before haranguing him into staying the night. Theo wouldn’t thank him for it, at least not verbally, but he’d at least sleep. Liam could at least make sure he ate.
Deaton says, “You’re free to leave,” to Theo, then adds, “I’ll contact you—” that you is universal, and encompasses the pack as a collective, “—when I know more.” Scott and Liam and Corey express their thanks, like polite members of society; Theo just glowers at everything and nothing and hops down off the table, shaking his hand loose of Liam’s and clearly making to stalk towards the exit.
But before Liam can snatch his hand back, execute his master plan to force self-care onto him, Theo grinds to a sudden ungainly halt, and coughs. Then he coughs again, even more wet, and wheezing, his hand groping out automatically to try and find something to brace against as he really starts to hack. The closest thing turns out to be Scott, who immediately bears up under the responsibility, grabbing Theo’s arm and helping steady him, his attention already back on Deaton as he starts asking rapid-fire, concerned questions.
But before Deaton can try to diagnose the problem or even do much of anything, Theo suddenly gives a last, painful-sounding wracking cough, and—vomits up something onto the exam room floor. It’s pale and streaked with black—black blood—and neither Liam nor anyone else seems to know what it is, at first.
And then Theo reaches a shaking hand down for it, his fingers just barely grazing the surface, and Liam realizes: a flower petal.
Theo looks over at him, and their eyes lock. They stare at each other.
---
It takes everyone a while to accept the reality that Theo vomiting up a flower petal just—hasn’t actually changed anything, and the only thing for them to do is wait for Deaton to run his tests, to winnow down his possibilities. Scott scrubs his hands over his face and attempts to dismiss them all back to their various homes, only for them all to realize—Liam letting loose a colorful and vicious set of swears—that Theo had somehow managed to slip away from them in the interim. Fucking super-spy skills. Liam exchanges a pissed-off, resigned glare with Scott—who’s just resigned—and sighs his eyes skyward. Malia nudges him. “Want me to track him?” she offers.
Liam smiles, her sincerity deflating his anger like a pricked balloon. “Nah, it’s okay. He’ll turn up.” Always does, he tells himself, which is true enough, but then his gaze falls back on the wilted, bruised flower petal that Deaton had picked up and rested delicately in the middle of the exam room table, and he frowns at it, a memory shivering itself loose of its brethren in his mind.
“Scott, I’m gonna—” he says slowly, looking over, and Scott—frowns, clearly catching his odd demeanor, but nods him on. Liam retrieves his jacket from the chair he’d thrown it over, and hurries out.
This late at night the Preserve is just pitch black, and even with his flared eyes Liam’s journey out into the middle of it is an adventure in temporarily-rolled ankles and scraped-up palms. He keeps his sense of smell shifted but there isn’t anything to catch, which in any other circumstances—if he was looking for almost anyone else—would be a sign that he’s barking up the proverbial wrong tree. As it is, he knows he’s right, this rock-solid certainty in the center of his chest, so he just keeps picking his way through the trees and picking himself up when he trips, until he gets where he’s going.
Theo glances over as Liam joins him on the rickety footbridge. “You recognized it,” he realizes softly.
“Took me a bit,” Liam agrees quietly, hands firmly in his pockets, though Theo has his arms free, and is leaning on the railing, “but yeah.” He exhales out a rough breath and looks down at the water below. “White lilies. Same flower you dropped here that night you were tricking me and Stiles.”
Theo’s only reply is to stretch back away from the railing, so that his forehead drops heavily onto his bracing arms. Liam looks at him, fear coating the back of his throat and his tongue; metallic-tasting.
“What’s happening to you?” he demands, hushed.
“I don’t know,” Theo tells him, and he sounds just as afraid.