BLUE
And I know I can't take back all the things I did
But if I had one wish, I would wish for one more chance
"Gone", Bebe Rexha
Sometimes, Theo felt like everything in his life was blue.
Blue had been his first skateboard, a gift from his parents for his 9th birthday, a few months before everything changed.
In the beginning, when he was still allowing himself to feel guilty over his own action, he used to spend hours with his eyes closed, remembering how Tara had laughed every time he fell from it.
Even then, he had been driven toward perfection, always practising, always getting back up after every fall. Maybe, if he had known what the price would have been, he would have stopped trying to reach it.
She had a beautiful laugh, his sister, and perhaps that was why he couldn't bring himself to forget about it. After his little adventure in Hell, it was replaced by the sound of his own ribcage cracking under the pressure of her fingers, digging into his chest to rip her heart out.
Blue had been the colour of his dad's shirt the last time he saw him and his mom after Tara died.
He didn't know what had happened to them, but it couldn't be anything good.
He used to think about them too, at the beginning, when the pain of the Doctor's experiments had kept him awake at night. In the end, he had to stop, soothing himself with the physical pain rather than the emotional one.
Days had turned into weeks, then months and years, and every second it had become easier to forget who he used to be. To forget how much he had loved his sister and his family and how he now regretted believing the Dread Doctors' words. With each passing day, the little voice that reminded him that maybe perfection wasn't something achievable faded away until he couldn't think of anything else rather than become the perfect Chimera.
Ironically, perfection was, in the end, a chimera.
Blue had also been Liam's eyes, the first thing he had seen when he had climbed out of the ground. They reminded him of the sky, of freedom, of a life that used to be his own.
They reminded him of the feelings and memories he fought years to bury deep.
Loyalty, courage, fear, hope, determination, anger.
Theo could read people as they were books he wrote himself, and that was why manipulating the Beta had been incredibly easy, his feelings for his girlfriend the perfect leverage to do so.
His plan hadn't exactly work, and everything had gone downhill from there, and he had ended up being sent to Hell and then saved by Liam himself, of all people. Not that the Beta had seen that as saving, it was more like a necessary evil for him.
What Theo couldn't deny to himself, was that he did save Liam at least ten times, between the Hunt, the hunters and the Anuk-Ite, without mention that time in the elevator in which he "sacrificed" himself as bait.
Before Hell, it had been easier. He didn't have any idea of what all the feelings in Liam's eyes were, not really. He could recognize them and used them for his purposes, but that was it. Now, things were different, because they had saved each other's lives. No one had ever saved Theo's life before, and the old Theo would never have sacrificed himself for someone else.
To be honest, he doubted even the new Theo would have acted that way if someone rather than Liam had been in that elevator.
Not that Liam needed to know that.
There seemed to be a strange connection between the two of them, not exactly friends, but not enemies, not anymore.
Allies?
He didn't know, and he suspected Liam didn't either, but it was fine. Theo hadn't lied that day at the station: he wasn't trying to get anyone's pack, that wasn't the reason why he had helped them.
The truth was he didn't know why he had stayed. He didn't know why he hadn't run as fast as he could away from Beacon Hills, looking for a fresh start somewhere else. Somewhere where he couldn't feel the walls closing in on him, taking away his breath, where he could run in the forest in is animal form without remembering that night at the creek.
He only knew that the idea of Liam dead was like a knife slicing his body, and that was the reason why he had stayed even after everyone else had left for college.
He wanted to protect him.
It had probably been the reason all along, even if he would never say that out loud. He wasn't ready, and neither was Liam. Their relationship was developing in a grey area with no defined rules, each one of them tiptoeing around the other, even when it seemed easy, always afraid of crossing the line in one of the two direction available: forward or backward.
It wasn't easy, but it seemed like they had found their balance, more or less. They were taking it one day at a time, never talking about it directly, but both knowing about it. It was stressing, but understandable, and Theo wasn't really worried about that. He liked how things were going, and he knew they had time.
After all, blue was is favourite colour.