a/n
*knock knock*
guess who's still a clown?
. . .
all i know is...(you're the nicest thing)
Liam's staring soulless at the cold, spotless patch of floor between his knees. The prickle of wet hair at his nape is dulled by the humid towel around his neck, a whistling chill soaks through his calves, up his knee tops, seeping into his flesh.
Outside his bedroom window, the earth hides behind an overcast sky.
He's been losing cognizance of the passing time. Nothingness molds in his brain, misty thoughts circling the drain, and he thinks he might not know how to exist within his own head at the moment.
There are scraps of himself steering him toward a drab, weak-pulsing madness, and he wants to burst out in a laugh with the way it's hysterically bubbling up the tightness of his throat, just to rid himself of this quiescent adrenaline pumping static into his muscles like it has any place here; belatedly wondering if acting out the urge would make him sound anything akin to a psychopath, or simply a pitiful halfwit betrayed by his own imagination.
He finds himself sluggardly burrowing his face into the safety of his battered hands, just for the sheer comfort of hiding for a moment; unable to pretend he is unaffected.
The world is tilted and hazy, splintering around its axis, and from a bird's eye view he sees the floor unravelling by threads, melt beneath his socked feet and the weight of his bed, above him the stitches loosen and the ceiling splits wide and open and cavernous.
Flames lick at the nooks of his mind, and all he can see around the crimson halo of them is Theo.
Like a crime setting the scene; Theo is low-lidded hollow eyes and palpable concern swallowing around him, he is the terse line of his rising shoulders and the tightness in his slanted jaw and the semi-circle shadow below his eyes. Liam's brain tapes fragments around the evidence; Theo being here with him, Theo coming to rescue him, Theo carrying him home—Theo, Theo, Theo.
Little can breach past this discomfited lull. He can't hear anything except the creaking hush of an empty house and the fall of cautious footsteps leaking trepidation, the husky vibrato of Theo's voice.
Liam thinks, in shards. The tedious car ride winding nonplussed with the world riding on mute, its silent burden slumping his shoulders, Scott ringing in his pocket. Theo carefully extracting the phone from his front pocket while Liam tried not to slam head first into the dashboard as he fumbled with the seatbelt. Dizzy, throughout the trek to his room (the stairs had not been fun), and a clumsy shower spent sat inside his bathtub with knees pulled up, trying to stave off hyperventilation and panic, ridding himself of the smeared, caked blood and dirt (while still uncomfortable with letting himself be seen, he did let the door open a sliver for Theo to get to him in the eventuality he managed to drown himself, or collided head-first with the floor and gave himself a concussion to boot, or slipped on a wet tile and cracked his head open, or whichever bathroom-related-accident was out there waiting to happen first).
Theo is still on the phone, now. Scott's exhausted and even, if a little frantic, voice on the other end of the line comes as a steady and muffled reassurance.
Silk skies cloaked in the smoke of clouds are eager to pour, to put their own fires out.
Touched only by the backdrop of an abrasive, lamplit golden hue, Liam wants to cling to the darkness imbuing his room, to the safety the swathes of shadow provide, feels unearthed beyond it, a little bit broken. But it's unbelievably easy, believing this is a vacancy made for two, when the entirety of the world is riding inexistent outside the symmetric lines of his room.
Before him, Theo is saying words he can't make out. Torpor washes his hands cold, the low pulse of panic thrums in his fingertips, he tastes it in the back of his throat.
Theo is crouching down in front of him, next, empty handed and worn.
"...hey." The murmur is hesitant, like an unfamiliar but gentle nudge to the shoulder. "Back with me yet?"
Liam sticks dispersed pieces of himself back together long enough to react. Watches through glaze and dimness, and there's a sting in his eyes, gathering warm at the corners, as he glances down at him.
It's a conglomerate of feelings warring for him, for this boy, who is here, who even now, is trying. He's trying so hard and still thinks the pluck he puts to his bloodied efforts goes unnoticed, invisible. But Liam sees it. Sees how he keeps breaking through the surface with every ounce of fight he has left, even after everything he's been through drags him to sink back toward rock bottom again. Sees how on days worse for wear he's short of a skeleton surviving on borrowed time. And it breaks his heart, over and over again. Because underneath the cruelty of a taken heart, Theo is resilient, and he's human, and he's good; the kind of masterpiece blessed with radiating shine but cursed to never see his own light as it bursts out of him.
A tug at the hem of his slate gray sweatshirt, far too gentle to be an impersonal, clinical appraisal or a plain once-over, uproots him from the wolly walls of his mind.
"Let me see." Theo's requesting, with a mild tone to match his actions, anxiousness broiling undersurface.
Liam, sapped of strength and willpower, doesn't do anything except exist. Breathe out, dip his chin in the resemblance of assent. And Theo takes it as his cue to slowly gather fistfuls of the fabric, and lift.
The surprised wince transpiring from the boy's stone features at the sight isn't reassuring, but then again, neither is the unfolding numbness.
It's unconscious, the way Theo reaches a hand for him amid his own warring thoughts, grazes rough, warm fingertips across marred skin. Then freezes, conscious and cognizant, searching his eyes with his own, wide, agitated, dilated ones.
"Can I touch you?" He blunders in a breath.
Liam doesn't remember the last time someone did him the courtesy to ask. Before the other boy can regret his question, he stumbles with exertion along the murkiness, and makes sure to substantiate the intention behind the nod of his head with firmness this time, makes sure Theo knows it's okay with him. Hopes he knows it is.
Something he can't quite decipher makes it past the gleaming ring of his irises, sinks deep, down to the root of his bones, igniting Theo's resolve. Toying with the hem for a breath longer, as if corroborating, his fingertips graze his skin again the next.
When Theo's warm hand slips, unhurried, underneath his fleecy sweatshirt, he can only hear the soft hitch his breath makes as it ricochets against the bare walls.
It's just the touch of his hand behind a closed door.
Panic strikes a diaphanous chord, and like lightning the night's events flash behind his eyelids in a dizzy spell, the burn of bile builds in his throat. But he struggles through the mosaic shards of memories, reminds himself that this is Theo, and Theo isn't against them, Theo isn't a vicious monster, and Theo wouldn't hurt him. Not now, not intentionally, and that— means something, means much more than he could put into words.
And then Theo's palm is flattening just so, neither feathery nor pressuring, and Liam's mouth falls slack on an inaudible gasp from the shock of bare flesh against flesh, a collision of undiluted warmths. And he wants nothing other than to just crawl forward, let himself be swallowed whole inside the safety of his touch.
"Too much?" Theo inquires lowly, gauging his reaction with scrupulous focus.
Liam shakes his head against another onslaught of wooziness, swallows around the vertigo and the dregs of dread left, and leans the slightest bit into the touch, only partly unintentionally doing so.
Theo's eyes, shining translucent with openness, are wide and inviting and so, so warm. And Liam realizes with a start, that stuck in this orbit, at this point in time, with their attempts at pretence and subtext and masks being torn off halfway, he wouldn't push him away even if it was too much.
The notion scares him the tiniest bit.
Theo's perceptiveness draws him to draw his hand away. But then something primary in Liam is mourning the loss of warmth with a leaden, suffocated cry, body crumpled and dipping toward him of its own volition, and he needs—he needs. So the touch, cautious, colored unsure, comes back to paint warmth into his flesh.
Rain smacks against glass, dotting sidewalks and tree tops and blades of grass alike, soaking the earth in vivid shades and pungent smells, and he feels as insignificantly nanoscopic as a speck of dust blemishing the world's already muddied windshield.
Theo fits a thumb into a tender spot between his ribs and a dull, sudden spark of pain sends heat down the knobs of his spine, sends him capsizing into the awareness that he is alive.
For any number of reasons, the realization has him gasping for breath with a sharp rebound of fright.
Liam digs his blunt nails into the skin of his thighs, can feel the half-moons shaping, stinging, below his lightweight gray sweats. Before he can deal real damage, however, Theo is there, seizing the circle of his wrist. Bones resting frail against the solid weight of his palm, Liam feels just a little less than human as Theo unpeels his fingers, one by one, with fair ease away from his body, battered and already sparing no effort to heal.
Theo chews back on the mildness of a reproof, exchanging his frown for something subtler and more sympathetic, and something keeps itching just below his skin at the sight.
He is little more than a smirched canvas of angry bruises pulling sharp at his flesh with every new intake of breath, a topographical map of hurts and aches waiting to be soothed.
There is a softness to Theo's eyes, drawing to his touch; a vow to follow through, a promise for relief. And he craves the whispered affection of that oath like water, thinks he might just die without it.
Liam has tears in his eyes.
A bolt of lightning burns through the nighttime, splitting the sky in imperfect halves of a whole, the clap of thunder bursts overhead a couple stitled seconds after, moon rising shrouded against the wet glow of a smoky asphalt.
He thinks, in beats. As to why Theo insisted on being the one to take him home instead of letting literally anyone else deal with what should have been nothing but a time-consuming hassle, a trifling inconvenience. As to why he chose to linger, when physically Liam is halfway through to being 'fine'. As to why he didn't just up and leave when he had the chance on multitudinous occasions, and as to how that doesn't only apply to this particular moment in time.
It feels like the skin of his throat catches, scorching, soft walls sticking to each other as he tries to shove out unguarded words while they singe down his esophagus.
"...gonna take care of me?" Liam slurs the syllables around the tremor of his voice, wet and thick and uncertain.
Theo's eyes fly up to his, flash with something he can't quite place still, go dimming, as the fingers on his skin curl almost defensively.
"Depends," He whispers on the gust of a dithering breath, and everything about this is laced with hesitation and curiosity and ailing and softened stone. In guarded cadence, he returns. "Gonna let me, Little Wolf?"