#2 Sometimes, I resent Stiles.

Anyone who had spent any length of time around Scott had probably learned that when he scratched the back of his neck, it meant that he was trying to buy himself some time to process an awkward situation. Usually, Scott was trying to cope with embarrassment after doing something really stupid in front of someone whom he was trying to impress. This time, however, he was simply, and genuinely, confused. Perched on the kitchen counter, he let his legs dangle as he stared at the person to whom he was speaking.

"I ... I honestly don't get why this is a problem."

Theo stopped in mid-stride and whirled to face him. He had been pacing across the kitchen floor, which was far easier now that the table had been removed. The chimera squinted at him, rubbed his face vigorously, and then squinted at Scott again. Theo's discomfort was so dramatic that it was becoming sort of hilarious.

"Have you been poisoned again?" Theo demanded. "Uh."

"Electrocuted recently?"

"No. Theo, what—"

"Kate Argent taken over your mind with her strange woo-woo powers?"

"Kate is dead."

"She's been dead before."

Scott rolled his eyes at Theo's attempted deflections. "Why are you making this difficult? Do you want to do it or not?"

Outside the kitchen window, the sun sank behind the green branches of the Preserve, putting a merciful end to another scorching afternoon. So far, the summer of 2015 had been filled with mercilessly hot days, and they had baked the patience right out of Scott. The week before, Stiles had had the bad taste to joke about how he expected to catch him panting during one of their Skype chats, and in response Scott had yanked the computer's power plug right out of the wall socket and ignored the buzzing of his phone for two days.

The pervasive, withering heat had only intensified the vexations of the last few months, which had seen one stressful episode after another. Scott had spent the first few days of the season recovering from Monroe's attack in Roseburg.

Scott had spent the slow, tedious days of enforced bed rest alone in his own house, as his mother had been away on her honeymoon with Chris Argent. He still didn't know where they had been other than it was somewhere in France. Chris had planned to announce details of the trip at the wedding reception, but Scott had left the party half-way through when he received the call from Emmaline's alpha that Monroe had been spotted nearby.

The rest of June and all of July had been spent finding the remaining survivors of Emmaline's

pack. Immediately upon his return to California, Mr. Argent had pitched into help Scott clean up the aftermath of the assault, but Scott had quite forgotten to ask after the details of him and his mother's trip. Together, they had tracked down all the scattered Roseburg werewolves, including a brand-new alpha, and safely settled them in a city in La Paz County called Quartzite. The average high temperature there was 107 degrees in July, though this year it felt like it was ten degrees higher. Scott had never been more grateful for the cool darkness of the Preserve when he got back, even if he could only find comfort there in the middle of the night.

August had seen him helping his mother pack away the house and get it ready for the realtors. There was an offer on the table, and he had been here picking up odds and ends left behind when he had been cornered by the chimera.

"What does that have to do with anything, Scott?" Theo's voice broke through his musings, rising in pitch. The only time that Scott had ever heard Theo this panicked was when the ghost of Tara was dragging him to the Skin-Walkers' punishment realm. This had to be a far less extreme situation, at least in Scott's estimation.

He wiped his hands on his shorts because all the towels had been packed. He found the conversation rapidly losing its amusement value. "You applied to Humboldt State."

"Yes."

"You were accepted."

"Yes!"

"Humboldt State is where Liam is going to be a sophomore this year." Theo gritted his teeth. "Would you stop treating me like I'm an idiot?"

"Well, maybe you should stop acting like one." Scott felt the edges of his temper begin to fray. He was coming very close to snapping at Theo, and he seldom snapped at Theo. It wasn't because he didn't have any deep-seated residual anger towards the chimera. In fact, he had a lot of it but he kept it buried deep, because if it he let it go, things could get ugly.

It wouldn't be hard to get angry, especially with the weather making him touchy. With every beat of his heart, he could feel his power try to force its way out of his veins; even though he had tamed the natural aggression which Peter's Bite had magnified, he had never vanquished it. It had been years since the library, and while he considered Theo an ally and maybe even a friend — a real friend this time — all it would take is one lapse to propel him into violence.

"Okay, Theo, let's look at it rationally. Liam doesn't like living in the dorms. I told him last year it probably wouldn't work, but he wanted to try it anyway. There's no privacy, and even werewolves with amazing self-control can't really relax. Dr. Geyer promised to pay for off-campus housing instead. Since he doesn't want to live by himself, he asked you to move in with him. Makes sense, right?"

"Yes." Theo's frustration leaked into his voice and his body language, but it wasn't a subconscious reaction to a challenge. Chimeras, it turned out, didn't have the same permanent problems with aggression once they had become accustomed to their metamorphoses. As much as they had mimicked some of the powers of a werewolf, they weren't actually werewolves.

"I just wanted to make sure, because you're acting like the Wild Hunt's come back to take us all and not like a friend of yours asked you to share an apartment with him. So, we're back to my

original question. Do you want to move in with Liam?"

"It's not that simple."

"Then explain it to me, because it sounds to be pretty simple from where I'm sitting."

"Liam's not my friend."

"Uh, he's gonna be really disappointed to hear you say that."

"Come on. We work together to help keep Beacon Hills safe. We back you up when you need us."

Scott pursed his lips and nodded. "I'm curious. How did you two seeing Avengers: Age of Ultron together help keep Beacon Hills safe? I'm actually pretty pissed that you two went and saw it without me."

"You were busy."

"Yes, I was busy at my mother's wedding rehearsal. You couldn't have waited twenty-four hours to see it?"

For some reason, the revelation that Scott was upset about that reduced Theo to speechlessness.

"And what about February when you took care of those baby jackalopes together? You spent an awful lot of time texting each other on different theories of their care and feeding. I still have the conversation saved on my phone. Want to look at it?"

"That's ... that's not necessary."

"If I showed it to literally anyone else on the planet, they would call you friends. Not allies. Not co-workers. Friends. In fact, I would go so far as to call you—"

"Don't!" Theo shouted. The word echoed across the room.

"You're afraid." Scott couldn't believe it. It was fucking 2015 and Theo Raeken was afraid that Scott considered him pack.

"No, I'm not."

Scott growled at him. He had been working in the house all day and the central air had been turned off; he still felt sticky. "Liar."

"Why are you so angry?"

"Don't try to change the topic." Scott hopped off the counter. "If you're not afraid, then you can repeat after me: I, Theo Raeken, am a member of the McCall Pack."

Theo didn't say anything.

Scott wiped a bead of sweat off his brow with his shirt sleeve. "Tell me, Theo, am I an idiot?" "What?" The chimera was taken aback.

"Do you think I'm an idiot?"

"Of course not."

"So, this last year, when every single member of my pack was in college except me and you, when I was running all over the Western United States working with my step-dad to stop Monroe and I couldn't keep an eye on the Nemeton with which Gerard had a plan to commit genocide and I couldn't keep an eye on my mother whom Monroe had almost had killed once before, why do you think I left you behind to watch them?"

Theo took a deep breath and looked away. "Well, maybe you are an idiot." "You don't think I should trust you? You don't think Liam should trust you?"

"You trusted me before." Theo said. "A whole lot of people have trusted me in my life, and most of them are dead now. Even you were dead, no matter how briefly."

"That was like nearly three years ago."

"Oh, my fucking God!" Theo whirled around to go somewhere else but there was nowhere else to go. "I spent eight years with the Doctors, Scott. More than a third of my life. You and the rest of your pack haven't even scratched the surface of what I did or what I witnessed them do during that time. Using me for what I'm good for is one thing, but ..."

Scott took a deep breath, forcing his own irritation down. He had truly thought that the chimera had learned his lesson, but it seems there were still ways he had to grow. Scott put both hands on Theo's shoulders and forced him to turn around so Theo could see his face. "Liam wants you to move in to him. He wants you to help him study, watch television with him, do the dishes, and take out the trash. He wants you to be a part of his life. His entire life."

"Well, he shouldn't!" Theo tried to jerk away but Scott was too strong.

"You don't get to make that call for him."

"I get to make the call for me!"

Scott felt like shaking him. "Why don't you want to be happy? Why don't you even want to try?"

"Well, first, I have to ask if we're still talking about me." Theo tried to shrug him off again, but Scott wasn't letting him go. The chimera switched tactics to manipulation. "Because it suddenly feels like we're talking about you."

In response, Scott just lifted his eyebrows in a disapproving manner. It was a technique that he had had picked up from Derek.

"Okay. Okay, do you want to know what I'm really afraid of?" Scott nodded.

With exaggerated care, Theo brought his hands under Scott's forearms and broke Scott's grip on Theo's shoulders. "I'm going to tell you a story. It's March of 2016, the week before Spring Break. An enemy breaks into our apartment."

"Which enemy?"

"Oh, I don't know." Theo threw up his arms, bordering on hysteria. "Some of Monroe's hunters. Another deranged academic whose career was destroyed by the Doctors. Werewolves from another pack I screwed over. Someone after Liam to take your power. It could happen. It has happened."

"Okay."

"I'm there, and I fight them off, but I kill one of them. Or two of them. Or all of them." "You have the right to self-defense, neither—"

"Ah-ah-ah. Let me finish. Liam comes from home from studying at the library or from picking up pizza or wherever, and he comes in and he finds corpses cooling on his living room carpet. And he looks up at me — it only has to be for a moment — he looks up at me and on his face is the question that I've been waiting to hear one of you ask for the last 34 months."

Scott let the silence hang in the air until he realized that Theo was expecting him to ask the question. "Did Theo turn evil again?"

"You can't tell me that if it were you who walked in it wouldn't be the first thing that popped into your mind. I don't want to ever see that look on his face."

"Well." Scott took one breath. Then another. He tried to think of a way to comfort Theo, but he could only think of the truth. "You will see it."

He hadn't physically struck Theo, but no one would be able to tell that from the look on Theo's face.

"You're always going to be the person who got him to try to kill me. You're always going to be the person who came the closest to killing me." Scott couldn't find a softer way to put it. "We never forget the wounds we inflict on each other, whether we mean to or not, and that's a good thing."

"It is?" Theo's laugh was bitter and disbelieving.

"Anything – everything – that's real has both good and bad mixed together." Scott pulled up his sleeve. "I got this tattoo to remember Allison, but I don't need it. I'll never forget the moment while I was holding her in my arms and her heart stopped beating."

"You loved her. She loved you. What I felt for you guys wasn't love. It wasn't anything close to love. I hurt people, badly. How can Liam be my friend if at any moment he might remember how much I hurt him and the people he should really care about?"

"Love and resentment aren't mutually exclusive." Scott shook his head. "After all, I resent the fuck out of ..."

The words caught in his throat. He had almost been about to say that he resented the fuck out of Stiles, yet he still loved him. All day he had been stomping around this empty house, irritable, coping with the urge to break something or someone. Now suddenly things he had never said to anyone threatened to spew out of him like a broken sewer pipe.

It wouldn't be fair to tell Theo what he hadn't told Stiles. To tell Theo how he daydreamed about Stiles getting bitten instead, and Stiles having to give up every dream he ever had to do the right thing. To say how many times he had bit his tongue hard enough to draw blood when he walked past Stiles's MVP award for the 2011 State Championship game in the high school's trophy case. To explain how he sometimes replayed the scene in the rain when Stiles had made it clear that Stiles could judge him but he couldn't judge Stiles in return because Stiles had been lucky enough to remain human. To explain that he had imagined again and again what would have happened if he had bit Stiles right then.

But this wasn't about him; this was about Theo.

"Liam can be your friend, Theo, not because of what you did yesterday, but because of what you two can do tomorrow. If you really don't want to live with him, don't. But don't let what can't be changed ruin the rest of your life."

Theo looked him in the eye and then nodded. But before they broke eye contact, he whispered a single word. "Hypocrite."