airplanes(Thiam)

chapter 1: You are now leaving Beacon Hills

Liam could remember his fifteenth birthday, when his Mom had brought a cake out into the quiet room, candles casting an eerie glow on Mason and his parents faces. Remembered the way he'd looked around the almost empty room thinking about the school he'd just gotten kicked out of, the friends he'd lost when he'd taken a crowbar to the coach's car. Remembered how lonely he was, how much he hated himself, the IED label that had been slapped onto him that left his Mom casting nervous glances every time he so much died in a game he was playing, waiting for the explosion. He remembered being lonely, lost, wanting something to change, anything. So he'd feel normal again. He remembered the way the pills he'd taken earlier still left his mouth tasting chalky and his limbs slow and hollow, the way he felt like he was floating along, a storm cloud pushed by the wind, unable to really do anything but wait for the lightning to burst out and the thunder to crack, terrifying everyone, for the rain and the wind to do it's damage.

He remembered the way his Mom had looked at him with a small smile, still nervous but getting better, no doubt thanks to the sedated haze in his eyes that his medication left. How she'd said "Make a wish." And despite being too old for wishing on a birthday candle he tried it, one last attempt, one pathetic, desperate plea, he'd shut his eyes and blew out the candles in a single blow, one thought running around his head 'I wish for everything to change'.

And it had. The change he'd been dreaming of had been no more nervous glances, it had been getting into a new school, getting on first line in lacrosse, it had been of his IED vanishing and the medication to stop rattling inside of him.

Then Scott bit him and he got his wish. Everything had changed, every single part of him. Everything but his anger, That still sat there burning inside him, eating away, waiting for him to let it loose. But now it was worse, more dangerous. It had fangs and claws and a blood lust, it had enemies to aim it at and situations where he was told he had to use it. To take strength from it.

He wasn't sure how many times in the next year he'd thought back to the birthday wish, he knew it wasn't that that triggered everything, that even though werewolves and the wild hunt and dread doctors and berserker were real, wishes weren't, wishes were child's play, they were something that never came true and if they did... if they did they came around wrong, they twisted your hopes until you were suffocating on your words.

You're not a monster, you're a werewolf, like me.

If wishes were real he'd have woken up back in his hospital bed before the wendigo had taken him, before Scott bit him.

Liam sucked in a rattling breath, blood dripping down his arm.

Everything had changed.

It was done, the hunters were gone, the anuk-ite was dead.

So why did he still feel hunted, why could he still feel the thrum of anger beneath his skin that made his claws itch to reach out from beneath his skin and tear into something else.

"You okay?" Scott asked. Liam nodded, eyes moving to the body of the anuk-ite reminding himself that the blood on the walls wasn't from anything he did. It was from them, his friends, his pack, Scott's arm was still dripping crimson even as he moved to check on everyone else.

They'd won. Liam had got his wish and everything had changed.

So why the hell didn't it feel like it? He hadn't taken his meds in over a year so why did he feel so tired, so drawn out that he was sure he could sleep for a week. Why had his parents started casting nervous glances once more, why had he stopped laughing again?

"You coming?" Liam's head jerked away from the anuk-ite to Theo, leaning back against the wall watching Liam with a blank face, his clothes were torn and bloody. His skin still knitting itself back together, the keys to his car swung around his finger in quick loops, Once, twice. Liam looked around the room. Everyone else was gone. "Scott needed to get Stiles to Melissa, idiot twisted his ankle." Theo's lips quirked in a smile. "I said I could give you a lift home."