Chapter Text
Theo doesn't understand words like Stop, Please, and No because not a single person he's known since nine understands them either.
Stop- when the Doctors first came to him like hulking figures out of his nightmares. Visiting him mercilessly, plying his young mind with horrors just as much as promises of a new, stronger heart. One that would never fail him.
Please- when he begged his parents to hear what he was saying, for Tara to listen like she always used to only for the three of them to tell him to get a handle on his dreams. His parents take away his television and games until he can behave and not wake them from sleep sobbing about the figures in masks and what they do to him...
No- when Tara is pushed into the creek and he watches, numb to the core and already tired. No one listened so this is what they deserve.
Stop. Please. No. All the times he was cut into, awake and paralyzed but able to feel each biting scrape against flesh and bone and to lose so much blood he had to be near death. Only to wake up with no wounds and a brain full of trauma, waiting for the next time they tell him to get on the table.
Please- when he did whatever the Doctors told him to for so many years, allowed himself to be used as a tool so they would not dispose of him. So they would trust him enough to give him a pack, The pack, when he demanded. When the Doctors did not tell him no. But not yes either.
Stop- when the Doctors called him a failure. He wanted them to take it back in their dying breaths. All he did because of them, all he became, and he is a failure?
Just stop...
Please—No- he just wanted Tara to keep her heart. Leave him broken and bleeding on the hospital floor. For it to end. For everything to stop. She still didn't listen and somehow he went on breathing, exhaling dirt as he climbed from his grave.
No- every new fight where he tried to do better, be better only to have it thrown back in his face. He will never be pack. His only use is as a tool.
Stop- he wanted Liam to stop talking. Snarling all those barbed words at him, the words that cut into his chest as sharp as any scalpel. Theo never wanted to be a monster but cannot stop now that he is. He has no pack.
No one.
Stop hurting him... please stop.