Liam likes broken things. That has always been a fact of him, even as a child. His toys only held the attention of his already vastly intelligent brain for a few minutes, until they were broken. And then he would entertain himself with finding the problem. Sometimes, if he was lucky, he could fix them.
See, that was always the goal. Find the broken things and poor your heart into fixing them. This isn't really a problem when he's younger, when his broken things are limited to toys and books and cars and the like. But when he's older, the things become too easy. His brain is too big now for things to be a challenge. And then he finds a new interest; psychology. And you can't be interested in psychology without being interested in people.
And then he finds a broken heart and well...he falls into predictability from there.
The broken heart is named Edward Jones and he is made entirely of smoke and alcohol and a voice that never rises above a quiet murmur. His lips never curl further than a small smirk, and his eyes roam from detached to vicious, but nowhere else. His nails are bitten into stubs and his fingers know the perfect places to press to make a person unravel. His mind is a hodgepodge of disorder and he wears it on his sleeves like medals won from a hard-fought war, like he earned every mental scar and personality defect with blood, sweat, and tears.
Edward runs with the wrong crowd because people who've never thought an ordered thought in their lives always do. His older brother, Ezekiel, is in charge, as much as person can be in charge of a pack of dysfuntionals. He's a high school drop out with a grey dog that's more wolf than anything always at his heels and a lit cigarette always dangling from two spray-paint stained fingers. He and his brother were known for making intricate artwork on the sides of private and public property.
Always close behind the brothers were the twins, Jane and Charlotte. Their mother was an English professor turned alcoholic who named them after Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. Their father had died in a fire in the library where he'd met their mother. It gave all three of them a hatred for books that was unprecedented. The twins had followed Ezekiel's footsteps in dropping out of high school for that reason.
Jane was even rougher around the edges than her sister. She and her boyfriend of two years had made a suicide pact in high school. They'd driven to a cliff's edge and were meant to jump together, but Jane chickened out. She tried to stop Eric, even managed to catch him, but she wasn't strong enough to pull him up, especially when he was kicking and attempting to tug out of her grip. His last words to her were scathing insults that she'd never been able to shake.
Charlotte was a movie buff who spent most of her free time in the movie theater were she also happened to work. She had a romanticized outlook on life because of this, imagining a future where she swept into a world that was something more than what she currently had. Something exciting, something where she meant something, where she was important. When high, she would talk for hours of fantastical worlds that she built for herself. She spoke so eloquently that Liam felt as though he'd visited every world she talked about, seeing it in crystal clarity in his own mind. Her smile was brighter than the sun and impossibly infectious.
Andy had laughter that crackled like lightning. Liam had never known him when he wasn't high, drunk, or drugged on the anti-psychotic meds his psychiatrist stuffed down his throat. He'd been in and out of juvie for most of his life until Ezekiel had gotten a hold of him. Now he was just better at hiding his crazy from the rest of the world and keeping the havoc it wrecked minimal. His specialty, his addiction, was in setting things aflame and watching the fire eat it whole. He showed Liam the beauty in destruction with his fire and his self-painted portraits on his arms and thighs, done with knives and lighters.
The group, in theory, did not make sense and did not work. A pyro-maniac, two sisters who'd father'd burned to death in a fire, a man with a wolf who didn't know where protection ended and became possession, his little brother who was addicted to speed and danger, and a boy addicted to books and pretending he wasn't crazy.
But in practice, they were a well oiled machine, working together in perfect harmony. That took care of each other, protected each other. And Liam had been exactly what they'd been missing to become perfect and unstoppable. He showed them which parts of them could be fixed, glossed over, and which parts weren't broken in the first place. He showed them outlets that weren't always self-destructive. In turn, they offered him a real escape from his abusive home life. They became a shield from the bullies, a place to call home, and never asked him to change.
He was alive when he was smothered in the smell of smoke and the sound of motorcycles tearing across asphalt. He was alive only when the wind of 100 mph was ripping at his face and his arms were around the strong, steady waist of the first person he'd ever been attracted to in the sexual way.
Nothing was perfect. He still had to go home every now and then. His father was still drunk when he got there, yelling and angry with fists flying and broken bottles slicing. His mother was still a small, weak thing hiding in corners and behind not-quite-believable smiles, sporting new bruises and broken bones every weak. He still wondered if she remembered what it was not to be afraid. He still spent days locked in the dark, damp basement, hearing voices whisper and feeling the world collapse in on him.
But everything was better for the rest of his high school career. Ezekiel or Edward of Charlotte would come to get him if his father kept him locked in the basement longer than a day. And if the sheriff answered the door instead of the drunk, Andy and Jane would melt out of the shadows and intimidate him into letting Liam out. They often spoke of running away, of taking his hand and leading him into a life were no one could touch him without his permission ever again.
Edward read to him late into the night, pressing gentle kisses down his spine in between lines of poetry.
Ezekiel blew smoke into his face and laughed quietly while reading off flash cards to help him study.
Andy taught him to fight in front of a faded punching bag every evening to the backdrop of a fading sun.
Charlotte told him half-high stories of far away worlds and made him promises of travel he believed.
Jane took him on late night walks, barefoot, down empty streets to the McDonald's for Dr. Pepper.
He had a home in them.
And when college rolled around, he thought it was all beginning to crumble. At first, he wasn't right. Of course, his father was angry when he saw the acceptance letters to Harvard and Stanford, beat him black and blue for it and locked him in the basement. It took the others two days to get him out without getting themselves arrested. When they did, they were ecstatic for him. Edward had smiled wider than Liam had ever seen. Even Shiro, Ezekiel's wolf-dog, had picked up on the excitement and licked him to death.
They agreed to go with him and whisked him away in the dead of night that August. He didn't go to Harvard or Stanford though, but to the University of Washington in Seattle. They set off from North Dakota and hid away in Seattle until he was 22 and just beginning his PhD program.
That's when his father found him.
James Asher had lost the last of his marbles when his son disappeared for college. He spent all his time trying to find his son, leaving for weeks at a time to investigate all the colleges he'd been able to find out Liam had applied to. His obsession with finding his son and his increasingly public drunkenness got him fired from his job as the sheriff. He killed his wife, Marie, in a fit of rage two days after that, but there wasn't enough proof to convict him and so he went free.
He continued to obsessively look for his son until he finally stumbled across him on UWs home page. He arrived in Seattle in time to intercept his son on his way between classes. He warned him to come back willingly or face the consequences. Liam refused, no longer scared of his father as a functioning member of society, constantly overcoming his mental disorders and living the dream life with his family.
A week later, Liam believed he had escaped his father's ire and stayed late at the library to study. After one in the morning, he drove home to their cabin in the forest just outside of Seattle. Upon entering the house, he found his heavily beaten father sitting in their living room, the dead members of Liam's real family spread all over the ground, impossibly still and unresponsive to his startled, ragged gasp. The sound of Shiro snarling and throwing himself at the bathroom door echoed from down the hall.
His father had a pistol in one hand and Edward's favorite vodka in the other. He tried to shoot Liam as soon as he walked in, but he was drunk so the first shot missed, the rest were fruitless because he was out of ammo. Frustrated, he'd climbed unsteadily to his feet and staggered at Liam. Liam had kept up his training though, and his father was sh*t face drunk, so he was able to get him to his knees with two quick moves. He didn't hesitate to snap his father's neck and kick him to the side so he didn't fall on Jane's lifeless form.
Listlessly, Liam drifted down the hall without really processing anything. He opened the bathroom door. Shiro tore past him and into the living room. Liam barely heard the tortured howl that he let out upon finding his master. Liam stared at into the bathroom mirror for a solid minute and a half before fumbling open the drawer. He felt around until he found the box taped to top of the drawer. He ripped the tape off and popped the lid open. Inside, Andy had hidden a spare lighter and three razors.
Liam tucked the lighter into his pocket, dragged a razor up both his wrists, and drifted back into the living room. He sank to his knees next to Edward and then stretched out beside him, twining their fingers together. Whimpering, Shiro crawled to his side and curled up next to him, half-heartedly licking his face. Liam stroked his fur, matting it with blood, and hummed softly to calm him.
The neighbor had seen the former sheriff arrive and heard the gunshots but knew they were a sketchy sort of bunch so hadn't done anything at first. After a while, she finally got up the courage to investigate with the cops on the phone.
At the trial, after she testified as to why it took her so long to get there, Liam had tried to dive at her and cussed her out colorfully enough to make Andy proud as the guards dragged him out of the room. Not long after that, he was approved to head to Shire House.
