Chapter Text
Isaac’s been alone before, often, and he’s been caught in the rain, sans piña colada, more than once. He’s thrown himself upon the kindness of strangers more than anyone ought to, and enough to know that kindness is a relative term. Kindness can be a blind eye; kindness can be a quick death. There are options in his head as he stands in the rain, and he knows them all to be flawed. He knows, too, that for all the options he can think of, there’s no real choice. He’s headed to Scott. His feet have been taking him there since before his mind thought to provide direction; his heart has been pointing him there since the Alpha who chose him was outshone by the Alpha-to-be he wants to choose. Choice is a far-away and gleaming prospect, and Isaac doesn’t think it’ll ever be fully within his grasp. But the McCall house is doable; the light in the bedroom window is visible. It can be enough for now.
When Mrs. McCall answers the door, Isaac puts on his best face. The puppy dog eyes work wonders in any situation; soaked and shivering, he knows himself to be irresistible to a heart with any softness. And Melissa McCall, though life has made her tougher than she ever wished to become, has a terribly soft heart beneath those hospital scrubs. Her eyes are tired and her curls, frizzed with the humidity, hang limp and loose, but her smile is genuine in a way that so many are not.
“Isaac! What are you doing here this late? God, get out of the rain, you’ll catch a cold. You need to carry an umbrella in this kind of weather—unless you’re like Scott, who seems convinced that it’s some sort of manly display not to.”
“Uh, werewolf heath,” Isaac says gruffly, “so, not a big deal.” Because it’s not. It’s not going to kill him. And he can’t say I don’t own an umbrella. Can’t admit that all he has, right now, is the soaked-through shirt upon his back. So instead he says, “Can I talk to Scott? And maybe crash here a couple nights? It’s just…” and he doesn’t know how to say this without crying or without making Mrs. McCall hate Derek, and she can’t, it’s not safe for her to, even though some part of Isaac wants her to hate Derek so that maybe he can as well. Instead of just aching.
She seems to know what he’s trying to say though, or at least that he’s trying to not say something. “Yeah, up the stairs, you’ve been here. But, Isaac…” and now she’s the one at a loss, “you know, if you needed—to talk? I’ll be here. Or,” she laughs, a little brittle, “I’ll actually be at the hospital, because I just called back in, but…”
“It’s OK, Mrs. McCall. Thanks.”
As Isaac heads up the stairs, he plays the scene in his head:
He’ll lean casually against the door frame, head tilted insouciantly, completely without care: Hey, Scott. Roomies?
He’ll knock first, peek his head in: Hey, Scott. So, I kind of need a place to stay while Derek deals with some stuff. Cool if I crash here?
He’ll abandon all pretense and head straight to those arms: Hey, Scott. Just…hold me?
But he’s not a girl, and he’s definitely not that girl.
So he just says, “I need a favor.”
And that night as he lies downstairs on the sofa alone, he wonders why he didn’t just say, hold me, after all. It would’ve been braver.
He’d worked with Scott for months before he realized it. They’d been through death-defying experiences together, and he’d known that he trusted Scott with his life, that he admired Scott, looked up to him. He thought it was friendship and a little bit of hero-worship until one day when he saw Scott bent over a sick puppy, stroking it like it was his own child. And that was when Isaac realized that somewhere along the line he’d fallen head over heels in love with Scott McCall.
It was a fairly big revelation, as they go—Isaac had never been in love before. But it didn’t change anything. He just went on with his life, and Scott with his, and nobody had to know if he snuck glances at Scott whenever he could, if he listened for that heartbeat above all others; if, when captured by the Alpha Pack, all that he remembers, besides his mysterious savior, is that he had to live so he could get back to Scott.
And he did. And everyone seemed glad he lived, so that’s something. And there were more things: Scott, rushing to his side in the elevator. Scott, who actually comes when he calls, even though Stiles says that’s like a sign of the apocalypse. And all of it combined, all of Scott just being and smiling just made him fall deeper. Even the god-awful tattoo couldn’t do anything to make him less beautiful.
Now, living in the same house with Scott, he sees so much more. Things that should be wake-up calls and deterrents: the way Scott wakes up in increments, a series of alarm-snooze button-alarm that pierces Isaac’s skull; the way Scott doesn’t wash or even rinse his dishes, and just leaves them sitting in the sink. Isaac pulls pillows over his face; Isaac washes dishes. It feels like he’s taking care of Scott, for a change, sometimes.
“Bro!” Scott says one evening, punching Isaac on the arm, “you don’t have to do so many chores! My mom’s going to think I’m slacking off!”
“You kind of are, Scott.”
“Hey! You’re supposed to have my back. And I have a lot on my plate—werewolf things, work things, school things! No one’s supposed to have time to wash dishes after battling werewolves, saving small animals, and reading Great Expectations!”
“You didn’t actually finish Great Expectations.”
“No, but I started it! Progress, dude. Plus, it sucked.”
It did, but Isaac finished it anyway, because if there’s anything he can identify with, it’s an orphan falling for a shiny someone he can never have.
There are moments of supreme awkwardness, straight out of every romantic comedy Isaac has ever been forced to sit through: Scott, coming out of the bathroom in nothing but a low-draped towel, water droplets glistening, poised at the ridges of his abs; Scott, on his way for a midnight snack, pouncing on Isaac, sleeping on the sofa, in the middle of and showing the very physical effects of a Scott-filled dream. Scott takes everything with good humor. There’s no sexual tension whatsoever, because for there to be tension there has to be an anchor on each end, and there’s just Isaac, his heartstrings trailing loosely in Scott’s wake. The house is one big locker room, or summer camp, or anything purely platonically puppy-pile-icly innocent.
There are also moments where everything feels easy: Scott, studying with him at the table; Scott, hair rumpled from sleep, falling beside Isaac on the sofa and demanding they spend the day watching reality TV; Scott, saying, “Hey, now we can bike to work together!”; Scott, acting like Isaac riding bitch on bike not built for two is the most normal thing in the world.
Isaac won’t let himself feel at home, but he does feel like he’s wanted. So he pretends like he feels at home; he pretends a lot of things. When Scott slips up and mentions Alison with yearning in his voice, Isaac is the sympathetic friend, with a side dose of you’re better off without her tough love. It happens often, and every time, it hurts all over again. For both of them, but for Isaac most, because he feels Scott’s pain on top of his own.
He’s got all the looks down pat—the cool bad boy, the aloof man of the world, the saucy ingénue. He can play the role he needs to, whatever people need him to be, he can be it, but with Scott he can’t ever seem to hit the right notes. Sometimes Scott just gives him this questioning look, as if to ask what he thinks he’s doing, and he doesn’t know, but he knows it’s bad that Scott can see through it, whatever it is. Life is about the face you put forward, the smiles you lie through, and the closer he is to Scott, the more all the cracks inside him start to show through. And Scott, he’s not as clueless as he used to be, maybe he never was. He’ll be a stoic martyr to protect Alison; he’ll be a good student to give his mom something normal to be proud of; he’ll do the right thing like he always does, but if he ever wanted to he could break Isaac in a way that even Derek couldn’t. It's more than a little terrifying, how much he trusts Scott to not hurt him.
He’s seen Alison rip Scott’s heart to shreds, attack Scott’s friends (himself included), and believe the worst in Scott when the worse things were closer to home. He knows it wasn’t simple, and he understands the power of dimples, shining hair, and a girl who knows how to kick ass and stand up for herself. He can even admit to himself that with different parents and different circumstances, she might’ve been as perfect for Scott as Scott thinks she is. He’s been in close quarters with her; he can see the appeal. And he understands all too well why Scott keeps going back, keeps letting that open wound fester even as he proclaims he’s moving on and getting closure. But Romeo and Juliet were screwed up for many reasons: family, age, their love-at-first-sight bullshit, all the things that everyone says now but rarely sees play out in front of them so clearly. He kind of liked the play, even the ending—it was inevitable, and he doesn’t like things that try to ignore the inevitable—but he needs Scott to live.
Isaac would be the rebound for him, would be the glue to bind the space where Scott’s heart would be, had he not given it away, blindly and foolishly, and refused to ask for it back. The wound can’t heal around a void, he wants to tell Scott, you need to have something to put in its place. He wants to offer himself up into the fissure that no tattoo can cauterize.
But it’s not his place to say, so he tries to make himself simultaneously as invisible and as helpful as possible, so no one will ever think to wish he wasn’t here. His face is as malleable as his destiny, and he can take being ignored far better than being seen. But sometimes, he rethinks this—he just wants Scott, once, to look at him and see him not as pack or as a charity case or as a teammate or a friend but as Isaac, the guy he can’t live without.
He’s not holding his breath for it, but he thinks about it sometimes, the way he thinks about college, the way he thinks about being a writer. It’s a rose-tinted fantasy, fluffy and wonderful, and he cherishes it all the more for knowing it won’t happen like that. He hides his dreams close to his chest, and he says things like, “I’m not very good at writing,” like he’s proud of it even though he fears it. He spills out thoughts as words on pages, and in black-and-white they embarrass him, proclaim his weakness to the world.
I wrap a scarf around my neck, and it’s a barrier. To the cold winds of the world, the sharp teeth of predators, the covetous gazes of creepy old men. In a scarf, I’m invincible. Sherlock Holmes. I have style, and sass, and I can say things like let’s kill them and it sounds like I mean it, like I could. In a scarf, I think I could. Strangle them, their lives and breaths caught by surprise in taxi doors and evil fallen at my hands, rightfully so.
And then at night when I can’t wear it, I strangle myself instead in the memories that replay as nightmares, and though I can hear the heartbeat of my alpha there’s also the tell-tale thumping hurt of my past, and it drowns out peace. In bed, on my back, I can only be a victim again. For all that I can’t sleep, it feels safer than any previous home, it feels like it might actually be home. Until one day it isn’t, and there, in a flash of glass breaking against the wall, it’s all happening again, and I’m back where I started, except a werewolf. But what good are claws and fangs when your neck is bared to world?
The words were such a comfort coming out of him onto the page, but when he reads them back they condemn him. When the house is empty, he burns them in the backyard. It feels like a ritual, the kind where you symbolically burn something to let the feelings go, except even when the last remnants have curled into ash, all the feelings are still there.