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Isaac is experiencing some kind of existential jet lag. It started the moment he landed in Beacon Hills, when he realized how little planning he put into the whole coming back thing. Which was none. No planning at all. He just reacted. He felt whatever happened to Scott, helped himself to Argent’s credit card, and ran. The running felt good. It kept the pain and the fear from consuming him. Stopped it from turning into panic.
But it wasn’t so great when he arrived in Beacon Hills without the right power adapter to charge his phone.
“It's the details that will trip you up,” Argent had told him once, during some training thing that Isaac failed miserably. “It’s the details that will get you killed.”
It had made him think of Allison, of how he failed her. Her and Scott both. It must have made Argent think of Allison too, because there wasn’t any more training that day.
He’d intended to keep running, from the airport all the way back to Scott’s house. But, for some reason, he’d asked Scott to pick him up. And, because of the phone thing, there was no way to contact him. Isaac sat down, just for a minute. Just to think about what to do, but the fatigue of the last few days had hit him all at once and he fell asleep. Then he’d almost punched Scott in the face.
A mini-collection of not his best moments.
But Scott didn’t immediately send him back, or away, so now he’s here. Here. In Scott’s house. And Scott’s saying things like your room, and I hoped you’d come back with his completely serious and earnest face, and Isaac doesn’t know what to do with it. He never has. There’s no way he deserves it.
He never has, but especially not now. Not after Allison.
As Isaac follows Scott into his bedroom, he presses two fingers into the area where his chest becomes his abdomen, below the xyphoid process. That’s where he feels Allison’s death. Then he moves it higher to rub a little to the left of his sternum where there’s an intermittent echo of the initial feeling he had a few days ago, much less intense but still painful. That’s where he feels what happened to Scott.
Scott sits heavily on his bed and Isaac stands inside the doorway feeling awkwardly out of place and a little out of time.
“Every time I think about how to tell you, it just makes less and less sense,” Scott says. He rubs his face in his hands. “I don’t even know where to start.”
Scott’s room looks a little different, more grown-up. It’s changed along with Scott. But even with the differences, it feels familiar. Isaac thinks he knows what the jetlag feeling is about. At least part of it. It’s some kind of misplaced and delayed homesickness. He never felt homesick for Beacon Hills. Not once. But he’s starting to think he might have felt homesick for Scott’s house.
“How about,” Isaac slides his back down the wall and sits on the floor. “Just. The beginning?”
It’s a stupid thing to say, and Isaac cringes. He’s always saying the dumbest shit. But Scott turns to look at him, and some of the tension leaves his face.
“Yeah,” Scott says. “Okay.”
Isaac listens. Scott is always listening to everyone else, and Isaac wants to do that for him. So Isaac sits with his back against the wall and listens very carefully, resting his chin on his arms which he keeps crossed over his bent knees. Holding himself together.
As usual, Scott’s right. The story doesn’t make a lot of sense. Not at first.
It’s a long story. But the more Isaac listens, the more he thinks the story isn’t actually all that confusing. The details are, and Scott keeps getting bogged down in the details, but the big picture is simple. Theo manipulated his way into Scott’s pack, drove them away from each other, tried to get Scott’s new beta to kill him, and when that didn’t work, killed Scott himself. The rest – Dread Doctors, chimeras, and books that make you relive repressed memories, and boy is Isaac glad he missed that one – is just background noise.
There’s the chest tightness, the chill, the nausea, that comes with hearing the story, but the burning, tearing, physical pain builds as well. Isaac rubs at his chest and when Scott turns to face him, there’s blood seeping through his shirt in the exact same spot. He suspected it before, but now he knows. What he felt was Scott’s death. And he’s still feeling it now.
Isaac is furious. It’s an all-consuming kind of rage that he hasn’t felt in a long time. The kind that takes his breath away and burns up all his oxygen, so it feels like he’ll never breathe again. The rage has many targets, but the primary one is Theo.
He doesn’t remember any kid named Theo. And he would remember. What kind of a name is Theo. But then again, he didn’t go to the same elementary school as Scott and Stiles…
“Isaac?”
Snapping his head up from where he’s been staring at the blood, he sees Scott’s concerned expression, which makes him even angrier. Because Scott’s the one with blood on his shirt, when he should be healing. Isaac’s the one who wasn’t here to do anything about it. And where the fuck was everyone else? And where are they now?
“You’re bleeding,” Isaac says, trying to keep the anger out of his voice.
“So are you.” Scott looks pointedly at Isaac’s hands, which sure enough, have shifted without his awareness. Blood drips from his clenched fists onto the hardwood floor.
Isaac winces as he opens them, claws coming unstuck from the meat of the palms. He turns both hands over and stares at them. Control isn’t something he’s struggled with since his second full moon. He isn’t good at being a werewolf, or a hunter, or much of anything, but controlling the shift was one thing he could do since almost the very beginning.
But since he felt Scott’s death, it’s been different.
Scott sits on the floor next to him. Close enough that Isaac can feel his body heat, providing a comforting reminder that, somehow, Scott survived.
“It’s been happening since you…” Isaac forces himself to say it. “Since you died.”
Scott’s quiet. Isaac listens to his heartbeat, rapid and muffled from what Theo did to him, his breathing splinted and not quite natural. Using the beat of Scott’s heart and the sound of his breathing Isaac is able to brute force a shift back. It hurts in ways it shouldn’t.
“The airplanes were a nightmare,” Isaac says, trying to lighten the mood. But it isn’t funny because they were a nightmare. Having to hold himself together in the very small spaces involved in traveling very long distances was the stuff of his nightmares. Scott just nods in sympathy, so he continues on with the rest of it, even though it’s embarrassing. “It’s almost like right after I was turned. You know? When everything’s just…”
“Too much?” Scott offers, when Isaac isn’t able to articulate it himself.
Isaac nods. “Not all the time,” he adds, not wanting Scott to think he’s invited a liability back into the pack.
“Mine’s the opposite,” Scott says, and Isaac wasn’t expecting that. “My senses, strength, shifting, it’s all less. It’s all…” Scott trails off and then shakes his head. “It’s all dull.”
Isaac looks at Scott out of the corner of his eye. He looks exhausted. Isaac wipes his blood off the floor with the sleeve of his hoodie.
“We should ask Deaton about it,” Scott says, after a few moments. As though Isaac’s sudden loss of control isn’t embarrassing, and his own dull senses aren’t concerning. Like it’s just something neutral that can be figured out. Then adds with a wince, “Well. We’ll ask him when he’s back.”
“Deaton isn’t here either?” Isaac runs his hands into his hair. He assumed that Scott at least had Deaton through all of this.
Scott shakes his head. “There’s been –” Isaac can hear the emotion in Scott’s voice, and he scents it coming off him. It’s a deep, lonely, desolate thing. It’s a different kind of pain. Scott clears his throat. “Like I said, it’s been bad.”
Isaac wants to do something comforting. But he can’t. It’s taking all of his mental and physical strength not to punch a hole in Scott’s wall. Which would definitely make things worse.
He does manage to bump their shoulders together, which makes Scott smile. So, he isn’t completely useless.
Telling Isaac about the preceding months doesn’t make everything better, or easier, but it does help. As he runs through what’s happened with Theo, he expects Isaac to be disappointed. But he never is. Angry, yes. Enraged at times, even. But never disappointed. He also doesn’t seem to think it’s Scott’s fault.
“How could you have known?” Isaac asks, when he describes his failure to protect Liam and Hayden and then, later, to rescue them. “It sounds like he set you up.”
“Of course, you thought it could be true,” Isaac says, as he recounts Theo’s telling of the story of Stiles and the wrench. “Stiles wasn’t exactly helping his case.”
“He was being a dick,” Isaac says, when he talks about the argument in the rain.
Maybe it’s because he was never subjected to Theo himself, but Isaac seems to see each situation in a way Scott hadn’t considered.
When he finally gets to the story about seeing Stiles in the hospital, before they figured out what was wrong with the Sheriff, Scott glosses over the hardest parts, but Isaac goes completely still. It takes Scott longer than it should to realize why.
“I’m going to kill him.” Isaac balls up both his hands, then opens them with a hiss when he loses control of the shift.
Another unexpected reaction. Because Stiles was right, the Sheriff was another casualty of his failure. “He has a right to be angry at me,” Scott says.
Isaac thinks about this for a few moments before responding, looking at his hands, wincing as he forces a shift back. “I don’t understand why,” Isaac says, words coming out faster as he picks up steam. “Because there’s no way you could have known or done anything. And you died.” Isaac’s eyes shift and he closes them quickly, taking a breath before he continues. “He can’t – he doesn’t get to hurt you.”
Scott blinks. He never thought about it like that before. It’s just what Stiles does. And Scott can take it now better than he ever could. He’s a werewolf and he’ll heal, after all.
“He doesn’t get to hurt you to make himself feel better,” Isaac says, opening his eyes and staring at his now very human hands. “You don’t deserve that.”
Scott blinks again and sees the freezer in the Lahey’s basement. Smells the stale fear that emanated from the thing as he stood over it with Derek. Feels the sides pressing in around him when he heard Allison scream and couldn’t get out right away. He’s not sure Isaac draws the same parallel, in fact he’s almost sure he doesn’t. But Scott does.
“I guess not,” Scott says. A large part of him still thinks he does deserve it. But Isaac’s assessment has opened up enough doubt to consider that maybe he doesn’t. Not completely. “I didn’t think of it like that.”
Isaac shrugs and is silent for a few beats, then clenches his hands into fists again. “I still want to beat the shit out of him.”
Scott shakes his head and smiles a little. “Please don’t.”
“Fine,” Isaac says with an exaggerated sigh, then looks at Scott with his mouth twisted in a smile that’s more of a grimace.
If Isaac were almost anyone else, Scott would hug him. But that kind of easy physical affection Scott shares with most of his friends doesn’t work the same way for Isaac. So he mirrors what Isaac did earlier and bumps their shoulders together. Isaac’s smile untwists into something a little more genuine, and Scott counts that as a win.
Scott continues explaining the details of the last few months as he gets supplies to change the dressing, which is now completely saturated and staining his shirt. Isaac listens. He lets Scott completely finish each thought, or more often than not, spin into nothingness before he says anything or asks any questions. It’s a kind of active listening Scott hasn’t experienced from anyone lately, and it encourages him to talk more than he normally would.
He peels off his shirt and examines the bloodstain. He’s accumulating shirts with bloodstains over the heart.
“Give it to me,” Isaac says, taking the shirt into the bathroom. He turns on the faucet in the sink and turns the shirt inside out, holding the stain apart from the rest and under the water. Then he looks at the blood on his own sleeve and pulls his hoodie over his head repeating the process. “Cold water will get most of it out.” Isaac shuts the water off and examines the stain. “You have baking soda?”
“Maybe in the kitchen.” Scott doesn’t want to think about why this is something Isaac knows how to do. “Stain remover would be in the basement.”
Isaac leaves with bloodied clothes and comes back empty handed a few minutes later as Scott is peeling off the tape securing the bloody bandage to his chest.
“I left them soaking in the sink,” he says. “Will your mom, um…” Isaac doesn’t finish the thought. He’s standing behind Scott, looking at the blood soaked gauze and the wound in the mirror.
“It takes a lot more than that to freak her out these days,” Scott says, thinking of the girl she’d found impaled on the kitchen table a few weeks ago. “And she’s working a double anyway.”
Isaac nods and sits on the lip of the bathtub. “That looks…” he trails off.
Scott gets the gauze completely removed, wincing as some of the fibers stick in the flesh. “It’s not that bad.” Scott says, absently. It’s at least a little more healed than it was this morning. He thinks.
Isaac scoffs. “It looks bad.” He stands up and Scott notices he’s rubbing at that spot on his chest again, this time with the heel of his hand. “I think, maybe, I’ve been feeling, like…” Isaac trails off again, like he’s unsure he wants to complete the sentence. “An echo of it.”
Scott stops what he’s doing and turns to face him.
“In the same spot, since it happened,” Isaac says, pointing to his own chest with one finger. “And even just the echo feels ….”
Scott starts to feel guilty about it, but Isaac shakes his head.
“No,” he says, firmly. “Not your fault.”
Scott can’t quite accept that.
“Besides, it’s not that bad.” Isaac smirks as he uses Scott’s own words against him. “Right?
Scott rolls his eyes, turning back to the sink. He dabs at the wound with a wet piece of gauze, removing some clumps of dried blood, then starts to cover it with a new bandage.
He can feel Isaac watching, and when he catches Isaac’s eyes in the mirror his eyes glow red, just for a second. He sees it this time, and something about seeing it makes it more real. Isaac’s shift too. The call-and-response of it, that it goes both ways, that he can still do it at all, makes him feel more like himself. He settles a little further into his skin in a way he hasn’t been able to since before Theo killed him.
Scott smiles, tight lipped but real, and sees Isaac’s reflection smile faintly in return for a moment before the smile stiffens into a grimace.
“Stiles still drives that shitty Jeep?” Isaac asks, but it’s more statement than question. “He’s on his way over.”
Scott can’t hear it yet, but he gets a sudden hit of Isaac’s angry chemosignals and is sure Isaac’s right.
“Go easy on him,” Scott says, and now he hears it too.
Isaac glares at him. Scott glares back.
“Okay,” Isaac says, breaking eye contact and sitting on the closed lid of the toilet. He closes his eyes. “Okay,” he says again, quieter this time, talking to himself. He runs his hands through his hair a few times. “Okay.” He opens his eyes and looks at Scott. “I won’t do anything.”
“Thank you,” Scott says.
Isaac nods. “Anything.”
Scott isn’t sure what he means, but he has his eyes closed again and Scott doesn’t want to ask. He goes back to changing the bandage, hears the front door open, and hears Isaac take a deep breath.
No matter what happens next, with Stiles or the rest of the pack, he’s not alone anymore.
He looks in the mirror and his eyes glow red.