Work Text:
everything is temporary;
even the sorrow that you carry.
2006
On Isaac’s third overdramatic groan of despair, the front door opens.
“Isaac?”
“In the living room,” Isaac calls back, picking up his pencil so he looks like he’s been working all this time. He looks up to see Dad in the doorway.
“Doing homework?” he asks. Isaac nods, gesturing at the composition notebook in front of him as proof.
“Cam said he would help me,” he adds petulantly.
This does not impress Dad. “Don’t tell me you’ve been waiting for Camden.”
“I haven’t! I haven’t, I started it, I swear.” The writing isn't very good — in fact it's definitely very bad — but it's started. There are words. Long ones, even.
Isaac waits for judgment, but before Dad can say anything else, Camden appears behind him and waves. "Hey Isaac," he says. "I'm gonna shower and then I'll be down to help."
"'Kay," Isaac says, looking at Dad like see, I'm not lying. "Good, 'cause you stink."
"I was in the pool for two hours," Camden retorts. "You stink too, what's your excuse?"
Isaac sticks out his tongue. Dad glares at him until he stops.
"I'm going to take a shower too, and then I'm going to start dinner," Dad says flatly. "One of you needs to come help me in about half an hour."
"What are we having?"
"Thank you for volunteering, Isaac," Dad says in a clipped tone, and Isaac swallows a sigh. Stupid mistake. He should know by now that asking about dinner translates to helping with dinner. "Half an hour."
He's gone before Isaac can repeat his question, and Camden points upstairs and says "Be right back," and then he's gone too.
Isaac sighs and turns back to his short answer paragraph.
In The Giver by Louis Lois Lowry, Mr. Lowry establishes that, he thinks people should be free to make their own choices and decision. He uses multiple symbols to do this. For example, the color red is used to symbolize…
God, Isaac hates English.
It’s probably his worst subject, not that he really has a “best” subject. But at least with math and science there’s usually a right answer. With English, there’s no right answer, just a whole lot of wrong answers. Isaac is really good at coming up with the wrong answers. He sucks at vocab, he hates analysis, and he still doesn’t get the rules about commas.
Camden is good at English. Of course he is; Camden's good at everything, Camden is the perfect student, Camden is everything Dad wishes Isaac would be. Isaac will be lucky to get a C on this short answer. Isaac will be lucky to get a C in the class.
Glancing quickly at the doorway to be sure Dad actually left, Isaac retrieves his Gameboy from under his right thigh and returns to his Pokémon.
Several minutes later, the kitchen floor creaks. Isaac hastily slides the Gameboy under his notebook with a suddenly-pounding heart and braces for being yanked to his feet, but instead—
"Whatcha doing? Playing Pokémon?"
It's Camden.
“Jesus Christ, you scared me,” Isaac huffs, pressing a hand to his heart. “I thought you were Dad.”
Camden strolls into the living room and sits on the sofa, directly across from Isaac’s seat on the rug. He eyes the coffee table between them. “Were you seriously playing on your Gameboy?"
“I was bored, this is boring,” Isaac complains. “Don’t tell Dad.”
“Fine, but put it away,” Camden says. He has a big binder in his arms, which he drops onto the coffee table with a thud. “Have you even actually done any of the essay?”
“Yes!” Seriously, why does everyone think he’s lying? “And it's not an essay, it's a short answer. It sucks but I at least started it. Here.”
He shoves his notebook unceremoniously in Camden’s direction. Camden lifts it up and starts to read.
“Okay,” he says after only a few seconds. “This is all you have?”
“You said you’d help me. I don’t know what else to write!”
“I haven’t read The Giver in like six years,” Camden says. “I didn’t say I would write it for you.” He pushes the notebook back towards Isaac. “Keep going.”
“But the beginning is okay?” Isaac says, casting a skeptical look down at his terrible handwriting.
“No,” Camden says. “But it's fine for you.” He pauses, then grabs Isaac’s pencil and leans over the table to scratch out a comma. “You should either say choices or decisions, not both,” he adds.
"If it's bad—"
"Dude, don't get stuck on your first two sentences. So far you haven't actually said anything about the book."
"That's because I didn't get the book," Isaac grumbles. "And I have to talk about a symbol in it but I don't know any symbols! I barely even know what a symbol is."
"You said you're writing about the color red."
“We had to pick out of four options. I thought red would be easier than the other three, but I don’t actually know what it means.” He waves a hand at the page. "Otherwise I would have finished my sentence."
Camden hums as he pulls out his own notebook. A book lands on the coffee table on top of Isaac’s vocab sheet; Hamlet, reads the blue cover. "Red usually indicates anger or love or some other intense emotion."
"I'm pretty sure no one is angry or passionate for this entire book. It's the opposite of intense."
“You have to think deeper than that,” Camden says. “It’s not about what actually happens in the book, it’s about what it represents.”
“Gee, thanks,” Isaac says sarcastically, “that’s sooo helpful.”
Camden lifts an eyebrow. “You don’t want my help? Fine.”
“Wait, no. I do. Help me."
Camden looks down at his own work, then looks up at Isaac. “Okay, so let’s say the color red symbolizes strong emotions. Like anger or love. Now why would that be important in a book like The Giver? ”
Isaac stares blankly at him.
“Come on, man,” Camden says. “You literally just said it to me.”
More staring. And a shrug.
“Okay,” Camden says irritably. Like it’s a personal affront that Isaac’s too stupid to be good at English. “You said nobody is angry or passionate for the entire book. Why is that?”
“Because everyone’s supposed to be, like, chill, I guess. And no one's really supposed to feel strong emotions."
“So, okay then. The main character, I forget his name—”
“Jonas.”
“Yeah, Jonas sees the color red, which represents strong emotions, and he’s never been exposed to strong emotions before.”
“I guess.”
“So…” Camden gestures. “There you go.”
“What? There I go what?”
An almighty sigh escapes Camden. “You really need me to spell it out?”
“Yes! ”
“Okay, but then I’m not helping you anymore until you actually write something.” Isaac nods. “Okay. The whole rest of the community in the book sees everything in black and white. They don’t see color. They also don’t really feel intense emotions. Then you have Jonas, who can see color, and can feel intense emotions. So the color red, which represents intense emotions, symbolizes Jonas being different from his community and being able to feel things that everyone else can’t.”
“Wait,” Isaac says, grabbing his pencil. “Say that again, but slower.”
“No. Put it in your own words.”
“I don’t even remember what you said.”
“It’s not hard, Isaac. Use your brain.”
“If it’s so easy, why don’t you just do it for me?” Isaac grumbles, scribbling down as much as he can recall from Camden’s analysis.
“I have my own English homework,” Camden says. “If I do yours, will you do mine?”
“What’s yours?” Isaac asks suspiciously.
Camden picks up his book. “Write an essay comparing and contrasting Hamlet and Laertes, a thousand words minimum.”
“A thousand?!”
“Still wanna swap?”
“No,” Isaac grouses, and returns to his terrible excuse for a short answer. Abruptly, he jolts. “Wait, has it been half an hour? When am I supposed to help Dad?”
“We got home at quarter to six.” Camden checks his watch. “It’s five past. So ten minutes.”
A rush of air leaves Isaac. “Thank God.”
Silence descends, a comfortable silence, filled with the intermittent scratch of Camden’s pencil in his own English notebook, where he’s obviously making good progress on his analysis of Hamlet and whatever that other guy’s name was. Isaac draws circles with his eraser in the corner of his page. When he blows on the rubber dust, it scatters.
The point of his pencil lands just past the end of his last sentence and he writes:
One example of how red symbolizes emotions is that the apple is red.
Great job, Isaac. A+ work.
“I give up,” he says. “I’m just gonna fail English.”
“You’ll be fine,” Camden says dismissively. “Don’t be dramatic.”
“Well, I’m definitely gonna fail English next year when you’re not here to help me with it. Betrayer."
"I'm literally serving my country," Camden says, rolling his eyes. "I'm doing the least traitor-y thing ever."
Isaac crosses his arms. "You're abandoning your family."
"Would you say that if I was going to college?"
"Probably," Isaac lies, just to be annoying. "Either way you’re leaving me here all alone."
"You won't be alone, Dad's here."
"That's not—" Isaac breaks off, frustration quickly building. "That's not the same!"
"Well I don't know what to tell you, Isaac. I'm not gonna be around forever anyway, and tons of people join the army after high school. Tommy and Elias are—"
"I don't care about them!" Isaac snaps. "You're leaving me! First Mom and now you too and it's not fair. I don't want to be—" His voice drops to an angry whisper, scared to admit it, or maybe just scared to be overheard. "I don't wanna be stuck here with Dad."
Camden's face hardens. "It's not my fucking fault Mom's gone, Isaac, God. I didn't kill her."
"I'm just—"
"If you keep this shit up you can finish your fucking work on your own. I already enlisted, I'm going, and there's nothing you can do about it, so suck it up and deal."
After another steely look, Camden huffs with finality and returns to writing.
Isaac chews the inside of his cheek. He doesn't want to cry, 'cause crying is for babies, which Isaac is not, but it's just not fair. First Mom, then Camden. Sometimes it feels like even Dad is gone, like he died with Mom and a different person who only looks like Dad came home from the funeral with them. Sometimes it feels like Isaac doesn’t leave the ghosts at the graveyard anymore.
It's tense this time when they both fall silent, and after a moment of staring haplessly at his own pathetic work, Isaac realizes he can't hear Camden’s pencil anymore. He looks up, but Camden is just staring at the ceiling.
"What time is it?" Isaac asks in a small voice.
Camden sighs. "Just go, Dad is probably gonna say some shit about how early is on time anyway."
That's true. Yet another reason Isaac needs Camden; who else will remind him that Dad operates in code now? And who else will translate it for him?
Isaac slowly shuts his notebook and gets to his feet. He brushes the fuzz off his pants.
"I'm coming back, you know that, right?"
It's said with annoyance, but one look at Camden's face and Isaac can tell he's not as irritated as he's trying to sound.
"I know."
Camden looks him in the eye. "Just, you're making this big deal of me going to the army, but it's not like I'm going forever. I'm not abandoning you, okay? It's just like going to college."
"College doesn't have people with guns," Isaac mutters. "And bombs. And tanks. And—"
"It's just four years," Camden cuts in. "And I get paid vacation and shit, so it's not like I'll never see you. I'll be back before you know it."
"I know," Isaac says again.
"Okay. Good." Camden rolls his eyes but it seems like he's rolling them at himself, not at Isaac.
Isaac tentatively says, "I'm still gonna miss you."
Camden sighs, but the corner of his mouth twitches, like he's trying not to smile. "Yeah you will."
Isaac raises his eyebrows expectantly. "And you'll miss me too?"
"Nope. Not even a little."
"Camden!"
"Fine, maybe a tiny bit." Camden holds his thumb and forefinger close together. "Like this much."
"Well, I'll miss you that much too."
"Great."
"Fine."
"Fantastic."
Isaac sticks out his tongue and Camden snickers. "Go help Dad. If you're really stuck on your assignment I can help you finish it after dinner."
That sounds like a fair compromise. Isaac grins. "Have fun with your thousand words of boringness."
With that final sentiment, Isaac scurries out of the living room to join his dad in the kitchen.
2011
“It must be weird to be back.”
Not for the first time, Isaac wishes he were better at the whole werewolf thing. The fact that Derek can sneak up on him is embarrassing on multiple levels.
In his defense, he’d been slightly lost in thought, but still. This time it’s Derek. Next time, maybe someone worse. Isaac should be more alert.
Besides, it’s not like Isaac is particularly thrilled to see Derek. A little warning would have been nice.
“To the cemetery, I mean,” Derek clarifies, and now that Isaac knows he’s there, he can also tell that Derek is standing a respectful distance away, making no move to approach. There’s a floral aroma mingling with the scent of his former alpha. If Isaac turns just a little, he’ll have Derek in his peripheral vision.
“How did you know where to find me?” he asks. His voice is rough. He clears his throat.
“I didn’t,” Derek admits. “I went to Scott’s house. His mom told me where you were.” A pause. “She also told me what today is.”
Isaac finally turns, and Derek takes a careful step closer, holding out a bouquet as if unsure whether or not Isaac will accept it.
“In my experience, flowers get stolen from these graves almost immediately, but I thought you might want to leave some anyway.”
If Isaac had to guess, he’d probably call this an olive branch.
“Thanks,” he says, and takes it.
Kneeling, he lays the bouquet gently over the grass. In the warmer months it’s the healthiest plot in the graveyard by no accident; Isaac had always taken great care to make sure Cam’s grave looked better than all the others. His quiet way of commemorating. Or maybe of rebelling against his father’s compulsive need to have everything perfectly uniform.
“The weird thing was being away so long,” he says belatedly. “Barely know what to do with myself now that I’m out a job.” And now that no one’s trying to kill me on the daily.
“Find a new job?” Derek suggests. “I’m sure Deaton could use an extra hand.”
Isaac snorts, but it’s half-hearted. “Yeah. That place is starting to become Deaton’s Home for Wayward Werewolves. Try saying that ten times fast.”
There’s no response. Isaac hadn’t really expected one.
They seem to find themselves here a lot, he muses. This is the place where it all started. From here Isaac can see Kate Argent’s grave, the grave he’d been digging on the night they met. The grave he’d been trapped in by his toppled backhoe, until Derek had appeared to offer him a hand. To pull him out.
It sounds like the beginning of a metaphor, but Isaac was never any good at those.
"You know, I knew your brother," Derek says at length. Isaac’s head whips around in surprise. “He was a year younger than me in high school. We were in the combined AP English class together.” He inclines his head. “Smart kid.”
Isaac is caught desperately between wanting to hear more and wanting Derek to shut up. He doesn’t know what to do with this. Cam’s memory has been laid to rest; he doesn’t know how to respond to Derek reviving it, rewriting it.
“He used to help me with my English homework,” is what he says, in a slightly strangled voice. Derek’s mouth tugs into a gently amused smile before quickly fading, and Isaac is struck by how much it reminds him of Cam. He turns his gaze back onto the headstone. “I was terrible at it. Still am, but he would always say it was easy. That if I just used my brain I would figure out…what the significance was of the color red in The Giver, or whatever.”
Derek hums his acknowledgement. Isaac’s eyes trace the letters and numbers carved into the granite.
“He said he would come home for Christmas,” he whispers. Vacant. Mechanical. Camden Lahey. 1988-2006. “I waited all summer. I counted the days. I spent half that summer in the freezer and sometimes the only thing keeping me going was knowing I would see him in a matter of months.”
Silent as the grave. Isaac is starting to really understand the meaning of that phrase.
“When the army guys showed up at our house to tell us what happened, at first I thought it was him,” he confesses, and he’s not sure if he’s talking to Derek or Cam, anymore. “I thought he was surprising us with a visit. I was so excited.” Words keep spilling out like a punctured dam leaking water. Until now, this story had been buried with Isaac’s father. Isaac digs his nails into his palm. Presses his knuckles into the dirt. “I was just a kid, I— I was twelve years old. I didn’t know. They came in the house, and I was calling his name, trying to get him to appear, and— and my dad tried to send me to my room, but he couldn’t do shit to me with the army folks there, so I listened in from the stairs, and I—”
A choked noise wrenches itself from Isaac’s throat. His carefully-constructed levee, now five years strong, falls with a fatal blow.
Derek puts a hand on his shoulder.
“When they left…” Isaac inhales and shakes his head. “I thought it had to be a prank. Cam liked doing those, especially on me, but my dad was just blank. Totally blank. When I saw his face, I knew. It was like — like he was a statue.”
A tombstone, he thinks, closing his fist around the rest of the metaphor. It was like his father was a tombstone, and Isaac was the rotting corpse buried alive in their haunted house.
For a moment it’s like Camden is here, feeding him the answers and laughing at his feeble grasp on figurative language.
“I’m sorry,” Derek murmurs.
“He was supposed to see me graduate,” Isaac says softly. “He was supposed to come back, you know? At least with mom, when she got sick, we knew what was coming. Camden…one day he was alive, and the next…gone. Just like that.” His eyes fall shut and a rogue tear escapes from the corner.
“You didn’t get to say goodbye.”
It’s spoken so low that it almost disappears with the wind. Isaac nods once and says nothing; Derek says nothing further. They stand there, a mourner and his sentry, until the tear track on Isaac’s cheek grows numb from the chill.
Suddenly, understanding dawns on him. Isaac musters up a more neutral tone.
“So what are you doing here?”
Derek’s hand falls away.
“I wanted to make sure you were okay. After everything.” There’s a beat. “A lot has happened in the past few weeks, and I wasn’t always the alpha I should have been. The alpha you deserved. I don’t know if I can make that right, but I wanted you to know that I’m sorry.”
“You’re leaving,” Isaac says, consternation gnawing in his gut. “You’re not just saying sorry. You’re saying goodbye.”
The hollow silence tells Isaac he’s hit the nail on the head.
It’s poetic in a way Camden would have appreciated. This is where it all started; it’s only fitting for this to be where it ends, too.
“I’m glad you have Scott,” Derek says. “He’ll look out for you.”
“Where will you go?”
“I’m not sure. Cora wants to go back to South America. I might go with her. Or maybe back to New York.” Derek exhales a puff of air. “There are some loose ends there I never tied up.”
Isaac fingers some dead leaves. “Are you coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll be okay,” Isaac says. “Like you said, I have Scott. And his mom, who’s been really great. And everyone. I’ll be fine.”
“I know.”
Isaac stares at the bouquet of flowers resting peacefully atop the wilted grass. Something is being laid to rest here, and it’s not Isaac’s brother.
You didn’t get to say goodbye.
“It’s okay, you know,” he says, getting to his feet and turning to finally face Derek. “All of it. Even the bad parts. What you did for me, what you gave me, that was — it was worth it. I don't regret it. So why don’t we call it even, okay?”
Derek looks like he’s going to argue. Isaac fixes him with a look.
“Okay,” Derek relents. “In that case…I should go. Don’t be a stranger, alright? You can get my number from Scott. If you need anything…”
“I’ll call,” Isaac promises, and thinks he actually will.
Derek nods. After a second of blatant indecision, he holds out a hand with an expression like even he isn’t sure why he’s doing it.
Isaac lifts an eyebrow. “A handshake? Really?”
“I— wasn’t sure you’d want a hug,” Derek admits.
“You’re going to South America indefinitely,” Isaac says. “We’re hugging.”
It’s their first hug ever, and it might be their last, so Isaac presses his face into Derek’s neck and holds on tight. They’re in a graveyard, after all; there’s not a living soul around to pass judgment.
When the hug runs its course, Derek steps back. His gaze flits from Camden’s gravestone to Isaac’s face.
“He talked about you sometimes,” Derek tells him, soft around the eyes. “In class. He was always bragging about his kid brother needing his help. I could tell he loved you.”
Isaac swallows hard. “Thank you.”
“He would be proud of you,” Derek says quietly, and offers Isaac a crooked smile. "I am too."
The carpet of dry leaves crunches as Derek walks away. Isaac looks once more at the bouquet, a tasteful combination of flowers in a spectrum of warm tones, and watches a red petal from a Gerbera daisy fall and land on the unbroken earth.