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“It’s a five and a half hour drive, Scott, and that’s if traffic is perfect,” Isaac says distractedly, trying to both successfully replace the gas pump nozzle in its slot and angle his body so that his phone is hidden from view of the gas station clerk eyeing him suspiciously from inside the building.
“I’ll reimburse you for the gas,” Scott coaxes, and the skeptical look Isaac gives his phone is just entirely wasted, given that Scott is—as previously pointed out—five and a half hours away.
“Do you even have,” Isaac pauses, checking the pump’s display, “thirty-two dollars and fifty-seven cents to your name?”
“No, but Peter does,” Scott counters cheerfully, and Isaac snorts a laugh. “C’mon, Isaac. Please? It’s a long, complicated story, and it’ll be easier to tell you with everyone’s help.”
The thing is, Isaac knows what’s happening here, and it’s not that Scott needs help telling the story of whatever the hell that was with the B-grade hunters that’d come looking for Isaac a few days ago. It’s bribery, is what it is: the sort of harmless deal-making that Scott occasionally engaged in. He’d tell Isaac over the phone if Isaac sighed and said no and made some kind of excuse—or made no excuse, really—but Scott wants him to come to Beacon Hills—wants to see him—and this is the excuse he’s offering up to both of them. Isaac bites his lip.
“It’d have to be tomorrow,” Isaac finally says. “I’m off work then and the day after, but then I’ve got a run of shifts all right in a row.”
“Tomorrow is perfect,” Scott agrees in a rush, and Isaac can practically hear the grin in his voice.
The gas station clerk is now openly glaring at Isaac. Wincing, Isaac tells Scott, “Hey, I’ve got to go, I’ll see you tomorrow,” and hangs up on Scott’s reply before waving his now-locked phone pointedly at the clerk. They keep right on glowering, but relax back into their seat behind the counter.
Isaac spends the entirety of the drive to Beacon Hills the next day counting off exits, and idly calculating how long it’d take him to get back home if he gave into the cramped, twisted-up feeling in his chest that whispers at him to take each and every one he comes across. The weather’s shitty but Isaac rolls his window down anyway, propping his elbow up on the door handle and cutting his fingers through the air that comes rushing in, taking in the sharp smell of exhaust and the sharper smell of ozone and the shifting, amorphous scents of the cities and villages and one-horse towns that he passes. A few years ago when he was taking this drive in the opposite direction, he’d sworn that he’d never go back, and he’d meant it, but like almost every other promise he’s ever made to himself, it’s one he’s not going to be able to keep.
By some miracle, he makes it all the way to the border of Beacon County before the ache in his chest spasms into something else, and he has to pull over on the side of the road and brace his forehead against the steering wheel.
You don’t have to go, Melissa had told him. You could stay, Scott had tried hopefully. But it’d been Argent with his red-rimmed eyes and shredded voice who’d said, Do what you need to do, and helped him pack up what few belongings he’d had. It’d been a huge waste of his time, though Argent probably didn’t know it, because half of Isaac’s shit had smelled too much like Allison for Isaac to bear, and he’d had to stop at a random restaurant dumpster off of CA Highway 99 and throw the offending items out. By the time he’d reached Visalia and the shitty studio Argent had helped him afford, Isaac had had two duffel bags full of clothes and little else to his name, but after he’d sat in the middle of his empty apartment and wept until his eyes had gone dry, he’d gotten up, and showered, and went to the job interview he’d had lined up.
Isaac breathes the same way now as he had then, slow and deep until he can do it without his exhales shuddering loose of his lungs. It’s how Allison had taught him, sat in the middle of the Preserve one of Beacon Hills’ rare quiet afternoons, her bow disassembled before her and an oiled rag in her hands. How do you do that? Isaac had wondered, trailing his fingers over the tightly-clustered holes in the paper bullseye Allison had retrieved from the tree she’d been using as a target, and Allison had smiled her small, close-mouthed smile, and she’d said: I breathe.
Eventually the pain in Issac’s chest recedes enough that he can sit up, and sit back. He’s in the middle of a stretch of farmland, rolling fields on either side, and he nearly dismisses the black figure he sees standing on a hill a few hundred feet away from his car as livestock before he recognizes the shape, and freezes.
The wolf doesn’t move.
Derek? Isaac wonders, squinting, but he’s still got his window down and the scent that the breeze carries to him is all wrong. Isaac hesitates, unsure what to do—call Scott, maybe? He should probably know that there’s some strange full-shift werewolf in his territory—but then he jumps hard enough to bang his knee on the underside of his steering wheel, because someone suddenly appears beside his car door.
“Jesus christ,” Isaac swears, his knee smarting. The expression on the face of the shaggy-haired man by his window doesn’t so much as twitch out of its frown.
“Who the hell are you?” he demands, gold starting to bleed into his irises, and Isaac gapes at him, unsure what to say.
But he doesn’t get a chance to respond: a blur of color suddenly flashes by the hood of his car, and then the black wolf from before jumps up on its hind legs and puts its forepaws on the man’s shoulders, pushing him back and away from Isaac’s window. The man stumbles back, but the surprise on his face quickly hardens into a scowl as he shoves the wolf’s forelegs sideways, forcing the wolf to drop back to all fours.
“Jesus, Theo, what?” the man demands, glaring down at the wolf.
The wolf—Theo, apparently—just barks, eyes flashing gold. He also keeps his paws planted where they are, which is having the probably-intended effect of blocking the man’s access to Isaac’s door but is also having the probably unintended effect of trapping Isaac in his car, unless Isaac wants to make a fool of himself clambering over the center console for the passenger door. Giving up on dignity, Isaac risks poking his head out his window.
“Hi. I’m, um. I’m looking for Scott McCall?” he offers hesitantly, looking back and forth between them. He feels a little silly looking expectantly at Theo-the-wolf’s canine face like he’s going to be able to decipher something from it, but, hell: of the two of them, Theo seems like he’s marginally more on Isaac’s side.
The expression on the man’s face spasms, some. “You must be Isaac,” he realizes, though even with that apparent added clarity there’s still no friendliness to his tone.
Theo barks, again, and Isaac doesn’t think he’s imagining the added sharpness. The man makes a face at him, but then he shoves his hands in his pockets and huffs, his shoulders rounding out of their aggressive rigidity. He looks away, his jaw working for a second, and then he looks back at Isaac.
“I’m Alec, that’s Theo. Sorry for the cold welcome,” he says, not even trying to mask his insincerity. “Scott wasn’t sure when you were going to arrive and then he and most of the others had to leave suddenly to go meet up with the Yreka pack, so he’s not here.”
Isaac’s face falls. God damn it, Scott, he thinks, but his irritation is more tired than heated; he lets his head fall back against his seat’s headrest with a thunk. But he almost immediately flails back upright, because Theo gives a low, burring growl that tugs at every one of Isaac’s instincts.
Alec makes another face. He glares at Theo for a few seconds, but then his teeth grit and he apparently gives up on trying to win whatever battle of wills he’d been having. “Look. Scott’ll be back tonight, okay?” he tells Isaac. “The Yreka thing should only take a few hours.” He’s apparently about to leave it at that, and then Theo barks again. Alec sighs, and begrudgingly adds, “You know Derek’s apartment building?”
“Yes,” Isaac tells him carefully, wary as to where this is going.
“You can wait there, with Theo,” Alec responds, gesturing to Theo with one foot. “Apartment 513.”
It takes Isaac an embarrassingly long time to realize what he means, and it’s Theo himself who tips Isaac over into comprehension when he moves back out of the way of Isaac’s door, circling around to plop himself down next to Isaac’s rear wheel. Darting a wary look at Alec still watching him suspiciously, Isaac gets out of his car and then pivots around so he can open the back door, smiling uncertainly at Theo as he does it. Theo lets his tongue loll in a canine approximation of a smile, and then twists around so that he can touch the very tip of his nose to Alec’s wrist.
Alec looks down at him for a moment, unmoved, and then his expression softens some and he takes the attached hand out of his pocket and strokes it once over Theo’s head.
“I’m going to finish the patrol and then go meet up with Nolan and the others. I’ll see you back home,” Alec mutters to him, and then he reaches back into his pocket, and fishes out a ring of keys. Those he tosses to Isaac—Isaac fumbling to catch them at the last moment—and then he starts walking away without another word, either to Theo or to Isaac; Isaac blinks after him.
Theo looks after him too, and then he gives a heavy, canine sigh and twists to hop up into Isaac’s back seat. Isaac hesitates for a moment, still clasping the ring of keys awkwardly between his hands, but then he forces himself to mentally shrug—welcome to Beacon Hills—and shut the big black wolf into his back seat.
And then he gets back in the driver’s seat, and goes to drive to the apartment building he’d been unceremoniously kicked out of, that one time.
---
Isaac’s a little worried about walking into what is now, apparently, a bustling apartment complex—rather than a run-down building full of half-finished condos whose purpose in life seemed primarily to be to provide dramatic places for Derek to nearly get eviscerated on a recurring basis—with a giant black wolf, but his concerns turn out to be unwarranted.
Theo sticks close to his side after Isaac lets him out of the back seat; close enough that Isaac can drop a hand, after a moment’s hesitation, into the fur at the back of his neck in an approximation of someone holding a pet’s collar, or a leash. But it’s not even that, really: it’s the way that Theo somehow manages to fold down his very presence, the force of his physical bulk, into a smaller, meeker shape, until even Isaac nearly forgets that he’s got his fingers wound in a werewolf’s ruff, and not a family dog’s. Theo even noses playfully at the fingers of the young girl who gets on the elevator with them as they’re headed up to the fifth floor, and who immediately reaches for him, to her mother’s instant, apologetic embarrassment.
“That was impressive,” Isaac murmurs to him as they’re stood outside apartment 513, Isaac trying each key on the ring one after the other, since Alec hadn’t bothered to specify the correct one and Theo doesn’t currently have hands. “Have you like, gone undercover before, or something?”
He’s distracted with the keys but he’s still pretty sure that Theo winces. Isaac glances down at him in surprise, but it turns out that the last key that he’d tried was the winner, and the door starts rolling open thanks to the hand that Isaac had already placed on the handle to check it; Theo eels inside the gap created without further warning. Blinking after him, Isaac spends a silly few seconds just standing in front of the open apartment doorway, and then he colors and steps quickly through, shutting and locking the door after himself.
When he turns back around he can just spot the tip of Theo’s tail disappearing around the last twist of the still—after all this time—completely ridiculous spiral staircase that all the apartments in Derek’s building are equipped with, for whatever reason, and so Isaac glances around, and then decides to head for the kitchen as the most neutral of possible ground. He’d been tempted to wander over to the bookshelves packed with what looks like random junk, but.
The silence in the kitchen after Theo reappears—now human-shaped and dressed in sweatpants and a worn t-shirt that smells more like some unidentified third werewolf than either Theo or even Alec—isn’t exactly strained, but it’s not what Isaac would call comfortable. Theo seems to realize that, in the same way that Isaac’s beginning to sense that Theo seems to realize a lot of things; instantly and with a vague, odd resignation, like he maybe wishes he didn’t. Isaac senses a story, there.
Or maybe several.
Kicking his heels against the surprisingly chic barstool he’d claimed at the kitchen island while Theo went up to change, Isaac tries to think of something to say. He hadn’t really factored for Scott being out of town when he’d arrived, and the fact that every other potentially familiar face—Derek, Stiles, Lydia, even Argent—are gone with him, well. He supposes he could go to the hospital or the station, try to meet up with Ms. McCall or the Sheriff, but his relationship with the latter was never that deep, and the thought of seeing Ms. McCall makes a hot, uncomfortable thing start squirming in his stomach; he knows she’d never blame him for the way that he left Beacon Hills after Allison, but that doesn’t mean he’s made his own peace with it.
Luckily Theo rescues him from his own circular thoughts. Isaac blinks at the bottle of neon blue sports drink that appears in front of him, then looks up at Theo, now leaned back against the counter across from him and cracking open his own bottle.
“If I had anything stronger, I’d give it to you,” he tells him, and Isaac grimaces; so his thoughts have been all over his face, great.
“Wouldn’t do much good even if you did,” Isaac reminds him with a quirked, commiserating smile; Theo shrugs one shoulder, then takes a drink of his own drink.
“Mind over matter,” he counters blandly, but it’s immediately clear his tongue is firmly in his cheek; he doesn’t grin, but the corners of his eyes crinkle some over the lip of the bottle.
Isaac finds himself relaxing, some of his tension bleeding away, and then he finds himself tensing right back up as he wonders at that fact. Theo must catch the rapid-fire up-and-down of his mood because he sighs and rubs the fingers of one hand across his forehead, and then sets his bottle down on the counter beside him with a dull clunk before crossing his arms over his chest.
“Look, about Alec—” Theo starts, then hesitates before huffing and gesturing a hand vaguely to seemingly encompass Alec, his aura of hostility, and his immediate—and obvious—distrust of Isaac. “It’s not you he’s pissed at.”
Isaac is immediately skeptical; Alec had sure seemed pretty pissed at him. And that’s not just Isaac’s own paranoia and lingering neuroses about returning to Beacon Hills talking: even if Isaac had been blind and unable to see the pinched, unhappy expression on Alec’s face, he’d still have been able to smell his dislike and hear his rapid-fire, adrenaline-fueled heartbeat. But Theo doesn’t look like he’s defending Alec for Alec’s own sake. If anything, he looks a little...guilty, Isaac supposes. A little guilty and a little quietly remorseful.
So Isaac chews over the question burning in his throat, part of him thinking this isn’t any of my business, I’m not a part of this pack anymore, before his curiosity wins out. “Who’s he pissed at, then?” he asks.
“Me,” Theo replies, immediately and easily.
His body language must not get the same memo as his voice, though, because his shoulders tighten up; Isaac can see the muscles bunching under the thin cotton of his shirt. His scent misses the mark, too; it goes sour with that same guilt that Isaac had thought he’d seen, that same quiet regret. Studying him in the weak winter sunlight coming in through the kitchen’s sizable windows, Isaac wonders if Theo wants to talk about this, and finds himself wishing, oddly, that he knew well enough to guess.
But if nothing else, Isaac doesn’t have much else to do while he waits for Scott to get back. And there’s a smaller, more vulnerable part at the core of himself that wants to know; Theo and Alec are clearly part of Scott’s pack, which makes their history the pack’s history. And Isaac—there’s a part of him that wants to know. That wants to be a part of it again, too, even in this small way.
So he deliberately reaches forward to take hold of his previously-untouched drink to give himself an excuse to drop his gaze, to busy his hands, as he asks the obvious question, the one that Theo all but invited: “What’d you do?”
Theo doesn’t respond immediately, and for a moment Isaac thinks he’s made a mistake, alienated the only person in Beacon Hills to—so far—greet Isaac’s reappearance as something other than a massive, personal affront. But when he glances up from his overly-careful opening of his bottle of sports drink, Theo is studying him thoughtfully; Isaac feels himself straightening under the scrutiny.
“I made him leave me behind in a parking lot to be tortured and murdered by a bunch of genocidal maniacs,” Theo finally explains, and when Isaac tests his scent again the heaviness of his sorrow is still there, and even weightier; he looks away from Isaac after a beat and adds, belatedly: “Same group who went after you.”
“Oh,” Isaac replies stupidly.
Scott, being Scott—as genuinely a good a person as he is—had not actually remembered to call Isaac back after their brief conversation a few days ago, Isaac standing over several unconscious, obviously B-grade hunters wondering what the hell was going on. On the other hand, Lydia—being Lydia—had sent him a text a few hours later to make sure he knew that everyone was still alive, which Isaac had appreciated beyond words, but there had clearly been some kind of emergency going on that was demanding all their attention and Isaac didn’t want to push for further details.
And now, standing in front of him, clearly: the emergency.
“You don’t...have to tell me any of this,” Isaac finally offers awkwardly, aware even as he says it that a not-insignificant part of his statement is already moot.
But Theo just shrugs dismissively. “Up to you. If you’d rather have Scott explain, I’m not going to be offended.” Then he pauses, looking momentarily thoughtful. “Having him do it might make more sense, actually. I was—” he hesitates again, his jaw working, then finally finishes, “—out, for a significant part of it.”
From what Isaac has gathered, Theo saying he was out for the majority of the hunter attack on Beacon Hills is a pretty massive understatement, but even having spent less than an hour in his company, Isaac is starting to think that understatement might be one of Theo’s primary character traits.
Or, more accurately: defense mechanisms.
He’s about to open his mouth, tell Theo that he’ll spare him having to relive the attack, that he’ll wait for Scott—something about hearing Theo bloodlessly describe his own brutal torture and attempted murder just seems like it might be beyond what Isaac is capable of, right at this moment—but Theo’s expression suddenly sharpens and his gaze darts up, towards where Isaac knows the front door to be based on the near-identical layout of Theo’s apartment to Derek’s. Isaac frowns and focuses his own senses just in time to catch the tromp of feet out in the hallway, and then there’s the muted sound of a key in the lock and the front door rolling open. Glancing back at Theo to gauge whether or not he should be concerned, he catches a fond sort of resignation on his face, there and then gone.
And anyway, Isaac’s need for a threat level classification is rendered moot seconds later when there’s a dull thunk of a heavy bag being set down, and someone yells out, “Hey, what the fuck did you do to Alec? I know he’s been kind of a mess the last few days—also your fault!—but he seemed extra pissy when he came to meet up with us.”
Theo lets out an exaggerated sigh and looks at Isaac. “That would be Liam.” Then he tips his head back some and calls, loudly enough that the newcomer—Liam—can hear him: “If you noticed he was pissed, why didn’t you just ask him?”
“Are you kidding?” Liam replies as he appears in the doorway, dropping his voice now that he doesn’t need to yell. “He’s still perfectly happy to take out his lingering issues with you on me, I wasn’t going to open that can of worms. I left him herding Nolan and Mason around like the world’s most neurotic sheepdog and came to ask you directly.”
Then he stops dead, apparently noticing Isaac for the first time.
“I’ve answered my own question,” he announces after a surprised beat, seemingly to the universe at large.
“Your lack of situational awareness continues to amaze,” Theo tells him pointedly. “You might, in fact, be the worst werewolf ever.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Liam the-potentially-worst-werewolf-ever dismisses, already on the move again. “Not all of us could be scientifically bred to be super spies.”
That...was either an incredibly weird and oddly specific inside-joke, or a reference to something that Isaac has no context for. Have you like, gone undercover before, or something? he remembers thinking earlier, staring at Liam as Liam crosses over to Theo, and in quick succession: leans up to kiss him, the move casual and yet somehow effortlessly intimate; snags Theo’s bottle of sports drink in a way that strongly suggests it isn’t the first beverage he’s stolen from him; and hops up on the counter to sit next to him. But even with the kiss, it’s the way that he thoughtlessly takes a swig of Theo’s stolen drink and then offers it back to him—Theo reclaiming it with an eye-roll and taking his own drink—that really makes plain the nature of their relationship: these are two people that know how to move around and with each other.
“And how exactly does Corey feel about Alec herding Mason around?” Theo picks back up on a thread from their earlier conversation, his scent now a roiling mix of warmth and affectionate irritation, his earlier sorrow washing away. In that instant Isaac connects the dots between Liam and the smell of the unidentified werewolf on Theo’s shirt.
“Amused, mostly, seemed like,” Liam answers, gesturing for Theo to give him back the bottle of sports drink, which Theo pointedly doesn’t. “Considering that Alec saved Mason’s life like, a shitload of times a few days ago, I think Corey will let him play sheepdog as often as he likes, from now until eternity.” He gives up on trying to get the bottle back and elbows Theo instead. “Are you going to introduce me or not, asshole?”
Theo looks briefly embarrassed as he realizes he’d obviously all but forgotten about Isaac, but manages to cover it quickly; Isaac finds himself biting back an amused smile. “Right, I forgot. You’re a child and incapable of saying hello to strangers.”
Theo turns, clearly about to do as Liam had asked—and as he’d clearly meant to do earlier before he’d been distracted by either Liam’s kiss or his proximity or just Liam, himself—but Liam is already reaching out a hand, and shoving not-entirely-gently at the side of Theo’s face, interrupting him.
“You’re a dick,” he accuses Theo, reclaiming his hand as Theo goes to knock it away. Then he turns to Isaac and says, “I’m Liam, sorry your host is a caveperson.”
And Isaac realizes what had been bothering him as he’d watched the two fo them, though bothering isn’t quite the right word; there’s a newness to Theo’s and Liam’s obvious relationship that strikes him in that instant. Clearly Theo had been the emergency that Scott and Lydia and the others had had to handle a few days ago, and clearly that’d meant something both general and specific to Liam, to Theo; to the two of them together. Isaac finds himself feeling oddly comforted by that, this unidentified and unasked-for satisfaction that just blooms in his chest: so maybe Beacon Hills was still just as much of a clusterfuck as it’d been when he’d left.
There was also this: two people transmuted by tragedy for the better.
“Isaac,” he remembers to reply, after a moment’s distracted hesitation. Liam’s face lights up.
“Oh, Visalia Isaac,” he says, apparently putting the pieces together. Isaac isn’t quite sure he understands the source of the wide grin that takes over Liam’s mouth as he does, but Liam doesn’t give him much of a chance to dwell. “Yeah, Scott said you’d be coming. Sorry he’s not here, but when Shohreh says jump, well.”
He grins again, sly, and elbows Theo next to him. Theo’s expression goes dry; another inside-joke whose context Isaac’s missing, another story he doesn’t know. But he can tell Liam’s accidental exclusion of him is just that—an accident—and more to the point, seemingly thoughtless, a little helpless; like seizing any chance to rib Theo is just so ingrained in him so as to be automatic.
Clearly also ingrained: Theo’s reaction. He knocks Liam’s poking elbow away, and more to the point does it with enough force that it actually spins Liam around just enough that his hip slips off the edge of the counter, and he falls with a squawk. He rounds on Theo immediately, hollering a war cry that Theo is just absolutely unfazed by; he catches Liam as Liam lunges for him and spins him effortlessly back around so that Liam’s back is to his chest, one of Theo’s arms looped around his neck in a loose—but still firm—chokehold. Liam gives an outraged protest and starts scrabbling at Theo’s arm, but Theo isn’t even paying attention to him anymore; he’s digging in one of his pockets with his free hand, and coming up with his phone.
Liam stops the instant he notices, his eyes fixed interestedly on the screen. “Hey, speak of the devil,” he observes, and then immediately blanches. “Don’t tell her I said that!”
Theo just rolls his eyes, and unloops his arm from around Liam’s neck before shoving him pointedly away. He also waggles his phone—clearly ringing—at Isaac in silent explanation before he starts meandering away towards the balcony, pausing only once with an irritated look on his face to surrender the bottle of sports drink he’d still been holding when Liam makes a wild grab for it. Liam takes a smug drink as he watches Theo finish stepping out onto the balcony, and then he turns back to Isaac.
Isaac had watched the preceding chaos with a bemused smile, and he’s still wearing it when Liam looks over. Liam’s expression spasms a little, his cheeks coloring just slightly, but then he barrels right through whatever embarrassment he may have been feeling, and hops back up on the counter as he says, “You helped save his life, you know.”
Isaac blinks. That hadn’t been what he’d been expecting at all. “Um. What?”
Now Liam rolls his eyes. It looks exactly like it had on Theo, like the expression had literally been transplanted from one to the other. He explains, “If you hadn’t saved your own ass and called when you did, I don’t know that we would have been able to turn around in time to save him.”
Isaac doesn’t know what to say to that, but he does know he’s uncomfortable with the squirming feeling that starts up in his chest as Liam continues to watch him. He shrugs, glancing away. “I’m sure you would have found a way. Scott said that Lydia—”
“Isaac. Would you just shut up and let me thank you?” Liam interrupts, sounding frustrated, but also amused by both his frustration and Isaac as the source of it. “God, you’re just like him.”
Isaac’s mouth runs off without his brain. He says, “You know, you say that like it’s an insult, but your scent says—”
Liam cuts him off primarily by flicking the cap from the bottle of sports drink he’d stolen from Theo directly between Isaac’s eyes, his aim pinpoint-accurate. He also deadpans, “Ha, ha,” while Isaac is flailing backwards, having tried—unsuccessfully—to bat the incoming plastic missile away.
The situation probably would have continued to deteriorate, but Theo steps back into the main body of the apartment. Liam just immediately forgets about Isaac, and it’s—honestly one of the best things that Isaac has experienced recently. He smiles as he watches, soft and genuine and helpless.
“What’d Shohreh want?” Liam queries curiously.
“Literally nothing,” Theo replies, sounding aggrieved but—like Liam—smelling something entirely different. There’s a slight shy curl to the edge of his lips, too, that Isaac doesn’t understand, at least not until Liam says:
“Ah, she’s still punishing you for,” he pauses, looking thoughtful. “What did she call it? Being a—”
“‘Fucking strategic catastrophe,’” Theo finishes for him. It seems important to him that Liam doesn’t get to say it, probably because the grin that stretches Liam’s mouth after Theo says it could generously be called shit-eating. He tucks his phone back in his pocket, and then adds, “Shouldn’t you get going? Unless you already picked up the desserts from Emmaline’s Bakery that you swore that you—”
He doesn’t finish, primarily it seems because Liam makes a panicked-sounding noise and flails his way off the counter. “Shit, shit,” Liam swears, sliding the bottle of sports drink onto the space he’d just been sitting on—and sending some of it fountaining up, and onto the fake marble, at the force he uses—as he digs around his jeans’ pockets with his other hand for his keys. “Stall for me, okay? Get into a pointless but all-consuming argument with Mason. Tell Alec he’s not allowed to come with you on your next patrol. Literally anything.”
“Anything, huh?” Theo repeats, looking thoughtful. “So getting kidnapped by hunters again is on the—”
Liam cuts him off with a fierce, almost harsh looking kiss. “Not funny,” he mutters darkly.
Theo’s expression softens, and he brings up both hands to cup Liam’s face as he kisses him more deeply—and more gently—before releasing him. Liam spends a few more seconds searching his face, and then he wheels away to start hurrying back towards the front door.
“Bye, Isaac!” he calls breathlessly as he goes. “Sorry to run, but see you tonight, yeah?”
He’s out the door and gone before Isaac can even think to answer. Still, Isaac turns back to Theo. “Tonight?” he asks.
“Pack dinner,” Theo answers easily. His expression is benign, relaxed, but there’s something—intent to it. He manages to search Isaac’s face without necessarily making it look like that’s what he’s doing. “A pack dinner in your honor, actually. Scott didn’t mention it?”
He asks the question but he doesn’t actually look surprised when Isaac shakes his head no. His lips quirk, and he snorts a quiet, amused laugh.
“Well, you should come,” he concludes. “Scott’s feeble Machiavellian scheming abilities aside, I’m sure Ms. Mc—” He cuts himself off abruptly, and then takes a deep breath to seemingly steady himself before correcting, “Melissa would like to see you, if nothing else.”
Isaac can feel his eyebrows rise, curious. Theo grimaces.
“She threatened to ‘volunteer’ me for clean-up duty at the hospital if I called her Ms. McCall again,” he explains. Isaac laughs; yeah, that sounded like Melissa. Theo smiles, unruffled. He adds, “I’m sure Argent would like to see you, too,” softly.
Isaac grins at him. “What, no ‘Chris?’”
Theo just grins back. “He threatened to shoot me if I tried.”
He says it, but the lie’s obvious, and easy to spot, and—more to the point—meant to be spotted. Isaac isn’t sure whether the joke started with Theo or with Argent but he does know that it is a joke.
He thinks about that, and then he breathes; Allison in the back of his head with her soft lilting voice counting in, two, three; out, two, three.
He says, “Yeah, okay.”
He says, “Let’s go to a pack dinner.”
---
When they arrive at the McCalls’, neither of the McCalls are actually there, ironically. Argent is, though, and from the scent of the place Isaac has to quickly upgrade his label for the house from the McCalls’, to the McCall-Argent’s. He blinks, slowing to an unintentional stop just outside the front doorway, but Theo keeps going. Unthinking, automatic; comfortable with the house and sure of his own welcome. Isaac hurries to follow, after a second.
“I thought you went with Scott,” Theo is saying to Argent as Isaac is closing the front door behind himself.
Argent—rag in hands, though from the smell he’s wiping grease off his skin, and not gun oil, or anything more alarming—just shrugs. “Call came in from Araya at about the same time. We had to divide and conquer.”
Theo nods distractedly, but his attention isn’t on Argent any longer, but on the frankly massive number of skewered vegetables and meat that Argent has laid out on the kitchen island, marinating in Tetris-style arrangements of glass dishes and cutting boards. He starts to lean a little closer to one, and Argent immediately moves to intercept him, grabbing him by the back of the shirt and pulling him firmly away.
“No,” Argent states flatly. “You start spouting opinions on the menu, it’s going to open up a whole Pandora’s box for everyone else to start spouting opinions on the menu.” He jerks his chin towards the backyard. “Go supervise the brain trust trying to set up the hammock.”
“Hammock?” Theo wonders, sounding baffled even as he’s heading obediently for the sliding glass door. “It’s December.”
It leaves Isaac alone in the kitchen with Argent, and it’s not the world’s most comfortable silence that falls. Isaac swallows, and looks away, and down. Something like shame melds with the hard lump of grief that lives permanently between his ribs and tightens his throat like a vice.
“Hi, Chris,” he murmurs. His voice sounds shredded; practically a croak.
“It’s good to see you, Isaac,” Argent quietly replies.
And it’s so achingly familiar. So desperately, painfully familiar: Argent and Isaac standing in the middle of Argent’s empty apartment made even emptier after that horrible, unbearable night, Allison’s hand lying pale and bloodstained and limp on the dirty concrete. Argent saying: I appreciate the concern, but you don't have to stay. I'll be all right, and then saying: I've dealt with this before. I have a capacity and—an ability to compartmentalize my emotions.
Isaac confessing: I don’t, and burying his face in Argent’s shoulder when Argent had collapsed out of his rigid hold and reached for him.
Now, there’s another long pause, and then Isaac is jerking and looking up just in time to catch the briefest blur of color and the raw look on Argent’s face before Argent finishes pulling him into an embrace, tight and tighter as Isaac feels his own expression spasm, and brings his arms up to clutch at Argent’s shoulders in turn. Against his chest Isaac can feel Argent breathing: in, two, three; out, two, three.
He closes his eyes, and breathes when Argent does.
Argent releases him after a while. Isaac isn’t actually sure how long they’d just stood there in the middle of the McCall—the McCall-Argent—kitchen, just breathing in sync. He does know that his eyes are hot, and the smile he manages to give Argent is wobbly. Argent’s is a little steadier, but not by much.
Finally he claps Isaac on the shoulder. “Scott and others should be back within the hour.” He jerks his chin towards the backyard. “Maybe you can do me a favor and go supervise the supervisor.” Isaac’s not sure who he means until he remembers Argent’s earlier comment to Theo. Argent adds, “He tends to get himself in trouble when left to his own devices.”
But that just reminds Isaac: “What happened?” he asks quietly, his eyes searching Argent’s face.
Argent just shakes his head slightly. “Wait for Scott,” he instructs, not unkindly.
Isaac hesitates for a second longer, and then he nods, and flashes Argent another wobbly smile, and then he heads for the sliding door into the backyard, just like Theo had. In the reflection of the glass, he can see Argent brace both palms on the counter once Isaac’s back is turned, Argent’s head hanging low. He can hear Argent inhale one shuddery breath and then exhale it back out, just as shaky. In for three, out for three.
By the time Isaac is stepping out onto the porch, and sliding the door back closed behind himself, Argent’s breathing is steady, and even.
Out in the grass, stood over a chaotic collection of metal bars and plastic bags threatening to blow away in the wind and little pyramids of screws and washers and other hardware, Theo is complaining, “What is with this pack’s allergy to reading instruction manuals? I’m having flashbacks to you all trying to put together all my furniture,” to the four other people clustered around in various states of dishevelment.
“Instruction manuals?” one scoffs in response. He blows a raspberry, even as he’s trying and failing to connect two pieces of hardware with a bolt that’s clearly the wrong size. “Who needs ‘em? We do things live,” he declares, right over the top of Theo muttering clearly you do, Theo’s eyes on that same too-big bolt.
But then Theo seems to fully internalize that Isaac is outside, now, and he glances up, and over. “Hey, Isaac,” he greets, and signals him over with a jerk of his head. He also points to each of his compatriots in turn as he introduces, “Corey, Mason—” the one who’d made the retort about instructions manuals, “—and Nolan.” Theo’s tone gets a little drier as he adds, “You already met Alec.”
Alec—sat in the grass with one of those tiny, cheap allen wrenches that come with DIY furniture in his hands—grimaces slightly, but he doesn’t apologize for his earlier behavior. He’s sitting close enough to the person Theo had identified as Nolan that their crossed legs are practically overlapping, and even as Alec is pointedly not looking at Isaac, he is looking at first Nolan beside him, and then Mason across the way, and finally up to Theo. The glances are fast, clearly automatic, but intent; Isaac can see Alec’s nostrils flare as he looks from one person to the other, and his fingers around the wrench twitch.
Who’s he mad at, Isaac had asked earlier, and Theo had answered me, and then had explained—so off-hand and so casual as to be entirely brittle—that it’d been because Theo had ordered Alec to leave Theo behind to be tortured and murdered by a bunch of genocidal maniacs. Apparently Alec hadn’t been the only one Theo had ordered to flee.
Apparently it hadn’t only been Alec’s life that Theo had been trying to save.
Isaac’s caught up in thinking all this, and so he’s really not expecting it when Mason leans forward—clearly trying to get a better look at Isaac’s face—and winds up leaning directly into one of the metal poles lying in the grass. It clatters against the other pieces, sending up a huge racket and startling everyone gathered around, and by the time they’ve all jolted and sworn and Mason has flailed backwards—sending the metal poles clattering together again as the one he’d unintentionally leaned against falls—the absurdity of it all has broken the heaviness of the atmosphere.
And then Mason finishes sweeping away the remnants of it when he observes, “You were here for the whole kanima debacle.” His expression goes schoolkid curious, and more than a little salaciously interested. “Did Jackson really turn into a giant lizard?”
“Your boyfriend got kidnapped by the literal Wild Hunt,” Theo mutters incredulously, “and it’s the lizard thing you have trouble believing?”
But Mason just flaps a hand at him in a clear silence gesture; Theo rolls his eyes. Isaac just grins, and wonders, “What exactly did Jackson tell you?” already prepared for just a mountain of bullshit. Jackson may have become slightly less of an asshole after the whole murder-lizard thing, but it was like adding or subtracting numbers from infinity; slightly less of the kind of massive asshole Jackson had been was still an asshole.
Mason and Corey and—to a lesser extent—Nolan and Alec are still quizzing Isaac about Jackson-as-the-kanima, and the Alpha pack, and the Oni, when there’s a sudden convergence of engines in front of the house; Isaac recognizes the asthmatic wheeze of the Jeep, along with a handful of others. He stops mid-turn through one of the hammock’s screws and looks up, and out, trying to identify the sounds of the other cars and voices, but they’re all too tangled up with each other; he glances over at Theo automatically—Isaac had taken pity on him, and possibly also had taken Argent’s instructions to heart, and had sat down to help him set up the hammock while the other four watched and interrogated him—and the curve of Theo’s lips is subtle, and small, but there.
His pack is home, Isaac finds himself thinking nonsensically, and something twists in his chest. Theo glances over at him as it does, brow furrowing, and so Isaac has to get up, and dust himself off, and head towards the oncoming cacophony to escape the attention, well-intentioned as it may be.
Theo doesn’t comment, but Isaac feels Theo’s eyes on the back of his head as they head inside, the both of them getting overtaken by Corey and Mason and—more sedately—Nolan and Alec as they all head inside, too.
It’s exactly as loud as Isaac anticipated it being. There’s no emergency or really any reason for everyone to be yelling, as far as Isaac can tell, except that all of them are young—I am, too, Isaac finds himself thinking blankly, though he sure as hell doesn’t feel young—and boisterous, and excited to see each other. To be with each other. Corey and Mason and Alec and Nolan immediately mob Liam, who’s attempting to edge past the chaos with his hands full of carefully stacked brown dessert boxes without being noticed, while Scott and Malia and Stiles and Lydia and Derek all talk among themselves and to Theo and Argent, both of whom start peppering them with questions about their trip.
Isaac stands on the edge of all of it, just watching.
Except then Ms. McCall catches sight of him, and just instantly lets out a sharp, surprised gasp, and calls his name; Isaac feels a wobbly grin take his mouth, and he meets her halfway when she starts wiggling her way through the gathered crowd towards him.
“Isaac,” she breathes, when she’s managed to enfold him into her arms. “Oh, Isaac. It’s so good to see you.” Her arms are tight enough around his sides so as to actually be compressing his ribs a bit. Isaac could not possibly care less. He buries his face against the side of her head—there’s no getting around the fact that he’s taller than she is—and just holds on.
She does the same, and even starts rocking from side to side, just a bit, calm and soothing and so subtly that Isaac almost doesn’t notice. She doesn’t let go even as the chaotic conversations around them continue to crest and recede, and she keeps right on holding on even as she’s spotting Liam trying to sneak past her. “Those desserts were supposed to be here an hour ago, Liam Dunbar,” she says.
Liam squawks and immediately starts trying to defend himself, helped precisely not at all by Theo when Liam tries to drag him into the fray, and Isaac just laughs quietly and doesn’t let Ms. McCall go; he just stays anchored to her like a rock in the midst of the pack’s ebb and flow.
But around the time that Theo is saying, “Why the hell did you buy a hammock in December?” to Stiles—because, clearly, who else would be responsible—and Stiles is replying, “Prime deal days, baby!” like the true college hedonist he’s become, Isaac finally forces himself to pull back. Ms. McCall smiles at him as he does, her hands coming up to cup his face, and then she takes a step back—wiping underneath her own eyes as she goes—and briskly drops her hands onto her hips.
“I thought,” she starts, giving the gathered crew an unimpressed look, “that the idea here was that all of this—” she gestures to the food, and Liam still trying to wedge the desserts he’d picked up onto the last bit of free counter space, and the pack all horsing around her kitchen, “—would be ready by the time I got off-shift?”
There’s a rolling chorus of sorry, Ms. McCall’s!, and almost as a unit the pack really starts getting to work. Theo and Derek and Malia start helping Argent haul dishes of marinated kabobs out to the grill, Mason and Corey open up the fridge to help Liam find places for the desserts, and the rest start hunting down silverware and serving dishes and outdoor-safe placemats.
But Scott—Scott just stands in the midst of it all, perfectly calm and perfectly cool, and he asks, “You mind giving me a hand with the folding tables and chairs?”
And it’s such an innocuous question. There are no stakes to Isaac trailing Scott down to the basement and helping him haul the furniture there out into the backyard. But still Isaac finds his throat tightening, and his shoulders hunching, even as he’s jerkily nodding yes. Scott does him the immense favor of pretending that he doesn’t notice—though he does, Isaac recognizes the look that flashes over Scott’s face—and instead he just grins, and pivots around—lifting his arms to avoid a last-minute collision with Corey as Corey darts past him on his way somewhere—and starts leading the way towards the stairs down to the basement.
It’s exactly as Isaac remembers it, down to the chaotic spill of holiday-themed decorations never quite fully put away, and spilling out of beat-up cardboard boxes and half-closed plastic tubs, the lot of them mixed-in with the general collection of cast-offs from any suburban life; unstrung lacrosse sticks that Scott had always sworn he was going to get around to fixing, a child’s skateboard, scuffed and missing a wheel, a pile of faded and worn old scrubs that Ms. McCall intended to turn into rags at some point. Isaac finds himself slowing, as he steps down the stairs, and grinning.
Scott glances up at him when he reaches the bottom, and grins right back.
He also picks his way over to the far wall, against which the folding tables are leaning. But it’s as Scott’s doing that, that Isaac takes another deep breath in an effort to center himself, some—trying to reconcile the warm weight of memory (there in that corner he and Scott and Allison had sat and dug through the McCall’s halloween decorations; there on that beat-up, cast-off couch he and Scott had sat one night and just talked, hushed and hidden so as not to wake Ms. McCall), with the strange, twisted up feeling that’d taken up root in his chest when he’d looked at the pack—at the McCall pack, not the Hale pack, or even the former-Hale pack, gathered around and moving almost as one indistinguishable unit—and he catches his first real mouthful of Scott’s scent.
Upstairs it’d been buried underneath the smell of food and the sharp winter air that Scott and the others had brought with them from the road, but down here it’s his own. Down here it’s his own, and it’s not at all what Isaac remembers. Smelling it is like a punch to the gut; Isaac literally stops, and folds over a bit, one hand on a nearby wall for balance.
Scott notices. “Isaac?” he asks, immediately moving back towards him, but Isaac shakes his head, then waves a hand at him that stays frozen up in the air: an unintentional stop.
Scott stops.
“What is it?” Scott wonders, hushed. Mindful of the supernatural ears upstairs, probably, and Isaac feels his mouth wobble.
He hesitates. Scott’s still staring at him. “You smell like them,” Isaac finally manages.
It’s not a comment that’s going to make any sense. Isaac has given Scott literally none of the information he needs to understand, but it doesn’t seem to matter; Scott’s expression still clears with surprise, and then goes soft.
“They’re my pack,” he replies, not apologetic—never apologetic—but sympathetic.
He doesn’t add the now, but Isaac hears it anyway. He swallows. He remembers thinking earlier: I’m not a part of this pack anymore. He breathes in the proof, Scott’s scent so familiarly unfamiliar in his nose.
But Scott—Scott just looks at him, and then he says, “So are you, though,” softly.
Isaac gives him a strange look, the shock of it enough to knock loose, for a moment, that twisted-up feeling still buried in his chest; pushing up against all his organs. But Scott just smiles, unfazed.
“That was the whole point of why Monroe—” He must catch the confused flicker on Isaac’s face, because he quickly explains, with a self-deprecating little smile. “The bad guy, that’s why she went after you. She told Theo that was the reason.”
Isaac just stares. “I still don’t—”
“Banshees who join packs become especially attuned to members of that pack,” Scott interrupts gently. “That’s what Monroe told Theo. That’s why she said she went after you.”
“Lydia,” Isaac realizes.
Scott’s small smile becomes a little larger, if a little more sad. “I told you it was a complicated story.”
Isaac swallows. He manages, after a few long beats: “That reminds me. You still owe me thirty-two dollars and fifty-seven cents.”
Scott laughs.
He laughs, and then he asks, “Do you want to meet them? My pack.” More earnestly he adds, “I’d like you to meet them.” And Isaac’s been gone from Beacon Hills for years, but at no point in that time, apparently, did Scott learn how to disguise the hope that sometimes creeps out of his true-alpha heart, and into his voice.
And so Isaac—something creeping out of his own heart, and into his own voice—just points out, voice croaky: “Technically I already met them.”
Scott just grins; he’d heard whatever was in Isaac’s voice, that’s what that grin means. Quietly he suggests, “Meet them again.”
There’s more than just hope in Scott’s voice when he says that. Isaac doesn’t respond right away, his eyes flicking over Scott’s face.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Okay.”
Scott blinks. “Really?” he wonders, like he hadn’t expected to win so fast, like Isaac didn’t have to head back upstairs at some point; like Isaac was going to be able to disappear directly out of the McCall—the McCall-Argent—basement without ever seeing any of the now-McCall pack face-to-face again. Whatever smothering thing had taken up residence in Isaac’s chest, it starts to crack and crumble away.
“Yeah,” he confirms, his amusement—his fondness—coloring his tone.
And Scott abandons the folding tables for a moment, and reaches forward to just grab Isaac by the shoulder, and haul him in for a tight, almost bruising hug. Isaac laughs—Scott, always one for the dramatic gestures—but it’s a wet sound; Isaac’s eyes are hot again. He drops his head to Scott’s shoulder, and breathes; in, two, three; out, two, three.
He blinks in surprise once he has. “Malia, huh?” he observes, pulling back. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
Scott flushes a little, but his scent goes liquid, and a little shy. “You and me both,” he agrees, and taps Isaac lightly in the shoulder with a closed fist, before clapping his hands briskly. “Okay! Tables. Let’s do this. Otherwise I can guarantee the hungry horde will just start eating wherever like the heathens they are.”
Isaac laughs. He goes to help Scott with the tables.
---
Hours later, after they’ve hauled the tables upstairs, and the hungry horde has eaten wherever regardless, and then proceeded to collapse around the backyard and house in ever-shifting clumps, the absolute last thing Isaac wants to do is leave the warmth of the McCall—the McCall-Argent—living room and the warmth of the McCall pack inside it. But he does need to know what the hell happened a few days ago, and so Scott needs to tell him. He makes reluctant eye contact with Scott, who looks back and grimaces, but then nods. He starts to push himself to his feet, Isaac doing the same.
From the subtle way Scott tries to move once he stands, it’s clear that he has no desire to make any of the others relive what happened: he gestures Isaac towards the back door with a silent jerk of his head, his other hand patting out flat—stay—when Malia frowns and shifts like she was going to stand, too. But it doesn’t work: Theo notices, like he seems to notice everything, and climbs to his feet without prompting. To do it he has to push Liam gently away, because at one point in the night, at some point when Isaac wasn’t fully paying attention, Theo had half-sprawled in one corner of the couch, and Liam had half-sprawled against him. Liam frowns as he’s shifted and clearly goes to stand as well, but Theo shakes his head, murmurs stay here low enough that Isaac almost doesn’t hear him. Liam has no intention of staying anywhere, Isaac can immediately tell, except then Theo adds, “Please,” and Liam drops heavily back down like someone had cut his strings.
Still, he watches Theo as Theo goes to join Scott at the back door, and Isaac watches him.
He gets the feeling, searching the unreadable look on Liam’s face, that Liam had meant his closeness to Theo to be natural, an expected by-product of the newness of his and Theo’s status, but what it actually is—maybe only obvious to Isaac—is half-terrified, a little superstitious. Three days ago Liam had had to watch Theo nearly choke to death on his own liquified organs, and bodily holding Theo down, half-covering him like he could physically shield him and keep him in place and out of danger isn’t going to do a thing for whatever tragedy might come after them next, but it’s something that Liam could do and so he’s doing it.
Isaac blinks then, looking away; feeling oddly voyeuristic. But he pulls his gaze back up to Scott and Theo stood waiting for him, he sees that Theo is studying him. Isaac has to struggle not to hunch when he catches Theo’s gaze; there’s a sudden thrum to the air that Theo probably doesn’t even realize he’s giving off, an intensity that says he doesn’t know how to handle the Pandora’s box of capital-I issues Monroe’s attack had cracked open any more than Liam, and Isaac winces and then flashes him a somewhat wobbly smile. Theo blanches, instantly and immediately, the color draining from his face as he seems to realize what he’d been doing. He drops his eyes, looks over and up at Scott: follows him out into the backyard when Scott slips through the doorway.
Isaac jogs to catch up with them.
“Alright,” Scott says, once Isaac has slid the door shut behind himself. “I guess we should start at the beginning.”
And he tries to, clearly, but he runs into two problems. The first is that, his best efforts be damned, the others won’t let him tell the story on his own: Stiles and then Derek and then Lydia and Malia all file out over the course of his attempting telling, interrupting Scott and then interrupting Scott to fill in their own perspectives, their own memories. Liam and Corey and Mason, followed immediately by Alec and Nolan, end up doing the same, until Isaac is having to beg, “Wait, wait. Hold on. What?” and forcing some of them, all of them, to start over, to go back to this or that part of the story; to go back to the beginning, which by necessity seems to begin a little earlier every time.
Scott’s second problem ends up being Theo, and the tight-mouthed, pinched-expression way that he stops Scott from glossing over, as he gets to a certain point: who Theo is; how he came to be in Beacon Hills to be captured and tortured and nearly murdered; how he developed the skill-set that Isaac had seen unintentionally on-display all day. “So anyway,” Theo says, grit-jawed after he’s filled in several missing gaps, Scott—and Liam, for that matter—equally mule-mouthed off to their various sides. “That’s why the Doctors—”
“—the Dread Doctors,” Liam mutters, not exactly sotto voce.
“—came to Beacon Hills,” Theo finishes, very deliberately—from what Isaac can tell—not looking at Liam sat tense and unhappy at his side.
“…okay,” Isaac eventually says, attention not on Theo but on Scott, who obviously wants to say something like it doesn’t matter, except that Theo shoots him such a preemptive and vicious look that Scott stops himself, because clearly: it does matter.
And Isaac gets that. Something he’s always known, that he’s been the beneficiary of more than once: Scott forgives easily, and that’s to his credit, but Isaac understands in a way that Scott doesn’t always—but Theo clearly does—that regrets are a part of people, just as much as their virtues. That sometimes regrets can’t be forgotten, or forgiven, because they’re the necessary cornerstones on top of which a person builds the rest of whatever else they manage to become; that without them—without the heavy, ballast-weight of them—a person would no longer be themselves. Theo looks at Isaac, then, Isaac turning his head automatically to meet him, and there’s a bitter sort of half-reluctant, half-helpless mix of self-loathing and self-acceptance in the grimace he wears. He nods once, after a moment, a quiet acknowledgement of the understanding that he must see on Isaac’s face: two people who’d managed to become something more than the sum of their regrets, in spite of it all.
“Okay,” Isaac says, more strongly; still looking at Theo. “Tell me the rest.”
It’s late by the time they do. Scott wraps up explaining how they’d saved Theo’s life from the mistletoe splinters Monroe had made him swallow—Isaac having to force down bile, because jesus christ—and then peters out, spreading his hands a little helplessly as he says, “So, there you have it.”
Isaac spends a few moments just sitting in the resultant silence, looking around at the pack—at Scott’s pack—scattered around the McCall—the McCall-Argent—backyard and then he thinks: yeah, there he probably did have it. He breathes—in, two, three; out, two three—and looks back at Scott.
“So everyone’s—okay, then?” he checks. “It’s over?”
But it’s Theo who ends up replying, not Scott. He snorts, wry but not bitter. “This is Beacon Hills,” he says, sat cross-legged now in the grass with Liam’s head in his lap, Liam having tilted over sideways somewhere around the story’s three-quarters’ mark. His fingers play over Liam’s forehead, the hair at his temples, smoothing it back and carding through it in gentle, careful motions. “‘Over’ is relative.”
“So’s ‘okay,’” Liam adds, sounding more than a little sleepy; he doesn’t bother opening his eyes as he says it.
“Granted,” Scott allows, grinning. “But yeah,” he agrees, more seriously, when Isaac looks up at him. “It’s over, and everyone’s okay.”
“…okay,” Isaac agrees after a moment, and finds himself—a moment after that—grinning right back.
---
He wakes up late the next morning, and slowly. Not exactly groggy—he has enough experience recovering from injuries or complete days- and weeks-long catastrophes to know what groggy feels like—but less sharply than he’s used to; less immediately there. He blinks a few times at the unfamiliar wall in front of his face, and then rolls over sideways, so he can look out into the rest of the room.
The McCall—the McCall-Argent—basement is exactly as he remembers it, both from last night and dozens of other nights before. The perpetually half-packed holiday decorations he’d tripped over on his way back from the bathroom, the laundry baskets half-full of clothes. Beneath him the cast-off couch is exactly as uncomfortable as he had recalled it being, even before he’d sat down on it late last night, wondering every step of the way what the hell he was doing.
“Stay here tonight?” Scott had asked as the discussion in the backyard had finally been breaking up, like Isaac was going to make a run for his car and drive the five and a half hours back on the wrong side of midnight. “It’s going to be cramped, but we can find you a place.”
Isaac hadn’t originally understood what he meant, until Scott had led him back inside and he’s seen the sheer number of air mattresses and sleeping bags and random blankets that were being retrieved from—all over, as far as he could tell, and furniture was being pushed back and relocated to make space in the living room, the dining room; anywhere that could be made to give up room, seemingly. Which made sense, really: Scott’s pack had grown, and every single member of it was cramming themselves into his house.
And, clearly: it wasn’t the first time they’d done it.
It’d been Isaac who’d suggested the couch in the basement, stood by Derek—Lydia on his other side—and watching the hissing argument between Stiles and Scott as Scott tried to argue that Isaac should get the single guest bedroom. “There’s three of us, Scott,” Stiles had reminded him, and Isaac had blinked, and looked sideways at Derek and then Lydia beyond him, and thought: oh. Derek had side-eyed him right back, and Isaac had been able to tell that he’d been waiting for some kind of reaction, but honestly all Isaac could think to do was blink again, and then say, “Oh, uh—congratulations,” quietly enough not to interrupt Scott and Stiles still being Scott and Stiles a few feet away.
Derek’s lips had twitched, and after a moment Isaac’s had twitched right back, and that’d been it: Derek had clapped him on the shoulder, and then gone to wade into the argument, and Isaac had stood by Lydia, then, until finally he’d been able to wonder, “But what about the couch in the basement?” over the noise.
Laying on the couch in the basement, Isaac closes his eyes. Three more breaths, he stills himself, counting them off slowly in his head, and then he pushes himself to his feet.
The house is oddly silent; especially notable after the chaos of last night. From what Isaac can tell as he summits the stairs onto the main floor, the house had been put back to rights—no sign of air mattresses or sleeping bags or misplaced furniture that he could see—and left nearly spotless, not so much as a forlorn water glass left behind. Isaac stops on his way into the kitchen, bemused by the realization that he’d somehow slept through the apparent clean-up.
A mug suddenly enters his field of vision as someone says, “Here,” and Isaac jumps. He traces his eyes from the mug to the hand holding it and up the arm to its owner’s face, and finds himself looking at Theo. Grinning, Theo wiggles the mug just a little; not enough to slop its contents over the side, but enough to draw Isaac’s attention back to it.
“Thanks,” Isaac says belatedly, and takes it. He nearly sputters on his first sip. “How much sugar did you put in this?”
Theo’s grin widens—becomes a little more shit-eating—and he perches himself on the arm of the couch, sipping from his own mug. “Enough to help kick start your metabolism, clear out the last of that—” he wiggles his fingers by his temple, “—in your head.”
Isaac studies him. “How’d you know?”
Theo shrugs. “Same thing used to happen to me.” He looks out the living room window, away from Isaac. “Still does sometimes.”
Isaac studies his profile for a second longer, and then pulls his attention away, towards the same window. He drinks his sugar-laden coffee, and does feel it perking him up a little more with every sip. “Where is everyone?” he asks after a moment.
Theo rolls his shoulders, slouches a little more against the couch. He looks back at Isaac, finally. “High school crew had to go to school,” he says. “Scott, Derek, Argent, and the others went to go check out the town, make sure there are no remnants of Monroe’s burrowing in anywhere.”
Isaac cocks his head, surprised. “And you didn’t go with him?”
Theo’s expression goes dry. “I am,” he says wryly, “apparently still recovering.”
He says it like it’s ridiculous, like he was inviting Isaac to share in his clearly humoring the pack being over-protective, and unnecessarily careful. But his fingertips tap out a staccato rhythm against his mug. His eyes dart sideways, away from Isaac, and his mouth flattens out, pressing all the color out of his lips for a brief second, before his jaw relaxes again. After a moment he sighs.
“I’m under strict orders not to let you leave before Scott gets back, by the way,” he says.
Isaac blinks. “What exactly is he expecting you to do if I actually did try?” he wonders, genuinely curious.
Theo’s lips twitch. “Pretty sure he didn’t think that far ahead.” He studies Isaac, his expression sobering. “And I didn’t really think it’d be an issue.”
Isaac stares at him, taken aback. Theo laughs, quietly, but—not at Isaac, Isaac doesn’t think. At the situation, maybe.
At himself, potentially.
He also offers up an explanation without Isaac having to ask for one. “I hate to give that psychopath credit for anything, but Monroe was right about one thing.” He looks back over at Isaac. “Banshees do become attuned to fellow pack members.”
“But I’m not—” Isaac starts to protest.
“You are, though,” Theo interrupts, not unkindly. “Otherwise Monroe’s plan wouldn’t have worked.”
Isaac doesn’t answer for a long few moments. “But I left,” he argues, quiet.
One corner of Theo’s mouth kicks up. “Not in any way that matters,” he counters. “Not here,” he adds, tapping two fingers against his chest; two dull thumps that Isaac nonetheless hears bell-clear.
Isaac manages to hold his eyes for a whole five seconds, maybe even six, before he has to look away. He winds up staring at the dregs of the coffee left in his mug.
“That seems uncharacteristically romantic, coming from you,” he finally manages.
Theo laughs, loud and surprised-sounding, almost. Isaac looks back at him, surprised himself to find his lips twitching upwards.
“Yeah, well,” Theo allows, unfolding from his seated position and plucking the mug from Isaac’s hands as he heads towards the kitchen. “I have been spending a lot of time with the true alpha lately.”
He heads to the sink, and starts rinsing out their mugs. Probably he could just slot them into the dishwasher, but instead he soaps up the sponge, starts scrubbing them clean. Isaac leans against the doorway, and watches.
“It’s a nice thought,” Isaac finally admits, as Theo is slotting the now dripping-mugs into the drying rack by the sink. “But at some point I really do need to leave.”
Theo takes his time shutting off the faucet, wiping down the excess water that had splashed onto the counter. He folds the dishtowel he’d used with precise flicks of his wrists, and then folds it over the oven handle. He turns around to put his back to it once he’s done, and braces his hands on either side of his hips. He studies Isaac.
He asks, “Do you?”
---
An hour later in the McCall—the McCall-Argent—driveway, Scott hands him two folded-over twenties with a flourish, both bills still crisp enough to have clearly just been retrieved from an ATM. “As promised, thirty-two dollars and fifty-seven cents. Plus, uh, interest,” he adds.
Isaac hesitates, and then accepts the bills. “Interest for what, exactly?” he wonders, more than a little sly.
Scott blinks. “Uh, hazard pay,” he offers after a second. He grins, wide and unselfconscious. “This is Beacon Hills after all.”
Isn’t it just, Isaac thinks. The majority of the pack had returned, and over Scott’s shoulder Isaac can see them through the windows moving around, shoving easily at each other; laughing. He retrieves his wallet for lack of anything better to do, and slips the twenties inside.
“Thanks,” he says, as he slips his wallet back into his pocket.
“Anytime,” Scott says, then: “Seriously, Isaac—anytime.”
Isaac looks back at him, thrown by the sudden change in his tone. Scott grins at him again, but it’s a smaller flicker of a thing. It doesn’t stay.
“You’re, what, offering to keep me supplied with gas money?” Isaac asks, instinctively going for the joke.
And Scott does roll his eyes. “I’m offering to keep you supplied with it if you’re using it to come here, certainly.”
He smiles again.
Isaac—can’t quite smile back, but he does hold Scott’s eyes, which feels like more of an accomplishment, really.
“Yeah,” he agrees, lamely. “Yeah, I’ll—yeah.”
Scott doesn’t push him. He does the opposite, actually: he pulls Isaac in, giving him a tight, lingering hug. He steps back, finally.
“Anytime,” he repeats, firm.
Isaac nods, throat too tight to speak.
It takes him twenty minutes to get out of Beacon Hills; to start counting exits back to Visalia. I have an apartment, he reminds himself when he passes the first, a job, when he passes the second, I have a life there, but then he realizes his hand on his chest, exactly where Theo had tapped two of his fingers against his own chest and told Isaac that he hadn’t left the pack in any way that matters.
He pulls over.
God, what am I doing, he thinks, and he doesn’t have an answer for that, so instead he does the only thing he can think of; he pictures Allison with her clever, capable hands running over her bow out in the Preserve that one afternoon, and he breathes: in, two, three; out, two, three.
He does it again, and again.
When he turns his car back on, and flips the U-turn, it’s easy: there’s no one left around to stop him.