Work Text:
Scott has plenty of memories that cause his heart to stutter and scent to tank noticeably before he can clamp down on his body and push aside the hurt. There have been instances since he had been bitten that are nightmare-inducing, bad decisions he has made, all that linger in his thoughts no matter how hard he tries to push them away or wants so badly to change if given just one more chance.
He usually has the pack, Stiles, to help distract him. Keep him focused on what is important and where his goals need to be—even something as innocuous as Lacrosse games or which new teacher is less likely to give detention over a missed class. Now Scott feels wrong-footed dealing with the fallout of the Dread Doctors and his pack bonds remain strained. The confrontations that happened have left a lasting scar that feels tangible to the alpha. He has healed because they are still a pack, even if sometimes he feels that means different things to each of them now.
Lydia still eyes him with quiet disappointment that causes her lips to purse tightly and make her voice a tad too flat when she deigns to speak to him. Liam walks around with a combination of anger, embarrassment, and regret. The last which stinks up the room he enters with a scent so bitter and cloying it hurts to be around his beta most days. Malia is resentful, but not towards him, though her bond is just as stretched and Scott cannot figure out why for the life of him.
Stiles... Stiles reeks of self-disgust until he sees Scott. Then it is carefully concealed anger, disbelief, and accusation—he still blames him for his dad getting hurt, for not being able to stave off death and be in two places at once. For not believing him implicitly the moment Theo reappeared or being able to connect his wild-eyed confession as self-defense. For not being enough of a human. Scott leaves Stiles be if only because he has his own thoughts on the entire fiasco of a year.
Scott was able to muster enough strength and luck that the Beast had been beaten and Mason saved by proxy was an extraordinary feat. But Scott has also had to literally bury his feelings; watching as the earth cracked open wide and dragged his heart down into the Skinwalkers prison along with the first Chimera. His English teacher would call it poetic. Scott calls it doleful.
None of the pack knows what started between the two of them pre-betrayal. It has never come up afterward either. Theo wormed himself so close he needn’t have used his claws to rip into Scott's chest. Knowing that whatever they had shared—fingers trailing alongside his tattoo after sex, both still a tangle of limbs on Scott's bed, breaths mingling and Theo looking at him with that smile of his that lit up his face just right that his heart skipped simply looking at him—was nothing more than a means to an end, for lack of better word, gutted Scott.
There is no one he can speak to who would understand, or at this point care. It makes so much sense why Theo had been skeptical of telling the pack anything, though his excuse at the time had been Stiles and his overwhelming paranoia.
Scott is so very, very stupid.
So he has no option other than to pretend everything is ok. That he is not walking around with pain in his chest so raw it may as well have been physical. He has to bury his feelings, along with everything else that Theo has given him.