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”I meant you. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
He sits by the still form of the werewolf laid out on the pallet Erica had occupied only days before. Filled with an untamable fire when awake, his alpha’s new second now looks impossibly young and frail, reeks of wolfsbane and pain, even after Derek took him to see the man who claims to be nothing but a vet - as if anything in this town is exactly as it seems. McCall should have listened to his own orders.
I don’t want you to get hurt. He's wondered before how Scott McCall managed to inspire such faith in people. Now, he knows. He probably didn’t realize it, but he’s the first person to say something like that to Isaac in years - in the years since his brother died fighting a war he wasn’t even sure he believed in, yet felt compelled to join because of a love for his country. Sure, Derek has tried to protect him, in his own way, but he’s never actually looked at Isaac and said, “Be careful,” in that direct, open way that dorky, socially awkward Scott McCall did tonight. Even the memory of that moment guts him, leaves him breathless, because if someone who barely knows him - who until recently had been fighting against him - can feel like that about Isaac, then maybe he isn’t as far gone as he thought.
Maybe there’s a chance that he can grow up to be the kind of man his mother and his brother always promised him he would be. Maybe he’ll be able to rise above the lonely years of pain and terror under his father’s iron fist and actually make something of himself, leave the world with something more than his father’s cold cynicism and anger to remember the Lahey family by.
Or maybe it has nothing to do with Isaac. Maybe, when it boils down to it, Scott McCall is simply better than the rest of them. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because he knows now that he will follow him anywhere, will fight beside him, will protect him, because he cares. Because he gave something to Isaac that he thought he’d never have again.
He gave him something to believe in.