Chapter Text
Stiles Stilinski is a kind boy, and a smart boy, and a very, very sad boy. His life usually feels like it’s in a state of flux, and he tries so, so hard to keep up with everyone, and with everything, but sometimes people fall through the cracks. More specifically, the person who needs him most falls through the cracks.
Maybe if his life’d been less flux-y, he’d have noticed Isaac sooner.
Maybe Derek Hale wouldn’t have had to bite Isaac to get him on Stiles’s radar.
Isaac Lahey is 11 years old when Stiles gives his Biology presentation. He knows Stiles’s mom is sick (like everyone else in Beacon Hills), but he didn’t know how bad it was. He’d heard the words “cancer” and “malignant” and “coma” and “non-responsive” on tv before, but they sound different coming from someone who used to give you their chocolate milk during lunch period. Their teacher, Ms. Denver, sits with tented fingers, the tips white with strain, but she looks calm and somewhat interested. Isaac eyes his own flashcards and poster board with a frown-he hadn’t realized that their reports on disease had to be so…detailed. Half of what Stiles is saying slips through the white space between his ears and is lost-the words are too complex, too much too fast for a sixth-grader with focusing problems to process. Only one thing really gets through to Isaac: what “chemotherapy” is. There is no way people actually have to take poison to get better. No way at all.
Isaac is frowning, forcing himself to focus on Stiles. Stiles is quivering at the front of the room, and he deserves to have someone looking at him without looking down on him, deserves to have an anchor somewhere, even if the anchor’s just a scared little kid. Stiles picks up the three-way display with weirdly steady hand; he handles it like it’s made of glass instead of cardboard and opens it like he’s afraid it’s going to shatter all over him. Once it finally unfolds all the way, he steps back, and there is a collective gasp. Many of the girls start to cry. Isaac doesn’t gasp, but he feels hot, fat tears pricking up at the edges of his vision, stinging him, and for about a second he’s sure his dad’ll see and he’ll spend the night in the freezer and his heart speeds up and he suddenly needs to pee but no, no, he’s at school. He’s safe right now. He looks around, hunching in on himself, and tears roll down his cheeks; he knows people will remember this. He feels like some great being’s just tattooed “Isaac Lahey Cries Like A Girl” straight across his forehead. He shudders, tries to set his face to show the resolve he feels: he’s crying over something that matters, and maybe that’s worth the brand.
Stiles gulps hard, looks vaguely confused. Takes a deep, deep breath. Lets it out real slow. Points at the first picture, the bright one of Ms. Stilinski in the kitchen. “This is my mom a year ago. She was totally fine, and really happy, and the doctors said she was healthy.” Stiles’s finger lingers on the corner of the grinning woman’s face, and then drags down to the bottom left picture. “This is Mom a week before the diagnosis. She was tired a lot, and she kept getting headaches. She thought maybe she was coming down with the flu or something, so she went to the doctor. That was about six months ago.” He swallows again, and Isaac can hear a dry little click, even though he’s four desks back and three over from where Stiles is talking. Isaac can hear the clock and people breathing around him and his tears hitting the desk, and he’s confused for a moment before he realizes why it’s so quiet. No one is talking or even breathing hard but Stiles.
Isaac focuses in on Stiles again, and sees his hand drag over to the upper-middle, a picture of the sweet, short-haired woman smiling brightly out through her dim skin, eyes shining even weighed down by large purple bags. “This one is of her about three months ago, after the diagnosis. We found out she had Acute Adult Myeloid Leukemia and a tumor in her head. The tumor was inoperable. That means they can’t do anything about it.” Stiles is shaking now. He’s pinching his mouth down so hard his lips are white. His amber eyes are watery and still for once.
Stiles’s shaking, pale hand drops down and presses the edge of the next picture back against the glue. “This one’s from two months ago. She started staying in the hospital all the time. The doctor said that even though we were aggressive in the treatment, the cancer was still stronger than she was. He said that she’d only last a few more weeks. She couldn’t eat without throwing up, and she kept spitting up blood. Her insides are dying here.” This picture looks like she’s about to fall over a very high ledge. Isaac can see that she’ll be gone soon. It’s obvious in the lines of her mouth. She’s staring out the window, and Isaac is sure that she didn’t know Stiles was looking, especially not that he was taking a picture—she’d have smiled for him. Isaac wants to hug Stiles tight and not let him go, because that’s what he’d want to happen to him if his mom looked like that. Stiles’s breathing’s getting ragged, and Isaac feels thunder in his own chest.
Just stop. Please just stop. You got an A. I promise you got an A, Stiles, please just sit down, you’re hurting yourself.
Shining amber glances at dripping blue, and Stiles half-smiles. “She was still okay, mostly. Still my mom. But here-” he points decisively at the top-right picture “-well, right before here, really, she kind of…snapped. A lot.” He wilts, like Isaac’s mom’s hydrangeas during the drought last summer. Like Isaac does when his dad gets the belt out. “That happens with people with brain tumors. The tumor’s pressing on things it shouldn’t be, making stuff hard for her brain. She stopped moving on her left side. She yelled a lot. The doctors said she didn’t mean what she was saying, but…well…it was pretty convincing.” Stiles’s eyes are back to their usual swivel, trying to look everywhere at once, barely able to focus on anything. His entire frame looks like it’s buzzing, and Isaac gets scared. Before he was uncomfortable, sure, and he was nervous, and he was afraid, but that’s just his normal state. Now he’s not afraid for himself—he’s afraid for Stiles, and that’s a lot worse.
Please just come sit down in front of me and talk non-stop and twitch around like a weirdo. Every time you open your mouth, you’re ripping yourself open, I can see it. Please.
But Stiles is resolute. The wavering line that is his mouth twitches helplessly as he touches the picture of his mother in a hospital bed, smooths it against the glue, patting at her bed like he can still smooth down the covers. “This is her right now. Well, not right now, this was last week, but it’s pretty close to where she is now. She…she doesn’t move much, now. And next week, Dad…well, Dad and I…probably mostly me, decided that we were gonna unplug her. The stuff she’s hooked up to-” Stiles’s ever-flailing hands, hands that’ve been so still except to touch the pictures of his mom, fly out and dance in their normal jerky movements all around his head for a moment before he reels them in- “all that stuff around her, that’s all that’s keeping her alive right now, and she’s ‘code blue’d twice now, and they’re pretty sure she’s not in there anymore-” he takes a moment to face his classmates and knock against the sides of his head “-I mean, her brain, her brain’s not working right anymore and even if she wakes up, which she won’t, she’ll be a veggie. And not like broccoli or carrots or anything like that, she’ll be like a baby, that poops and eats and pukes and probably cries but doesn’t learn, and she won’t ever go back to being my mom again. So we’re going to turn her off. Her body at least. We’re gonna kill her.” Stiles’s eyes are defiant, blazing, still a little soggy around the edges but daring anyone in the room to tell him he’s doing bad. Daring anyone to verbalize the question that at least half the people in the room have to be asking themselves-Why would you want to kill your own mom?
Isaac feels the thought flicker somewhere in the back of his head for a second before coming to float over his eyes, but he snatches it back and shakes the life out of it. He’s mad at himself for even thinking it. He doesn’t get it—and hopes he doesn’t ever need to—but he’s pretty sure that the guy who still brings everybody Valentines (the cool shiny ones with the superheroes and everything) on Valentine’s Day, even though you’re only supposed to give them to people you like like now—wouldn’t kill his own mom for no reason. There’s got to be something about it he doesn’t understand all the way, so he trusts Stiles. The boy obviously knows what he’s talking about.
So that’s why he’s nodding to himself with tears rolling down his cheeks and his teeth crushing his bottom lip between them when amber meets blue again. Every single ounce of fight drains out of Stiles, like somebody opened a spigot on his back and it all poured out onto the floor. Stiles mumbles something, then clears his throat and says,“It’s not fair.” Then louder, “It’s not fair. It’s not fair! She’s my mom! She’s my mom and she’s got to die and we have to do it because we’ve gotten too good at keeping people alive!” He takes a great shuttering breath he’s all limp and he’s definitely sobbing and he continues, screaming now.
Isaac isn’t afraid-okay, maybe he’s a little afraid, he’s not good with the yelling—but he understands grief. He does. When his brother Camden died in Iraq this past summer, his dad was like this for weeks. Isaac wasn’t that torn up, which was maybe a terrible thing to think, but he and his brother tried to keep out of each other’s way and that was about it. He feels bad for not feeling bad though, and he hopes that made up for it a little. His dad, though…he went crazy. He drank a lot more and started hitting Isaac more than he had since Mom left when he was nine. She came back before his tenth birthday at least, but still, it was the worst thing. Isaac was terrified that she’d go again and he found her, made her promise that she wouldn’t leave him alone with his dad ever again, and she told Dad that if she found another bruise on Isaac then she’d leave and take him with her. She promised. His dad agreed, but around the last week of summer vacation he’d found the freezer in a garage sale on 3rd Street and he didn’t need bruises to make Isaac hurt and hurt and hurt anymore—
But there it was, he’d zoned out again. He had a bad habit of doing that when people yelled, even in his general direction. He went somewhere else, and the somewhere else was maybe not very good but at least it wasn’t currently happening. Stiles isn’t in the room anymore, and neither is Ms. Denver, and Stiles’s mom looks like she’s staring at him from the cardboard, and he has no idea what he’s supposed to be doing right now. He taps Erica Reyes’s shoulder (the pretty blond girl who half the people in class are afraid of because she has seizures like Caesar, and that’s actually pretty cool to him); she doesn’t even look up from her copy of The Call of the Wild when she tells him, “Pull out your workbook and do pages thirty-through-thirty-six. If you did them already—which you should have, it was homework yesterday—you can talk or whatever. Just don’t be too loud.” She flips her page, like she was still reading while she was talking, but he knows she’s just pretending.
“Erica.” She looks up as he says her name. He pauses for a second, tasting it. They’ve known each other since first grade—as have most of the students in the Beacon Hills school system—and this is maybe the fifth time he’s ever spoken her name out loud. For a second he’s reminded of sour-coated gummy worms, but he pushes on. “What else did Stiles say? I got to ‘too good at keeping people alive’ and then…you know.”
She looks startled, then vaguely affronted, but she nods. Even though there’s a solid block of six people around him—in front of, diagonal to, and behind—Erica’s always the one he asks when he shuts off in class. She’s the only one who doesn’t ask him stupid questions like ‘why’. “Angry stuff about doctors that he probably didn’t mean, lots of crying, and he screamed for about a solid minute. If there’s one thing you can say about Stilinski, he’s got breath control.” She leans down and affectionately pats her clarinet case, like it’s a cat or something, and now it’s his turn to feel affronted.
“Are you serious right now? The guy freaked out in class about his dying mom and all you can say about him is that he has awesome breath control? I think maybe you’re a little too obsessed with band at the moment.” He’s glaring at her and she tries to look uninterested, but he reads the fear in the set of her shoulders and he tries to stab the anger to death inside his head. “Sorry. Sorry. That was mean.” He takes a deep breath and stares hard at his desk, his eyes burning again. He hadn’t even realized he’d stopped crying. “I don’t like making people scared. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not scared!” Erica swats his shoulder and he jumps and flinches away without thinking about it. He tries so, so hard not to look at her but now the tears are coming freaking again and he just has to make sure she’s not rearing back to punch him or something and he sees her looking scared again and ugh can’t he do anything right? “Hey…” Her voice is lowered, like he’s a spooked dog and she’s trying to soothe him, and it makes this heavy rage that tastes like onions and copper broil up in his throat, but he shoves it down, because that’s kind of what he tastes when he says ‘Dad’ now and he doesn’t want to taste it if he doesn’t have to. “Hey, I’m sorry too, okay? I just…I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Isaac’s eyes blaze up and he sits up straighter, angles himself both towards and away from her—shoulders towards, hips away, twisting himself up. “You didn’t hurt me! I just…I don’t like to be touched! That’s all!” He glances around quickly, desperately hoping no one heard their little exchange (doesn’t need Isaac Lahey Gets Beaten Up By Girls on there with Cries Like A Girl), and it looks like he’s got his wish-most people’ve moved their desks together and are babbling about the scene that’d just played out before them. Lydia Martin’s voice is the loudest, and he feels a weird delicious heat in his belly at the sound of her. Then he realizes what she’s actually saying and he kind of wants to ask Erica to punch her in the face for him. Then, the biggest favor he’d ever asked her was for a piece of gum last week, and she’d said no, so that might not go over well.
Lydia: “He totally had like a meltdown! Poor guy—I bet we should all just ignore him for the next couple weeks, let him get himself straight, because really, that—” she gestures with one finger, elegantly outlining the chalkboard and the space in front of it with her finger and then turning back towards the gaggle of girls and boys surrounding her desk “—that was just all-out weird and if he ever says anything like that to me—” she takes a deep breath and flutters her eyelashes “—I’ll never speak to him again. Not that I talk to him much now, but still. What a weirdo.”
Lydia’s Circle of Followers: “Giggle giggle yes master or something.”
Erica’s gone back to pretending to read and he can tell he’s probably hurt her feelings, but he’s not totally sure how to fix it without making it worse, so he just slumps back in his desk and tries not to hate Lydia Martin. He can still remember Lydia pre-third grade, vaguely—a small, quiet girl who read obsessively and extensively and won an AR medal—after all, the only reason he knows half his words is her! Well, her and comic books. Then her parents made her have a birthday party in third grade and it was huge and she invited everyone but the back row--himself, Erica, Boyd (who was not in his class this year) and Jackson. She said she was sorry, but she could only invite 80, and they were the extra four. It set kind of an unfortunate precedent for Isaac; the oddball out who wasn’t even friends with the other oddballs. Apparently the party was awesome, because all anyone could talk about was Lydia Martin. She seemed to liked this, because she made sure she was the only thing they talked about for a while longer.
Isaac decides that tomorrow, when everyone else was avoiding Stiles, he’d finally, finally speak to him. Reach out and make a friend, like his mom kept saying.
But tomorrow comes and goes, and Stiles isn’t at school. He isn’t in class for a solid week, and when he comes back he has bags under his eyes and he doesn’t twitch or talk so much anymore. There are some whispers of relief from Ms. Denver, something about finally taking his ADHD meds as prescribed, but Isaac doesn’t really hear any of it. His mom’d left on Friday, and he’d spent the whole weekend in the freezer. His throat is raspy and his whole body hurts—the thing was big enough to lie down in, but he was afraid. So afraid. He hates the dark and not being able to stand up all the way. He decides that once he had a full week to recover from the freezer, he’d finally, finally talk to Stiles.
There was a six-day block where he’d thought he’d actually make it. Then, on Sunday night, his dad caught him crying.
From then on it was always something. It’d be two days or five days or even six, and then it’d happen again. He’d be stuck in the freezer. He thought he was going to go insane.
It let up during the summer, but that didn’t mean anything. It was still the hardest summer he’d ever endured.
By the time seventh grade started up, he could barely remember the promise he made to himself.
But he does remember.