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Isaac is five when the first fight happens.
The first one he can remember, the first one that marks itself over his mind like a ropy scar.
“I fucking told you Maggie, I told you fifteen fucking times, the kid can’t have dairy after dark. He’s like a goddamn gremlin or something, watch, he’s gonna come into our room tonight whining about monsters under his bed, the wolf man in his closet, it’s gonna be something, it’s always fucking something--goddamn it you listen when I speak to you--”
“I am listening you fucking prick now shut up the kid’s in the back!”
The first one where his mother yells back.
Isaac is starting to feel trapped--safety can’t be drawn from Cam tonight. Cam is sleeping over with Douglas and Isaac was supposed to go to Matt’s but Matt got the flu and his dad doesn’t want him to catch the flu and oh god they’re getting louder--
He doesn’t have anything to distract himself with back here, no comic book no Gameboy no anything the radio’s not even up that loud--
But it's on. Maybe if he concentrates hard enough...
He splays both hands over the speaker incased in his car door, breath coming in gaspy little quirks as he has what he will never mark as his first anxiety attack. It’s the seatbelt. I’m leaning too hard on the seatbelt, it’s caught around my neck, it’s choking me.
The same seatbelt he always, always tucks behind him.
He closes his eyes tight enough to rumple and wrinkle every muscle around them and strains his ears for a melody, a lyric, anything.
He gets, “I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when” and a rattling ticking thrumming living beat in his fingertips.
His legs twitch and his feet tap of their own accord, and he discovers something as his breathing evens out.
He wants to move, but he can’t. His dad’ll yell if he notices his seatbelt isn't on right.
His mom takes everything with her but her Walkman.
Isaac is pretty sure that means she still loves him.
Matt goes home sopping wet, terrified, and sobbing.
Isaac cries himself to sleep with his headphones on, staying silent but keeping time with his fingers against the soft cotton of the pillow, imagining some phantom dancer’s movements. This CD is the Treasure Planet soundtrack, and ‘I'm Still Here' is itching in his bones so hard he actually gets out of bed and starts to move, to attempt what he’s seen in Fantasia and The Wizard of Oz.
A dance teacher would see ridiculous potential in his natural bone structure, in the fluidity of his movements...at least when his eyes are closed.
The moment he opens them, he gets nervous and awkward and jerky. The magic spell is broken, and he imagines his dad walking in.
Worse, he imagines Camden walking in.
He crawls back into bed shaking his head, but he can’t bring himself to take his headphones off, even though it’s impossible to sleep with the movements he’s imagining, flips and leaps like flying, things he wishes his body was capable of.
“Isaac, come on. You are so fucking slow.”
Isaac isn’t fucking slow. He’s cold. Freezing, actually. He shoves his hands between his thighs and rubs them together a few times, but then he hears a brief strain of orchestral bellowing--at least fifteen tubas, he is so fucking interested--and he’s scrambling up and over the brick wall in moments, falling on his ass on the other side. His breath is steaming and his ass fucking hurts.
“Fuck off. Gimme a cigarette.”
Erica gives him a glowering look and tosses him the pack.
She’s wearing a parka, and he’s jealous as shit. He forgot his jacket.
He doesn’t catch the packet of plastic, his limbs are too stiff from a few things besides the cold, and Marlboros scatter in the back alley.
Only two are totally ruined in the puddles from the recent rain, but Erica swats him anyway. “You’re a fucking idiot. Fuck this, we’re gonna miss the opening movement.”
“You’re sure there’s not an alarm?”
Erica rolls her eyes. “You sure you’re not just fucking chicken?”
He saw how stupid it is to let something like ‘chicken’ piss you off in Back to the Future, all three installments thanks, and he knows better...
But he goes into the back door of the local music hall before she does. Just on principle.
He stares at the orchestra through a hole in the black back curtain with huge starving eyes, wishing his goddamn hands didn’t hurt so much--he’d tried to get into a dozen different instruments over the past few years, but he can’t make any of them work for him, mostly because he can’t play them for longer than an hour before his hands lock up on him.
He hopes he gets better at digging graves by hand soon, because if he doesn’t start using the back hoe he’s not even gonna be able to write for school anymore.
But that’s not the important thing right now, the conductor walks up and takes his place and Isaac can’t help but think that this is wrong, that he’s not supposed to freaking see the conductor’s face--
But then the music actually starts and his concerns are destroyed.
It’s the Dante Symphony and Isaac is burning for Inferno, the first movement.
He’s shaking so hard he can barely breathe and clutching at the edges of his jean pockets to keep himself from moving, and he hears a wheeze beside him and takes a look and Erica is crying.
He wraps an arm around her shoulders and she crowds into him and they discover an obsession together.
Three days later, he comes home and there are men in full army dress at the door and Cam was supposed to come home next month and he runs.
His father comes after him.
In the struggle that ensues, his Walkman is broken.
When he wakes up a few mornings later, more sore and terrified than he’s ever been in his life and devastated to the point of suicide (and not even really over Cam, over his goddamn Walkman and what shit is that), there’s an Apple iPod sitting on his desk, next to a Valium.
He takes both.
Home....home sucks.
Isaac walks a lot, always in time with whatever song’s playing. He doesn’t realize that every now and then he goes up on his toes, that he spins and hums along with whatever’s playing.
He’s way too far into his own head for that.
He doesn’t even pay attention to where he’s wandering, so when he winds up between buildings at the retirement home, it’s not really a big deal.
And one day when he passes a class full of geriatric ‘ballerinas’, he doesn’t think, he just goes in, because he might be able to bum a cigarette off one of them and his iPod’s almost dead and there’ll definitely be an outlet in there.
Gloria is his favorite. She’s eighty-nine, from Florida, she steals him cookies from the cafeteria, and she smacks him with her cane when his position is off, when he gets stuck, when he can’t figure out how to listen to his body, but she never, ever yells.
He tries not to get too attached though. People drop like flies at Beacon Hills Rest Home--he learns that fast.
Gloria hangs on for two more years and teaches him everything she knows.
It’s a start.
When she dies she leaves him her gator-tooth necklace and all of her dance books, outdated but very practical, along with a single lavender sticky note in her slightly shaky old lady scrawl.
“You could be great. Get out of here. Maybe go somewhere sunny. Love you, boy.”
He cries when he finds out that she’s being cremated.
He’s just so fucking grateful he doesn’t have to bury her.
He has one more year, and he can go.
Beacon Hills Rest Home hurts too much, so he says goodbye to the few that remain from his three year stint there--the ones who can remember him for more than ten minutes at a time--and takes his dancing elsewhere.
Takes it to the graveyard at 2 AM when he can’t just fucking sit anymore.
Takes it to the nature preserve, where there’s all sorts of open space and a million clearings and nobody says he’s gonna ruin his ears.
But never, ever takes it home.
He torrents so much music he actually has to buy a new iPod, a 160G beast, and an external hard drive. He feels bad about it, but how else is he going to get what he needs?
Isaac needs fucking help.
“Look--I--they want me to audition. And I don’t have a car. I can’t get there. You know how my dad is.” Isaac has painted his father to be controlling and overprotective, which, yeah, he is. But he left out big pieces of that particular portrait. “I--please Boyd. Seriously. Please.”
“You’re telling me you want me to steal my grandma’s car so we can go on a road trip.” Boyd’s face looks, as usual, entirely impassive.
Isaac nods helplessly--it’s the only option, it’s his last chance-- and Boyd breaks out into a wide grin. Isaac’s eyes widen until they seem at least half whites. He doesn’t know what that means. Boyd never smiles at him. Erica, yeah, but not him.
Boyd just doesn’t smile that much, in general, really.
“Uh, we’re actually going out this weekend--they want me to audition, too. For the Theatre department. You can just tell your dad you’re staying over at my house. Gran’ll back you up.”
Isaac has to run to the bathroom and vomit, he’s so happy and so suddenly scared.
A small woman with steel-gray hair and steel-gray eyes in a steel-gray dress is the only other person in the room. The very large room, thank god.
“Begin.”
He nods just slightly and folds out of his normal standing position, until his spine is stretched taught and he's his full 6’3’’. Then the music starts--Ascension from the Dante Symphony--and he evaporates into the music, but his brain doesn’t disappear, which is a little unfortunate. When he stills in the middle of the room, panting just barely, heart thrumming triple-time, the woman speaks.
“You were very stiff. And your positions are slightly off. How much formal training have you received?”
He blushes and looks down his own body, his only tool, the only thing in the world besides his iPod that’s truly his. “Um. None.”
She coughs a bit and then says “Thank you.”
He looks up, absolutely confused.
There’s stillness for thirty solid seconds and then she motions toward the door in the most elegant gesture he’s ever seen in his life. His eyes grow huge and he tries to study it, his own hand coming up to make an attempt at the same thing.
Then he realizes that she’s telling him to leave and emptiness is crammed down his throat. 'Stuffed hollow' doesn't make sense, but it's how he feels.
“You’re welcome.” It’s probably a stupid thing to say, but it’s all he can think.
He leaves stiff-backed and doesn’t say a word to Boyd, who looks completely elated.
He rides with his face pressed out of the back window all the way back to Beacon Hills, and the moment they pull up to Boyd’s house, he’s running.
Gloria’s scattered somewhere in Florida, so it’s not like he can talk to her, and his iPod died half way back, and he doesn’t have music and he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at becoming a Wolf and going to Seattle Performing Arts University--
He opens his mouth and a sob tears out of him.
Then he screams, sounding like a dying animal, and he can hear a million things scattering at once.
And he doesn’t stop.
He stands perfectly stock-still, hands fisted and every muscle trying to press its way out of his skin, and he screams.
When he runs out of air, he screams again.
And again.
And again.
And finally he goes home, and then to work.
And home, and then to work.
And home, and then to work.
That is how his days go for two months. Erica is obviously worried, Vernon keeps passing Isaac his pudding (which is a huge fucking deal), and Isaac doesn’t speak.
At first it’s because he can’t, but then it’s because he just doesn’t feel like it.
His dad doesn’t even notice.
Then his letter comes, and he cries again.
Looks like he’s gonna be a Wolf after all.