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In an impressive show of his restraint and maturity, Isaac doesn’t kill Stiles when he arrives.
He’s very far from perfect, though, so he does grab him by the throat, press him up against the wall, and threaten to kill him before Scott calls him off.
“You’re supposed to be his best friend,” Isaac says as he lets him go, anger coursing through him, eyes shifting involuntarily. “Fucking act like it.”
Stiles coughs and rubs at his neck. “Alright, alright, chill out.” He turns to Scott. “Didn’t know your—" he flaps a hand at Isaac dismissively, “—guard dog was back in town.”
“He came to help,” Scott says, simply. He looks past Stiles to Isaac and nods, a clear request for Isaac to stand down.
He does. Or he tries to. He sits in Scott’s desk chair and stretches his legs out, rolling it a little away from where Scott and Stiles are standing, arms crossed over his chest, and watches Scott and Stiles interact. It’s obvious, to him at least, that there’s something different about it. There used to be an easy physicality, that was always present in their interactions. Incursions into personal space that Isaac found puzzling and a little alarming. That isn’t the case any anymore. Scott’s body language is less open, his movements more guarded. When Stiles steps closer, Scott moves a fraction away. It isn’t clear whether they notice the difference, but Isaac does. He wonders if it’s the Nogitsune that caused it. He shivers, like he does every time he thinks about the Nogitsune. Or the Oni. The fear that comes with those memories is frigid.
“Isaac?” Scott puts his hand on Isaac’s shoulder.
Isaac flinches, startled out of the memory. Scott flinches too. He tries to remember if Scott used to flinch, but he thinks that’s also new.
“Sorry,” Isaac says, although he’s not sure for what exactly. There’s lots of things. Scott can take his pick. He rubs at the spot where his chest hurts.
“It’s okay,” Scott squeezes his shoulder before letting it go. “We’re going to check out the communications tower.”
“Wait, what?” Stiles shoots Isaac a skeptical look. “Why? He doesn’t know anything.”
“I brought him up to speed,” Scott says.
Isaac sits up straighter and glares at Stiles as he starts counting off on his fingers.
“Evil scientists—”
“—Dread Doctors,” Stiles interrupts.
“—chimeras,” Isaac keeps going, “something killing a bunch of people. Scott’s new Beta —“
“—Liam,” Scott interrupts.
“Whatever,” Isaac rolls his eyes, like the kid’s name matters. “Scott’s new Beta trying to kill him. What am I missing?” He feigns confusion and then snaps his fingers and points at Stiles, “Oh, and an old childhood friend named Theo manipulating you into abandoning Scott when he needed you most.”
The silence that follows is tense.
“That’s not fair,” Scott says, shaking his head. “Theo got to all of us.”
Isaac ignores him, gaze fixed on Stiles. “Did I miss anything?”
“What? I didn’t?” Stiles’ mouth hangs open a little. “You weren’t even here!”
Isaac is hit with another wave of anger; he takes a step closer to Stiles. “And where the fuck have you been, exactly?”
“Okay, enough.” Scott steps between them rubbing at his forehead.
“I don’t remember you ever being particularly helpful,” Stiles grumbles.
“Well, agree to disagree,” Isaac says with more confidence than he feels.
“Hey!” Scott interjects before Stiles can say anything back. He sighs and rubs at his face. “Let’s just go.”
The communication tower is an appropriately creepy Beacon Hills municipal building.
“You have to be kidding me,” Isaac mutters to himself as he peers down the hole in the ground. “Tunnels?”
CONFINED SPACE is spray-painted right behind the grate. It’s almost funny, the way Beacon Hills loves to torture him.
“We can trace them back to see where it came from,” Scott says.
It. The last chimera. Scott’s right, they can do that. And Isaac will do that, for Scott. But he really doesn’t want to. Stiles is already down the ladder, his sneakers squelching against what’s sure to be the cause of the foul stench overwhelming Isaac’s senses.
“You don’t have to,” Scott says. “You can wait here. Or go back home, you just got in a few hours ago.”
It’s something Scott does without even realizing it, Isaac thinks, offer choice when it would be easier to make demands. Always asking instead of telling.
Isaac shakes his head. “I want to.”
He looks down the grate again. Crouches down. Closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Prepares himself to push through the fear. He’s done it before. He can do it again. He’ll do it again, for Scott. His heart pounds in his throat.
He senses Scott move closer to him, until they’re side by side. Close, but not quite touching. Isaac opens his eyes, and looks at Scott, who’s looking back. Isaac lets his breath out all the way. He trusts Scott. He has for a long time. Even before he knew it was trust he was feeling, he trusted Scott.
He lowers himself, one rung at a time, into the bowels of Beacon Hills.
Theo doesn’t look the way Isaac thought he would. But then again, true monsters rarely do.
As soon as he emerges after the unsuccessful chimera ambush in the tunnels, Isaac has another one of those surges in his senses and power. But this time, he loses control.
He hasn’t experienced a complete loss of control since his first full moon, the one he spent in the holding cell. It’s like all every emotion he’s ever felt takes over, operating his body while his mind is absent. That first time, the senseless rage sought an outlet in violence. It didn’t matter who the target was. This time, all that rage is focused on Theo.
It isn’t a fair fight.
“Isaac!” Scott roars behind him.
It forces his shift back, but the anger is still there. He lands another few punches with his human hands. He wants to kill this monster who killed Scott.
“Let me kill him,” Isaac hears himself say, as he comes back to himself. Scott is behind him, trying to grab his arm to pull him off. Theo is pinned beneath him, unconscious, face swollen and blood oozing from one of his ears. He hits him again and blood sprays across his face, warm and metallic. It smells good. “Let me kill him.”
“Isaac, stop.” Scott puts an arm around his chest and drags him off. The force he uses causes them both to collapse onto the damp floor of the tunnel.
Isaac starts to move back toward Theo, but Scott catches him by his shirt collar.
“Let me kill him.” Isaac’s shirt rips, and Scott grabs his arm to pull him back. Isaac tries to shrug him off, but he can’t. Scott is too strong. “He killed you. Let me kill him.”
“Not like this,” Scott says, keeping a firm hold on Isaac’s arm. “Not like this.”
“He killed you,” Isaac twists around and looks at Scott, his vision blurry. “Scott, he killed you,” his voice breaks with emotion.
“You might regret it, if you kill him like this,” Scott says. He lets go of Isaac’s arm and puts his hands on his shoulders, “He doesn’t deserve that. Don’t give him that.”
The ache in his chest sharpens. He scents the beginning of Scott’s blood seeping through the bandage and realizes that Scott’s talking about himself. Isaac is pretty sure he would be fine with killing Theo right here and now, but some of the anger dissipates. It doesn’t matter what he wants; Scott should get to decide what happens to Theo. It seems important that he does.
None of this is about Isaac. It’s not even about Theo. It’s about Scott.
“Okay,” Isaac says. His voice shakes as the anger leaves adrenaline in its wake. His whole body is trembling. “Okay,” Isaac says again, pushing himself back farther from Theo and clumsily bumping into Scott in the process.
Scott pulls him into a hug. “Thank you,” he whispers into Isaac’s ear.
Isaac doesn’t hug him back at first. Too overwhelmed by the whole thing. Still shaking with adrenaline, and the remnants of anger, and then frozen by the shock of the contact. It’s the first time they’ve hugged since Allison’s death. It’s the first time he’s hugged anyone since he left Beacon Hills. It feels strange, at first. But then it doesn’t. It feels familiar. It feels safe. He hugs back. They stay like that for what feels like a long time, as Theo sputters and heals in the background.
Isaac will do anything for Scott. Even let Theo live.
Scott and Stiles discuss how to find Kira on their way back to Scott’s house, but Isaac doesn’t pay attention. It’s not a plan that will include him. Not least because spending an extended time with Stiles is such a bad idea no one even pretends Isaac will go with them.
He stares out the window from the back seat of the Jeep as night falls around Beacon Hills. The surge in his senses, the fight, and the exhaustion of travel hit him suddenly and, like he did at the airport, he falls asleep without meaning to. He wakes up to the sound of a hushed argument.
“What was that?” Stiles is asking.
“I don’t know,” Scott says.
“That was some werewolf 101, entry-level control issues,” Stiles hisses.
Scott doesn’t say anything.
“That, like, made Liam look good,” Stiles says. “Liam! You know? Our little I.E.D Liam? That’s how bad it was.”
Scott stays quiet, Isaac listens to his heartbeat. Steady. It sounds less muffled than earlier that day. It sounds like he’s healing.
“Theo did kill me,” Scott says, something flinty in his tone. “Maybe it wasn’t such an overreaction.”
Stiles is quiet after that, and Isaac enjoys the rest of the ride.
That night, Isaac dreams about the Oni.
They feature regularly in his rotation of nightmares. Their blank masks. The way fighting them was like fighting a stone wall. Futility personified. In the dream he’s trying to get to Scott, or maybe tell him something, the goal isn’t entirely clear. What is clear is that he’s stuck. The Oni have him trapped him in the basement of his father’s house.
“I have to tell Scott!” Isaac yells.
But the Oni keep advancing. They don’t say anything back. They never do. They’re between him and the staircase; the freezer is behind him. Isaac knows it’s there; he doesn’t need to turn around to see it. He doesn’t want to.
This is a little obvious, Isaac thinks as he realizes it’s a dream.
“This is a dream,” he says to the Oni, not that it matters or that they care, as the closest one raises its sword. He closes his eyes and tries to wake himself up. At first nothing happens, and he has a moment of self-doubt, but he tries harder and then feels the pull behind his sternum, his consciousness dragging him from asleep to awake.
But he opens his eyes too soon. Because now he’s back in the freezer.
Fuck.
This is a dream he’s had so many times, he almost always knows it’s a dream.
You’re a werewolf now, he thinks to himself. He reaches his arms up and presses against the lid. Just open it.
But it doesn’t budge. He tries to shift, but he can’t. He can’t do anything.
It always goes exactly like this.
This is a dream, he tells himself. You don’t have to be stuck here. Get out.
But he can’t. He never can. He’s stuck in the nightmare. The panic starts then, because maybe he’ll never wake up.
Get out. Do something. Do anything. Get out.
Isaac bangs his human hands against the lid. Until they start to hurt. Scratches with his human fingernails until they break and bleed. But nothing happens.
It never does.
He startles awake with a gasp and spends an agonizing few moments frozen. Terrified to open his eyes and find he’s still trapped. There’s a knock on the door. Isaac has a horrible moment where he thinks, maybe, his is back there. He holds his breath, goes still, his heart pounding in his ears. But when he hears the knock again, a little louder, accompanied by a familiar, quiet, voice, he knows it’s over.
Isaac opens his eyes. They shift automatically to see better in the dark. The fear does that sometimes, lowers the barrier between his shifted and non-shifted forms. Not that he needs any help recently, with all the unapproved shifting his body’s been doing since Scott’s death.
The room is unfamiliar, and he’s momentarily disoriented before he remembers that he’s at Scott’s house. In Scott’s guest room. And Scott’s heartbeat is right outside the door. Fuck.
He feels himself flush with embarrassment. He untangles himself from the sweaty sheets and stands next to the bed, shivering.
“Isaac?” Scott asks, through the door.
“Yeah, I’m fine!” Isaac’s voice cracks and he might have been embarrassed about it another time, but he’s embarrassed about too many other things to really care.
“I know,” Scott says. “I just couldn’t sleep. Thought maybe you couldn’t either.”
This is an old tactic of Scott’s from the first month after Isaac moved in. When he had nightmares that were loud and humiliating and relentless. They both knew Scott could hear through the wall. They both pretended he couldn’t. Isaac was so grateful for that then, and he still is now.
“Okay, yeah.” Isaac runs his hands through his hair a few times, expelling some of the anxious energy that clings to him and pushing his sweaty hair off his forehead, before opening the door.
Scott looks exhausted, so it’s possible he truly couldn’t sleep and isn’t just sparing Isaac’s pride. It shouldn’t make Isaac feel better, but it does, a little bit.
“Come on,” Scott says, “lets hang out in my room.”
Isaac peels off his soaking wet t-shirt and leaves it on the floor to deal with later, rummaging in has bag for something clean. He probably smells like fear-sweat, but he can’t bring himself to care enough to do anything about it.
There used to be a beanbag chair, or something like it, in Scott’s room. There isn’t anymore. Isaac used to sit there, or next to Scott on his bed while they did homework or talked about non-supernatural things to pass long insomnia-filled nights. He pauses in the doorway, uncertain of where to put himself in this new version of Scott's room, but Scott sits on his bed, on top of the covers against the headboard, and pats the spot next to him. Which is as good an invitation as any.
Scott spreads his legs out, crossing them at the ankle. Isaac curls his knees into his chest. The light is off in the room, the faint illumination of the streetlight outside keeps it comfortably dark. Dark enough to talk about the things that matter.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” Scott says. He doesn’t look at Isaac when he says it. “But if you want to, you can.”
“So can you,” Isaac says.
Scott looks at the quilt on his bed. Picks at a loose thread. “Thanks.”
Isaac puts his forehead on his knees. “It was the Oni,” he says. Scott goes very still. Isaac hears his heartrate increase. “I dream about them, sometimes.”
“Me too,” Scott murmurs. “Was she…”
“Not this time,” Isaac says, shaking his head before Scott can say her name. “But yeah, sometimes.”
Scott blows out a long breath. Headlights briefly illuminate the room. “You loved her.”
Isaac’s stomach clenches, then goes cold. He rubs at the spot where he feels Allison’s death, then where he feels Scott’s. He starts sweating again, despite the cold. He’s been dreading this conversation, because he has no idea what to say. He’s imagined it over and over. What he might say, how Scott might react, but he’s never played it all the way through. It’s too painful.
“I don’t know,” he says, honestly. Because after thinking about it for a very long time, he’s still not sure. And there wasn’t time to find out.
“It’s okay if you loved her,” Scott says, he moves one of his legs so his thigh touches Isaac’s ankle. A gentle, reassuring pressure. “I’m glad you did.” They’re both silent for a few moments.
“I did love her,” Isaac says, trying to put this complicated thing he doesn’t fully understand into words. “But I’m not sure … if it was…” he trails off, lamely. Unable to do better than that. But he sees Scott nod in his peripheral vision. So maybe Scott understands, somehow, in that way he seems to understand things Isaac can’t. Which is what really matters.
“She was easy to love,” Scott says, with a soft smile.
“She loved you,” Isaac says, and this he’s sure of. And was even before her death. “I think half of our conversations were about you.”
Scott laughs. “That sounds boring.”
Isaac smiles and shakes his head, because it wasn’t boring at all. Before Scott and Allison, Isaac didn’t have friends. Not really. Having two people who cared about him, and two people he cared about was truly unbelievable. Isaac had a hard time believing it. He would lay in the bed in Scott’s guest room and wonder about it. How someone like Scott, and someone like Allison, could find something in him to care about, when he hadn’t really done all that much to deserve it. And had done a lot of things not to.
It made him feel some big and powerful emotion he had no name for at the time. Now he thinks he might know what it was – what it still is – but it’s too scary to think about. He can’t go there, so he doesn’t. It was clearly too good to be true or to last for long.
“I feel like I can’t talk about her,” Scott says. “Like I’m not supposed to.”
Isaac twists his neck to the side, keeping his head on his knees, so he can see Scott.
“I love Kira,” Scott says, with such conviction that Isaac knows it’s true. He feels a twinge of something uncomfortable in his chest, a different spot from where he’s been feeling Scott’s death, but he ignores it. “She’s brilliant, and funny, and kind. She’s strong. She’s a total badass. And she somehow loves me?” Scott looks at Isaac like it’s the most ridiculous thing, even though it’s definitely not. “You know wolves and foxes aren’t supposed to get along? But she doesn’t care about that stuff.”
Isaac didn’t know that, but he can understand why it’s important to Scott.
“And I know that loving Kira doesn’t mean I didn’t love Allison, or that I don’t love her now. But it feels like talking about her would be wrong and I just…” Scott trails off as his voice gets thicker.
Isaac tries not to become uncomfortable, because he doesn’t want Scott to pick up on it, but he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say. He knows nothing about love, clearly, not even being sure if that’s what he felt. Or feels. He knows nothing about anything, basically. But then he thinks about what Scott does for him, which is mostly just listen. And that he can do.
“I want to talk about her,” Scott says, he wipes at his eyes. “I miss her.”
Isaac moves a little closer to Scott, bumps his side into Scott’s shoulder. “We could talk about her?” Isaac clears his throat, which suddenly hurts. “If you want to, I mean. I want to talk about her too.”
“Okay,” Scott says. “Yeah, I’d like that.”
Isaac unfurls his legs from where they’re curled against his chest and inches down the bed until his shoulder is at the same level as Scott’s, then leans into him. Eventually, Scott rests his head against Isaac’s shoulder.
“I’ve been thinking about the control thing,” Scott says. He must feel Isaac tense in anticipation of being told off for his performance earlier, because he continues quickly. “Nothing bad. I just think, maybe some of my power goes to you while I’m healing.”
“How does that make sense?” Isaac’s chest feels tight. “That’s not how it works.”
Scott shrugs, “Who knows how any of this stuff works.”
“Why me?” Isaac asks, not sure he wants to hear the answer.
Scott knocks his head against Isaac’s shoulder. “Because you’re my first beta.”
Isaac doesn’t like the implication of that at all. He also doesn’t really believe it. “But you have the new beta —”
“—Liam.”
“—Whatever. And he’s bitten. And I was never—”
“Yes, you were. When you stayed to help with Jackson? Maybe then, or before, but it doesn’t matter exactly when. You’ve always been my first beta. You still are.”
"But it doesn’t count if you’re not bitten.”
“And who decided that, Derek?” Scott scoffs. “Argent? Come on. We chose each other. Tell me that doesn’t mean as much, if not more, than who bites you.”
Isaac’s vision goes blurry and he rubs at his eyes. The tears are silent, but still frustrating. He’s done more crying since being back in Beacon Hills than he has in the last year, at least.
“I was so afraid,” Isaac whispers. It feels like a shameful admission. Something he can only say in the dark. “I was so afraid you were dying.”
Without moving from where he's resting his head against Isaac's shoulder, Scott reaches out and grabs Isaac’s wrist, squeezing it. Then he works his way down to his hand, which is balled up in a fist, and puts his hand over it.
Scott’s holding my hand, Isaac thinks, dumbly. Even though they aren't really holding hands, his palm starts to sweat.
“I wished I had,” Scott whispers back, after he’s been silent for a very long time. “I thought, it might be better.”
Isaac has an image of Scott on the school bus, blood from a different wound bleeding through his shirt. Stiles walking out of the rest stop bathroom, saying something to Lydia that sounded a lot like Scott was already dead. The certainty Isaac felt, in that moment, that nothing would ever be okay again.
“It wouldn’t be,” Isaac says, opening his hand and grasping Scott’s, despite the sweat of his palms. Crushing his fingers together with the force of how much he means it, hard enough that he hears Scott wince and he tries to ease up. “It would be so much worse.”
They both open their hands to try to interlace their fingers together at the same time, which results in a moment of awkward fumbling that Isaac finds embarrassing, but Scott doesn’t seem to mind.
He should feel bad about this, holding Scott’s hand, but it doesn’t feel bad. It feels right. Isaac closes his eyes, thinking that it feels very right.
They must fall asleep. Because when Isaac opens his eyes it’s daylight, and Scott’s gone.