Work Text:
Melissa grows up with her voice soft and her posture correct, her shoulders back and her hair braided, her presence a shadow that never registers in the minds of most who meet her. She goes through high school like that, nursing school in college: quiet, reserved – she knew better than to make a pretention of dignity – it wasn’t meant for her; better to keep out of sight, out of mind, out of reach.
She grows up a Brown Girl, glanced at but never acknowledged until it’s time to sexualize and commodify her, until the most frequent greetings she hears are catcalls, rarely her name; no one cares to know it.
She goes through life a Brown Girl, Single Brown Woman, marries a White Man, becomes a Brown Wife, imagines she’s standing up for progress with an interracial marriage, by not being a stay-at-home mother, working whatever shifts she can, pulling in cash, having a baby, a Brown Boy who can pass as White, as ‘normal’, who she can hope won’t be stereotyped in quite the same way. And it’s that hope that changes things. Because hope doesn’t matter when there’s yelling at home and no cash to spare, when the White Man is in charge and more than happy to fulfill the role of placing himself first, always first, my-opinion/life/voice/vague, tangential, biased knowledge/thought/experience/whim-is-more-valuable/important/worthwhile/reasonable-than-yours, because his is a stereotype that won’t penalize you for living up to it, arguing that cable television is clearly a better thing to spend money on than a child’s inhaler.
She grows herself a spine over days and months and breaks out of one stereotype and into another: Single Brown Mother, hauling ass through the shifts and overtime hours. She does what she can; she teaches Scott to drink at home when he’s fourteen so he doesn’t find himself wasted and spread over some stranger’s lap on his twenty-first birthday like she did; she watches him and Stiles sputter their way through their first cigarettes in her backyard; she does her best to enforce the notion that being a ‘man’ isn’t everything, that gender is relative, that she will always love her baby, that boys and girls and androgyns and genderqueers all need to find something they love in their life and follow whatever path it leads them down.
She feels proud when people tell her what a kind boy her son is, how polite, how respectful, how smart, how he’s impressed them – she thinks she sees a familiar look in Doctor Deaton’s eye when they cross paths in a grocery store and he relays a tale of Scott and a cat with a litter of sickly kittens. To be Brown and associated with ‘good’ is an achievement they can all stand in appreciation of.
When Trayvon Martin is shot in the chest at close range and the life stutters out of his heart, this seventeen-year-old boy who is the product of another woman’s life and love and labor, she sits next to Scott on the couch that night to watch Thor, the tale of the competing sons, and wonders what she would do with herself if she went from Single Brown Mother back to Single Brown Woman – if that’s a stereotype change she can handle at forty years old, after ten years living in this niche.
If anything, Scott turning into a werewolf only makes the fear more omnipresent – is he stuck in traffic or lying in a ditch, in the woods, in the trunk of an Argent’s SUV? Did Stiles just cheat at Halo, or is there another humanoid lizard crawling around her living room? It’s almost too much to realize that so many of the others don’t have families to worry about them – or have families who don’t because they don’t know, don’t care, haven’t cared much at all anywhere along the line.
There’s a bittersweet sting when Scott brings Isaac home late at night after the debacle at the hospital. (Or maybe it’s Isaac who comes home with Scott.)
“Derek said to keep out of sight and keep Scott out of trouble,” he tells her, and then spends forty minutes sitting quietly and giving exactly zero indication of hunger until Stiles arrives with five large pepperoni pizzas, whereupon he eats an entire one by himself, splits the second one with her, and leaves her the larger portion – and even then only because she insists that he keep taking slices. Scott and Stiles demolish the other three pizzas in a combined effort and give her mournful stares until she concedes to hand over her last slice.
Stiles trudges upstairs to Scott’s room shortly thereafter in the name of being conscious for school tomorrow, but Melissa sees the laptop power cord poking out of his backpack. She lets him be – it’s pointless to argue, and they’ve all been frightened enough today. No one is going to be sleeping well tonight; why bother trying?
“I can take the couch,” Isaac says.
Scott doesn’t even have to look in Melissa’s direction. “Forget it. C’mon.” And he tows Isaac upstairs in Stiles’ wake.
Melissa doesn’t bother them. In Isaac, she sees a shadow of her once-upon-a-time self, the girl who buried herself under the radar, a different stereotype set in the same fashion: an Abused Child. And with the werewolf transformation, he’s surely come across the ugly parts of his psyche that foster in others of his kind, that wait for the moment to unchain themselves and lash across the faces of spouses and children and friends.
She wonders what his first transformation was like. She wonders if he’s afraid of himself. (In the same position, she might be.) She wonders if his father ever feared himself – if Scott’s did, the damage in their hearts having streamed over the dams and past the walls, down into their hands and lungs: simple things made complex with their shattering, Abusers.
In the morning Isaac is sounder in his skin, thundering down the stairs behind Scott and Stiles, all three of them shirtless, skin greasy, hair in various states of disarray, Stiles with a farmer’s tan and Isaac lacking all traces of his wounds and Scott…
“When did you get that?”
Isaac freezes.
“Um,” Scott says. “Yesterday?”
Isaac looks ready to run.
“I hope I’m not going to find that charged to my credit card,” Melissa says.
Scott blinks, Stiles sputters out a laugh, and Isaac breathes again. “No worries,” Scott tells her. “You’re good.”
Isaac gnaws on his bottom lip.
“I’m making waffles,” Melissa says. “Any requests?”
That’s the end of the discussion about Scott’s tattoo.
The shadow of your first trope never really abandons you. Melissa’s first instinct will always be to quiet down when others start speaking, even if they do it over her, and cold fingers trickle down her spine when she straightens up and raps “Excuse me” into the face of a white man forty years her senior, someone who will refer to her as Mexican not because she is, but because he assumes that’s what all Latin@s are; he will call all Asians either Chinese or Japanese, or maybe Indian if they’re particularly distinct and he’s in a perceptive mood; anyone with black skin is African-American, no matter where they’re from or what they call themselves. And he will stare at her, blinking sullenly, and then leer into an “Of course, sweetheart” and redirect his gaze towards her chest or ass until she’s out of sight.
Isaac learned to be quiet at some point – not sneaky quiet: unobtrusive quiet. She knows he’s there when she sits down to read the paper one Sunday morning; he’s sitting across the kitchen table from her with Scott’s sweatshirt slung loose across his bare shoulders, picking at his nails, waiting for… something.
She gets through the front-page article about escalating brutality in Syria before she hears faint voices and finds herself glancing over the top of the paper at him. “Is Derek Hale up there?”
Isaac startles at her directness, guilty expression as telling as anything else, for all that he stays silent.
Melissa tsks and drops the paper, unfolding it across the table, keeping one eye on Isaac’s expression as she rifles through the pages. “They’ll be a while. You want the sports?”
Isaac swallows; she waits through his hesitation. “Are you reading the food section?”
“All yours.” She hands it over.
His knee is jumping under the table as he takes it, and afterwards he hunches over the pages, careful, watchful, like someone’s going to steal it out from under him. He must be paying attention, though, because he doesn’t jump like Melissa does when Scott pounds down the stairs, face red like he’s been yelling, voice a little hoarse; he brushes a knuckle across Isaac’s shoulder as he skips past on sock feet, asking abstractly if there’s anything to eat.
“There’s exactly what there was last night,” Melissa says. “The grocery list is on the fridge if you want something else.”
Scott groans, then grabs a package of pop tarts and plunks himself down next to Isaac. “They’ve got cherry filling,” he says, breaking one in half, and Melissa thinks he’s complaining to her until Isaac says “I like cherry” and takes one of the offered halves.
Scott hums to himself as he chews and skims a glance over Isaac’s part of the paper, and when he stands to go back upstairs he asks “You bringing that?” as a suggestion instead of a question, even though Scott’s never cooked anything more advanced that microwaved dinners in his entire life.
The paper goes up with them; Melissa will later find it spread across Scott’s pillows, a recipe for peanut butter cookies torn out, the blankets twists up, indents from two intersecting bodies denting the sheets. She will leave everything where it is, including the sleeping boy in the armchair in the corner, and go back downstairs to where Scott is crosshatching cookie dough with a fork.
“He’s passed out,” she will say, and Scott will nod, brow wrinkled up with all the thoughts in his head, and reroll a ball of dough that didn’t flatten correctly. “He trusts you,” she will say.
And Scott will pause and look over at her and reply, “He trusts you, too.”
And neither of them will comment on the wonder of that.
Melissa has no idea what Isaac’s legal status is, since he’s seventeen years old and an orphan and clearly not in anyone’s custody, but he seems to be living just fine. He’s never any thinner when she sees him, only older and perhaps bruised and broken and worn-out, depending on the lunar cycle and the supernatural population of Beacon Hills. She worries about him just as she does about Scott and Stiles and their circle of monsters and humans – Vernon Boyd and Lydia Martin and Allison Argent and, in the vague background, Derek Hale – and drapes a blanket over him whenever he falls asleep on her couch, even when he does it six nights in one week.
And here is where she and Isaac differentiate the most: Melissa has always had people. Her parents and her friends and her husband and, even when the others all fell away, Scott.
Isaac? Isaac doesn’t have anyone – anyone except them.
In her head, Melissa gives herself the name. Single Brown Mother of Two.