Chapter Text
It had been two months since Scott and Allison broke up.
You’d think he would be over it by now. Allison certainly was. He watched her move through the seven stages of grief faster than Stiles could finish a bag of family-size Cool Ranch Doritos. Week 1, teary-eyed conversations with Lydia; week 2, bitter stares and angry workouts; week 3, she was already cracking jokes (Scott was 99 percent sure they were about him) with the girls. By week 4, she was looking at Isaac differently. And two weeks later, they started dating.
42 days. That was how long it took for Allison Argent to get over Scott McCall.
Scott, however, was still stuck on day 1.
He stared blankly at his laptop while the professor’s voice blurred into everything else, an indistinguishable noise. It didin't matter anyway - he stopped listening approximately 48 minutes ago.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it, but it buzzed again, then again.
He rolled his eyes and took his phone out.
Group chat: the pack where we should all know less about each other
Isaac: [photo]
Isaac: allison says hi
Isaac: we’re getting coffee
Stiles: did we ask
Isaac: this place is great we should all hang out here sometime
Isaac: wait scott do you wanna join us after class
Isaac: scott
Lydia: girl.
Isaac: what
Stiles: I WILL WALK TO THAT CAFE AND STRANGLE YOU RIGHT NOW
Isaac: what did i DO
Stiles: nothing
Stiles: JUST YOUR ANNOYING EXISTENCE IN GENERAL
Scott stared at the screen. As annoyed as he was because of Isaac, he was glad that Stiles was defending him. A faint smile played on his lips - after all, he still had his best friend.
His thumb hovered over the keyboard. What should he say? Something normal, casual - come on, think, Scott.
Scott: Sure, but maybe during the weekend when everyone’s free :)
The smiley face was a lie. Actually, Scott had become extremely good at lying over the past two months, to his friends, to Stiles, to his mom, even to himself. He immediately regretted sending that message, because now he was going to sit in a cafe watching Allison and Isaac feed each other pastries and laugh at inside jokes that he wasn’t a part of anymore.
His phone buzzed again. It was Stiles.
Stiles: you are genuinely a DOORMAT omg what is wrong with you
Stiles: a kind, beautiful doormat who i’ll be having words with later
Scott tried to hold his laugh. At least Stiles would be there too, at least he wouldn’t have to suffer alone.
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Scott laid in his bed, staring at the ceiling. His phone kept lighting up, but not from Allison’s messages anymore - they were from the group, from Isaac, from his mom, asking if he had eaten anything green in the past two days (he hadn’t), and from Stiles, sending him unfunny memes. Stiles had been trying to make him feel better, showing up with coffee, bad jokes, and sometimes with an expression on his face that Scott couldn’t quite read.
He rolled over and turned on his phone.
Scott: Dude. It’s 2 am
Stiles: so?
Scott: I need to sleep
Stiles: you’re not asleep tho
Scott: But i need to be
Stiles: is this still about allison
Scott: Yeah I guess
Stiles: dude you seriously need to stop moping around and move on
Scott: I can’t, not with Isaac’s stupid updates on their relationship status every 5 seconds
Stiles: yeah about that
Stiles: i kinda had an idea on how to get back at them
Scott: Oh no how bad is it
Stiles: the fact that you instantly knew it’s gonna be bad
Stiles: anyway i’ll tell you when i see you tmr
Stiles: now you need to sleep!!
Scott: Ok fine but you have to tell me first thing tomorrow
Stiles: sure willll
Stiles: good night I LOVE YOU :3
Scott chuckled at the last message. Stiles said ‘I love you’ all the time, casually, carelessly, the way you’d say it to a family member or a particularly beloved pet. Scott is like family to Stiles, and he knew that, but the thought still made him feel warm.
Scott: I love you too, now let me sleep
Scott placed his phone back onto the nightstand. He stared at the cracks on the ceiling, thinking about Stiles’ ‘idea’, the one that Scott knew would be terrible, probably illegal to some degree, and would definitely make everything worse. Yet a smile curled at the corner of his lips. He closed his eyes, and miraculously, slept.
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Stiles didn’t hate Isaac. He was genuinely a nice person, he even remembered everyone’s coffee orders and would bring them to every hangout. And sure, Stiles was friends with him, or had been, before he started dating Allison and developed an unexplainable need to document every single moment of their relationship and send them in the group chat. And yes, he knew Isaac wasn’t trying to hurt Scott, he was just extremely oblivious, the kind of obliviousness that was even worse than intentional cruelty, because you can’t even get mad at him without feeling guilty yourself.
Stiles tried. He tried to tell him, ‘dude, maybe cool it with the photo updates’, but what he got in response was a genuinely confused face. Isaac blinked with his huge, puppy-dog eyes and said, ‘Oh man, was that weird? Sorry, I guess I just couldn’t help it, and I thought everyone would be happy for us.’ And suddenly Stiles was the one apologising, and then going home to scream into his pillow. So yes, Stiles didn’t hate Isaac, he hated the situation, he hated watching his best friend’s face crumble when he picks up his phone and sees yet another selfie of Allison and Isaac laughing, or kissing each other on the cheek. He hated the fact that there was nothing he could do about it. Which was why he ended up lying awake at 2 am, letting a horrible, probably life-ruining idea take over his mind.
He clutched his phone in his hand, staring at Scott’s profile picture. It was a dumb picture of Scott mid-laugh, caught off-guard, one hand trying to cover the camera. Stiles took that picture two years ago at a party, and it has been Scott’s profile picture ever since. Every time he looked at it, he remembered why he fell in love with Scott McCall in the first place.
Not that he told anyone. Not that he even fully admitted it to himself.
He had been in love with Scott since - well, probably ever since he could remember. Ever since Scott smiled at him on the playground of preschool, before he even knew what love was.
It was pathetic, cliché, even. It was the kind of tragic, unrequited love that only belonged in a young adult novel with a pastel cover.
But even people in those books would get their happy ending. Stiles wasn’t sure if he would.
He tried, though. God, he tried so hard. Freshman year of collge, he had finally accepted that the flutter in his chest when a cute guy smiled at him wasn’t just admiration. His bi awakening had been not much of a dramatic realisation, but a slow, exasperating process of late night googling and an extremely awkward conversation with his Dad that ended up with the Sheriff saying, ‘Oh, I knew. That time when you won’t stop staring at the bodyguard at the swimming pool when you were thirteen, remember?’ Stiles remembered his face burning.
But he never told anyone else, not Lydia, not Malia, and certainly not Scott. He wasn’t ashamed of it or anything, it was just that he didn’t want to see the look on Scott’s face. The calm acceptance, the ‘that’s great man, I’m happy for you’, while nothing changes. Some part of him hoped that Scott would look at him differently, see him as more than just a best friend with bad jokes. But a more realistic part of him knew that Scott’s ‘I’m happy for you’ would be genuine, it would be kind and supportive of who he is, and without any romantic interest whatsoever. And that, more than anything, was what Stiles couldn’t stomach. Sure, he could handle rejection, but what he couldn’t handle was that Scott would be so painfully understanding about it, patting him on the shoulder, giving him a hug, and then going right back to pining over Allison, or whichever girl that caught his eye. So he kept his mouth shut, and went back to pretending the only person he had ever wanted was Lydia, whom he hadn’t thought about in that way for years.
Stiles kept it all to himself. He would hook up with guys in secret, and every time, without fail, he would end up comparing them to Scott. He’d kiss or make out with someone with the lights off in his dorm, whose name he would forget in a week, and pretend it was Scott. And for a short while, it worked, right as their lips met his, as their arms wrapped around his waist, it almost worked. He almost convinced himself that the shoulders under his palms belonged to Scott, that the breathy sigh against his lips belonged to Scott, that the body pressing him into his bed belonged to the only person he had ever wanted - but then, the guy would speak, or laugh, or even move in a certain way that would make his illusion shatter. All of it would be wrong, in a thousand tiny ways. Stiles would know because he spent years studying every single detail of Scott McCall - the exact shade of brown his eyes would turn into in low light, the exact angle of his upturned lips when he smiled, the exact sound of his laugh when he was genuinely happy, all deeply ingrained in Stiles’ memory. He would lay there afterwards, listen to the stranger’s breath become even next to him.
He felt nothing.
He’d wait until the guy was gone, then he’d shove his face into his pillow, muffling the sound of his rapid breathing. Because crying over someone who didn’t know you were in love with them was embarrassing. And crying over your straight best friend who would never look at you the same way you’d look at him was just straight up laughable.
So Stiles didn’t cry. He would just lay there in the dark, scrolling through the photo album he had of Scott, and then clutching his phone to his chest, Scott’s frozen smile being the last thing he saw before he fell asleep.
So when Stiles came up with the plan, he almost laughed out loud.
To be Scott’s fake boyfriend.
The irony was so perfect it hurt. For years, he pretended that being Scott’s best friend was enough. He pretended that his heartbeat wouldn't race whenever Scott touched his arm. He pretended that every hookup was just a substitute for the real thing that wasn’t even real. And now, he was thinking about pretending to be Scott’s boyfriend. Just to get back at Allison and Isaac, to show that Scott was fine, that he didn’t care and he moved on. He would pretend to hold his hand, pretend to say ‘I love you’, and Scott would pretend to say it back. It would be everything he ever wanted, except none of it would be real. He would get to pretend, for a few weeks, that Scott was his. Then Isaac and Allison would back off and stop accidentally twisting the knife, and Scott would finally get better.
He was the biggest idiot in the entire world.
Stiles picked up his phone and told Scott that he had a plan. He chuckled when Scott’s message appeared, saying ‘Oh no how bad is it’. You have no idea, he thought to himself.
He told Scott to go to sleep, and then stared at his phone, his thumb hovering over the send button. ‘Good night I LOVE YOU :3’. It was casual, it was something he had typed hundreds of times before, and not just to Scott either. But his heart was pounding as if it was the first time. He could delete it. He could just say ‘good night dude’ like a normal person.
But Stiles didn’t. His thumb pressed send, and he threw the phone away onto his bed as if it had burnt him. He immediately grabbed it again, because Scott’s message had just appeared on the screen.
Scott: I love you too, now let me sleep
He wanted to cry. The four words he’d been dying to hear for years, in the most platonic way possible.
Stiles put his phone upside down and covered his eyes with his arm.
‘You are genuinely pathetic,’ he said to himself.
Tomorrow, he’d tell Scott the plan. Tomorrow, he’d offer to pretend to be something he had wanted to be for years.
It wouldn’t be real.
But it was all he was ever going to get.