Work Text:
Before the bite took them all away, Isaac used to have a scar just below his knee. It was pretty unremarkable, compared to some of the others. It was one of the oldest, faded and small. He had earned it when he was only five years old by falling off his new bike and gashing his knee open on the pavement.
He remembers crying, sobbing into Camden's shirt. It was the most pain he'd ever been in and blood was everywhere and he was going to die, he was sure of it. But Camden was there, and he managed to calm Isaac down eventually. He cleaned all the blood off Isaac's leg and closed up the cut with just two tiny butterfly bandages.
"See?" Camden said when he was finished, his tone reproving but his touch gentle. "It doesn't even hurt, does it?"
Isaac thinks of that moment a lot these days. The scar is gone now (along with Camden, and mom, and dad, and Erica, and Boyd...) but Camden's words still ring in his head. He lived with the pain for so long on his own that he'd almost forgotten what it was like to have someone there. Someone who cared. Someone to patch up the hurt. Someone to tell him it'd be OK.
("Someone will hear me," Isaac remembers pleading once, in the beginning, "someone will come."
His dad's laughter was rattling chains and broken glass.
"You think anyone gives a shit about you? No one cares, Isaac! You don't matter to anyone!")
Scott tells Isaac he matters all the time. With his words, with his actions, even with the roof now over his head. Part of Isaac keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the day when he screws up badly enough for Scott to give up on him. But it doesn't come. Scott does get angry, sometimes. His voice deepens and his eyes flash red and Isaac's wolf cowers at the sight of him, but it's still never the end.
It takes awhile for Isaac to put a name to what he feels for Scott, even in his own head. But it's almost as if the word slowly settles itself into his chest over time, heavy and warm. Other people would call it painful, probably, but Isaac doesn't mind it really. He's not five years old anymore; he knows what real pain feels like.
He'll admit, there are some days it does make him feel slightly vulnerable, though. Scott will be teasing Stiles or frowning over his algebra homework or arguing with Derek, and Isaac will let himself indulge for a moment, letting his gaze linger and his thoughts wander. So when something pulls him back to the present - Stiles laughter, Scott's frustrated sigh, Derek's derisive snort - there's always a half a second where he's sure he's exposed, his reddening cheeks betraying him to the world.
(Or those nights, just every once in awhile, where his wolf is restless and Isaac slips into the shower or under the covers and indulges in another kind of fantasy altogether.)
But even on those days, in those moments, it still doesn't hurt. Not really. Scott's friendship is already such a bright burst of safelovedimportant that anything else, anything more, just seems minor in comparison.
So on the rare occasion when he does find himself wallowing (wishing, wanting), he just plays a montage in his head of everything Scott has already given him - his trust and loyalty, his smile and his protective frown in turns, even his mother and her kindness, their house, the new place they've set for him at the dinner table - and he sets it all to the soundtrack of Camden's voice when he was five.
See? It doesn't even hurt, does it?