Author's Notes:
1. This is for fountainxxpenny. Happy belated birthday, dear. Thanks for all your help and support over the last year.
2. Big thanks to bethskink for helping make this story happen.
3: Story fulfills angst bingo prompt: violence and TW: contains discussion of and references to sexual violence.
4. Comments and constructive critique are always appreciated.
Hang on Tight and Don't Look Down
Scott catches the flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. Though his step falters, he keeps going, pulled by the lawnmower to the end of the row. The chore is turning out to be more challenging than he expected, and he's keeps catching himself looking for excuses to quit before it's done. With the impending full moon—and the damage he can feel it wreaking on his personality—he had hoped to do a couple of extra nice things for his mom to help her get through.
Before the bite, he hadn't been able to mow the lawn. Even loaded up on allergy medicine and with a filter mask over his face, the grass was too much for his asthma. The McCalls had been forced to hire a local kid with money they really couldn't afford to spend. The asthma was gone now, but not the physical problems. With a grimace of pain, Scott rubs his ears, fruitlessly trying to stave off a headache from a high pitched whine in the motor. He's going to get this task done, and no unexpected wavering in the shadows near his house is going to distract him.
A discrete sniff of the air reveals nothing. Between the powerful reek of newly mown grass and the bitter slice of diesel fumes that cut through it, all other smells are buried. He turns the lawnmower around and starts back the other direction, more alert to changes in the shadows around him than he had been, but otherwise giving no indication that he wasn't just caught up in a mind-numbing activity. The yard is more than half done, and he'd shed his shirt before the end of the first stripe. Now sweat is dripping down his chest and plastering his hair to his head, and he is seriously reconsidering whether the money being saved is worth it.
Another flicker of movement closer to the house makes him tighten his grip on the push bar, the metal denting under his fingers. The first flash could have been anything: a bird or squirrel or even a falling leaf. The second one is far more deliberate. Someone is trying to get his attention. Gritting his teeth, he finishes the row and gets the mower turned around again. Less than two steps into next row, he lets the mower pull to a stop and thumbs the button that shuts it off.
For a long moment he stands there, bits of grass strewn from the blades clinging to his bare legs and itching. With the engine noise gone, other sounds start to become audible. Among the susurration of traffic and the swishing of tree branches in the slight breeze of the day, he hears harsh, uneven breaths.
Abandoning the mower and the task, he stalks around to the front of the house, eager to confront his visitor. The ends of his fingers tingle with the start of his claws, restrained, but just barely.
Erica is standing on the front porch with one hip jutted against the support column. Her short shorts and tight t-shirt are filthy, stained and torn with dirt and streaks of blood, and her long blonde hair is ragged and strewn through with crushed leaves. She seems oblivious to her appearance, though, when she rests a hand on the railing and smirks: "Took you long enough."
Scott eyes her for a moment, then turns to peer around the yard, expecting to see Boyd and Isaac lurking. When he doesn't find them, he turns back. He has to admit that he's a little confused. "What do you want?"
Erica jerks her shoulder in a half-shrug, as if the answer should be obvious.
"I don't like you," Scott says. He can't remember the last time he was so blunt; normally, his feelings for a person have little impact on how he treats them. Not today.
"Then you don't know me. I've changed a lot as a person. I've grown a lot." She sticks her chest out as if displaying her breasts will emphasize her growth. Any effect she was hoping to achieve is lost beneath her dirt, and beneath their history.
"I didn't like you before," Scott counters. The announcement seems so final, like a judgment that can't be reversed, and Scott shifts his footing on the lawn in a useless attempt to hide his discomfort. It's strange that he even feels discomfort at the confession; he'd never thought the sentiment was a secret.
Now Erica laughs, a single huff of surprise. "Most days, I didn't like her either," she responds, quieter. "She's the only person I ever truly wanted to kill." She pauses and looks out at the horizon where the pale disc of a full moon is suspended, its threat obvious to both of them. "Except, today, I kinda want to kill everyone."
Scott closes his eyes and nods in understanding. The moon's pull thrums through his body, filling him with twitchy, volatile energy. He feels like he's one spark away from exploding. He hasn't felt like this since his second full moon and he'd forgotten just how badly he wants to grab that spark and go where the explosion takes him.
When Erica speaks again, her voice is tight and tiny as if she's hoping to squeeze the words past him before he can catch them. "I need your help."
Scott almost lets them go by as if he ihadn't/i heard them. If it had been a little later in the day, he would have. As it is, Erica's timing was well chosen—or badly chosen, depending on your perspective. Scott sighs. "Why not go to Derek?" he asks. The question is perfunctory; he has a list of reasons he'd give with "I trust him as far as Stiles can throw him" right at the top. "He's your Alpha."
"He put me in a halo," Erica snips. She mimes the device around her head with her fingers as stand-ins for the spikes that drilled into her skull to hold the instrument in place. "He told me that I can handle more pain than the boys like it was some kind of joke to him. The next time I see a medieval torture device, it had better be a picture in a history book."
"And what makes you think I'll do anything different?" He closes the last few paces to the porch. From this vantage, he's looking up at Erica. Her smell is rank by human standards and nearly intolerable by werewolf ones, and it's obvious that she hasn't had more than a perfunctory bath in at least a week, a quick splash in the creek that runs through Beacon Hills Forest Preserve, if she was even able to do that. He does his best to ignore the smell, because after an afternoon in the hot sun, he's not much better off.
For the first time, Erica looks at him. Really looks at him, as if she just not realized that he's actually there. Her eyes are hazel and wide, any makeup she'd been wearing long since worn away, and she looks vaguely surprised at either his presence or his question; he can't tell. "If anybody would know a different way, it would be you. You haven't made a secret about how much you dislike Derek or his methods. You've been on your own this whole time and so far you seem to be coping pretty well."
Scott twists his hands together, considering. "Not so good," he starts. He climbs the first step, the wooden boards of the deck creaking under his feet. Erica backs up to the porch swing, so Scott stops. "I had it all figured out; didn't change at all last full moon. But, now…" He shakes his head and makes a weak gesture toward the moon.
"What happened?" she asks, as if she actually cares.
Scott leans against the wooden post and stares up at what he can see of the blue afternoon sky, where the porch's overhand doesn't block it from view. It's a beautiful day, one he should be spending at the beach or the skate park when he's done doing his chores. One he should be spending with his girlfriend. "Allison broke up with me. S-she was my anchor." He doesn't volunteer how the last time Allison broke up with him, the shift had felt like the moon was rending his body the way her words had rent his heart.
"So it's like your first full moon all over again?"
Scott licks his lips, not sure how to explain. Nothing will ever be like his first moon; the shift was frightening and painful, but fast and buffered by his need to protect Allison. His second was where he experienced the truth. He'll never again be ignorant of what the moon can do to his body and his psyche, and that just makes the impending evening all the worse. "No," he finally explains. "I know how bad it's going to be."
"I don't know what mine is," Erica says. "My anchor. Isaac does. Boyd said he thinks he does. They made it look so easy."
"You'll figure it out," Scott answers.
"Kinda running out of time," Erica snaps back. She slumps into the porch swing, a defeated and scared sixteen year old girl. "Help me. Please."
Scott considers her, tries to consider what it cost her to come to him. It's hard to break through the shell of antipathy that's closing around him and, truth be told, he doesn't try very hard. Helping Erica, not helping her, either way doesn't matter to him—until he sees her touch a spot on her forehead where the spikes must have driven in, and it occurs to him that Erica coming to him must have really pissed off Derek.
While Erica showers, Scott digs around in his room for a shirt and yoga pants that Allison had left over one time and he had never bothered to return. At first, he didn't want to. Then he developed a strange superstition that returning the items would really and truly mark the relationship over.
He leaves the clothes outside the bathroom door, explaining in low tones to Erica what he's doing. He knows she can hear, that there's no need to shout.
He lifts the clothes to his nose before he walks away and inhales deeply. They're still strong with Allison's scent. The smell curls through his body and centers him. It's not an anchor, but it's better than nothing. He feels bad for Erica, feels the urge to help her renewed. He does his best to cling on to that empathy. If he can't retain what it actually feels like, maybe he can retain the memory of feeling it. Maybe that will be enough to get them through.
After dropping off the clothes, he heads to the kitchen and starts digging around for food. He has no doubt that Erica hasn't been eating well, either. She's probably better off there since she can kill her own food, but even the werewolf physiology can't subsist on pure meat. He pours a couple glasses of orange juice, one of which he drains in one long gulp. Then he finds some bread that hasn't gone moldy and a band new bag of green grapes which he dumps into a colander to rinse off. He's running the water over the grapes when he hears his mother call his name.
"Scott?" she calls again. "Are you in the—" She steps into the kitchen with a stuffed laundry basket balanced on her hip and comes to a stop when she spots him. "You're not in the shower," she says. She glances at the ceiling, then back at him, her eyebrow raised. "Did you leave the water running outside?" The question sounds hopeful, like she already knows that the answer is negative and she has to ask anyway for her own well-being.
"It's Erica," he tells her. He shuts the tap off in the sink and gives the colander a shake to loose the excess water. "Erica Reyes," he adds, as if that will make everything OK. He knows his mother knows her and that connection seems like a good thing to exploit.
"Why is Erica showering in our house?" his mother asks. Her eyebrows crawl higher and her hands clench around the plastic handles of the laundry basket. She hasn't changed into her scrubs from the capris and t-shirt she'd put on that morning, yet her bearing is all commanding nurse.
"She needed to clean up," Scott answers simply. "Do we have anything else to eat? She's probably starved."
"Scott?" his mother says, ignoring the question. The warning in her tone clear. "Scott, I expect you to be more responsible than this. No matter what else you may be, you're still a kid and you're still living in my house and—"
On a different day, he might have interpreted her questions, her expression as concern: a mother worried over the choices her teenage son was making. He's standing in her kitchen half-clothed and sweaty, his hair is mussed, his face hot. He's admitted to a girl being in the shower. Any other day, he would have understood the miscommunication, would have turned his hands out and apologized until the mistake was cleared up. Today, all he sees is condemnation; the only thing that occurs to him that his mother is questioning his choices.
Scott snarls, his hackles up. "You're just jealous that I'm getting more action than you are!" he shouts, slamming the colander of grapes down into the sink harder than necessary. It isn't him, isn't something he would say. It also isn't true. Right now, he doesn't care. He wants to hurt her for daring to undermine him. Grapes escape from the colander and roll down the garbage disposal.
His mother's mouth drops open and she takes a step back; with a slight movement, she shifts the laundry basket between them. "Scott McCall," she utters, her voice pale under his verbal attack.
The fear in his mother's brown eyes slices through the pull of the full moon and yanks the tiny part that's still him back to the surface.
Scott takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. "I can't do this today, Mom," he says. "We're not…she's not." He huffs out another breath, his eyes cutting away for something neutral to focus on. It's the Christmas card photo from two years ago—still stuck to the refrigerator—that catches his attention. He barely recognizes the boy with bad skin who is posed with his brand new lacrosse gear in a studio shot that his mom still proudly shows visitors. "I'm not him," he finishes.
"That was nearly two years ago," his mother says as if she never would have thought otherwise.
"I mean—" He once more curls his fingers tight, using the slivers of pain of his nails cutting into his palm to buy more time. "—It's the full moon. I told you. I tried to tell you. I'm not myself. I can't be myself." He stumbles hard over his words, his apology. Speaking hadn't been this difficult when he'd tried to warn her a few days ago about what to expect. Then again, he doesn't remember the full moon hitting him so hard, so early. He wonders if Erica's presence is exacerbating the effects. And then he wonders if his mother will ever be able to understand how the vast majority of the moon's effects on him have no physical manifestation and thus are hard to explain.
His mother's lips form an O of understanding and her eyes drift to the ceiling. The water cuts off and they hear a thump of someone climbing out of the tub. A moment later, the hair dryer starts up. "Her, too?"
"Yeah," Scott answers. "She asked me to help her." He rakes a hand through his brown hair, the water that got on him from the sink slicking back his sweat-stiffened hair.
Without a word, Melissa disappears into the laundry room. When she reemerges a moment later, the basket is gone. "What can I do?" she asks. "You're going to need help getting ready now that there's two of you." She heads for the refrigerator and starts to pull dishes of leftovers out. She carries one of them over to the counter and dumps the contents onto the cutting board. As she starts slicing up the remains of a meatloaf from a couple nights before and making it into sandwiches, she warns, "Don't think you're getting off the hook. We are going to talk about this.
Scott nods silently wondering which "this," exactly, they're going to talk about. For all that he has been able to communicate to her, there's a great deal more that he hasn't—some of which she's not going to understand until she sees. A lot of which he never wants her to see. He stands awkwardly half way between the counter and door, not sure what to do with himself next. This is the part that Stiles would have helped him plan through, except Stiles is on vacation on the other side of the country, and no planning they had done was meant to accommodate two werewolves.
"I only want to make sure you're being safe," his mother adds a moment later. She turns to look at him, her posture carefully guarded, one foot balanced behind the other as if she's getting ready to bolt. She's still afraid of him. Right now, though, that's the smartest way she could be feeling.
"I know," Scott answers. He blinks, an idea clicking into place. He'd planned to stay home before, knowing that his mother would be at work and he could lock himself in the basement without fear of hurting or bothering her. With Erica in the mix, he wants to be as far away from the house and other people as possible. "We're going to go into the woods tonight. I won't be back until tomorrow.
For a second, he thinks she's about to remind him of his curfew. Her gaze sweeps over him and the tip of her tongue peeks out as she gets ready to admonish him. Then she turns back to the counter and starts stuffing the sandwiches into plastic baggies. "Get the blanket off my bed and let me throw it in the wash," she says. "You'll need something to keep you warm once the sun goes down."
With this direction to guide him, Scott heads for the stairs. First the blanket, then the chains. They're going to go into the forest, but they're not going to run free. No matter how much the urge to kill itches inside him, he's still determined to make it through this moon without satiating it. This moon, and all the rest.