title: A Bump in the Night
summary: Where Derek has the grand plan to leave Isaac in the care of one strawberry blonde whose greatest weapon is intellect and really, he would rather have Allison because at least she has arrows. —IsaacLydia. Set after Season 3, Episode 1, "Tattoo."
disclaimer: I do not own Teen Wolf.
rating: T
It was the worst idea Derek ever had. Ever.
In the history of ever. Like, seriously?! God, this was the stupidest—
A thinly veiled glare was directed at him by aforementioned alpha male, a glare only slightly different from the guy's usual brood. "What was that?" rang Derek's threatening voice, another very affectionate characteristic of his.
"Nothing," Isaac replied, slightly defeated, slightly in submission, but mostly because he would rather have her hang around than have Derek suffocate him to death via hostile silence. Honestly, his angsty alpha lord really needed to adopt new tactics of intimidation. It wasn't like he was a hormonal teen—
"Ew."
Her voice floated into the room and made Isaac want to cringe. The memory that he was, once upon a very dark age, in love with her was one he wanted to shred to pieces with his claws. As his mind drifted to entertaining the thought of tearing her to pieces, Lydia crossed her arms over her chest and looked… unimpressed.
"What happened to him?"
If Isaac wasn't injured, he would've pounced on her in seconds, and not in a hormonal-teenager-kind-of-way, but in an I'm-going-to-rip-your-throat-out-kind-of-way.
Derek gave Isaac a warning glance, his eyes flickering a red that said back down, idiot. So Isaac swallowed his killer instinct and thought about Scott, who was pretty cool and a good friend, and who would probably not like Isaac so much if he accidentally killed Lydia, a more or less distant friend of Scott.
Whatever, Isaac concluded, shifting so that he could lay down on the crappy bed in Derek's crappy fall-apart mansion where everything was going to crap. She'll probably just get bored and leave.
"—just watch over him for a few hours," he heard Derek request. "If you hear something from outside, there's a tunnel that leads to a room underground that should be safe to hide in." And before Lydia could contest the setup that Derek had arranged, the alpha had closed the door behind him.
Isaac was left with a very unpleasant feeling.
Something he hadn't felt for a while now, but as he laid there in the rickety bed that god knows where Derek pulled from and situated in the middle of the living room, he felt it. The cold fear that burned him alive. The fear that existed whenever his father was around.
He felt it. The surge of violence.
Again. The ruthless beatings.
And again. That black hole of a fridge where he tried to claw with weak fingernails against the—
Suddenly, the bed shifted and fear fled from him as alarm overtook it. Isaac whipped his head around to meet a particularly annoying classmate sitting nonchalantly on the already cramped twin-sized bed.
"What are you even doing here?" he bit out as venomously as he could.
Lydia blinked at him, unaffected. Right, how could Isaac forget that Lydia was the resident bitch? Peter Hale may have sent her off the rocker for a while, and Stilinski's friendship may have warmed her cold, frigid heart, and there was Jackson who was an asshole and—
"To take care of you," she replied simply, staring at her nails.
Isaac scoffed. He rose from the sheets, perhaps a little too quickly because the wounds started to sting again, and sat up beside her. "You have got to be kidding me," he replied, offended. "What can a girl like you, devoid of any special characteristic aside from the fact that you have an immunity to wolf bites, possibly do for me?"
It was completely ridiculous. And therefore, it was Derek's stupidest plan ever.
Lydia turned to look at him, her brown eyes staring at him, like really staring at him. "I'm not here to protect you, Lahey," she explained, "I'm here to keep you company. That's what friends do for each other," she added with a shrug.
"We're not friends," Isaac said coldly.
"I meant Scott and Allison," she returned, "who begged me on behalf of Derek, to come to a creepy mansion and spend my Saturday night looking after a sick person." Lydia averted her eyes, studying the remaining wreckage of the room that Derek had yet to tidy. Isaac felt from the steady beating of her heart that Lydia was her usual blatantly honest self.
She didn't want to be here, but she was. Selfish Lydia Martin who always use to think of only herself was finally expressing concern for others. She wasn't here for him, but she was here. And the warmth that exuded from her was not something Isaac liked to acknowledge, but it existed and it was overwhelming powerful.
Isaac remembered why he liked her. It was because of her presence. It wasn't her beauty or her well-hidden intellect, but the simple power and control she projected from every ounce of her being.
Isaac was nearly pulled back into the intoxication that was Lydia Martin, when his ears twitched and his heart quickened.
Something was coming.
Two somethings who happened to be very familiar and very dangerous to him.
As he turned to her, about to speak, their eyes locked and immediately, she nodded. "To the room underground then?"
In spite of his wolfish pride, Isaac needed help.
His arm was draped over her shoulder, as the majority of his weight collapsed on her. She shuffled the two of them through the murky tunnel underground. He could sense how concentrated she was on preventing them from falling.
Beneath the earth, he could only faintly smell the twin werewolves. This was probably a good thing because the whole scent thing should work both ways.
Hopefully.
If not… Isaac glanced down and his nose fell into the sweet scent of strawberry shampoo. It was strong enough, close enough, for the smell to consume all his senses. Isaac wondered, as Lydia lugged him along, if things were to get bad, if the twins were to find them, would he run if he had the chance?
Would he just leave her and run to save himself?
Probably.
He didn't get this far, he didn't gain this much to lose all of it over a girl that a year ago, wouldn't have given him a second glance. She surely wouldn't have ditched her floral dresses and clicky heels for a sweatshirt, shorts, and worn tennis shoes and come to an abandoned mansion to carry an injured werewolf to—
When Lydia pushed the door aside, darkness stared back at them. A familiar, chilling darkness that Isaac never wanted to face again.
"I-I'm not going in there."
Lydia groaned beneath him. "What do you mean?" she whispered fiercely, pulling him inside on her trembling shoulders. "If we don't hide here, whoever they are, they're going to find us." She fumbled with sliding the door closed behind them.
Lydia then dug into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a flashlight, illuminating the ground with a thin trail of light.
"I would rather they find us," Isaac replied stupidly. "We can probably head out to the forest from here and then we can spilt up. I'll tell Derek—"
"You can hardly move," Lydia bit out. "Derek will be talking to a dead—"
Her voice diminished when the light was cast on the box of volts, then onto the odd iron gate decorated with rusty shackles and chains. Recognition and understanding bashed against his head as a hidden past unfurled in the silent screams of his kind.
"Let's get out of here. Now."
Lydia huffed exasperatedly and answered with a curt, "No." She managed to turn the two of them around and steadily helped Isaac—who was altogether unwilling—to sit, leaning against the iron gate. "It's safer to stay here," she explained. "The earth should be able to hide your scent. And if we're here, Derek will know where to find us."
That sounds logical.
Still, Isaac wanted to leave. "If they find us, then we're dead," he argued, trying to use the iron bars to pull himself up. "We won't have anywhere to run. You, Lydia, will die."
Despite the dark, Isaac was able to catch the offhanded shrug. He was about the question her sanity when the flashlight switched off and Isaac sat in a pool of darkness.
In was in the box again. Too weak to get out. Stuck inside and wounded physically, wounded mentally, wounded—
The panic was about to reach his throat when he felt the warm body slide beside him. Her scent consumed him, the irrevocably mix of strawberry and fragrant flowers and honey, intoxicating him and saving him from the darkness of his mind. It was effortless the way she could capture attention.
She sat beside him with their shoulders touching and when he felt her fingers slip through his, entwining and sending volts of electricity through his entire body, he knew.
He knew that if he had an opportunity to run away from danger, he wouldn't.
He would stay because he was an idiot.
He would stay because he actually liked being beside this girl that he tried so hard to hate.
He would stay because he needed to protect her.
"Hey Isaac," she whispered.
"What?" he said, almost irritably.
Lydia squeezed his hand. "You've stopped trembling."
fin.