x
Isaac had always liked the stories of the Greek gods.
back when before his father locked him in the freezer and threw flatware at his face, Isaac used to watch him read heavy, leather bound, gold scripted legends of men and women that were entirely fictional and still so mesmerizing that he wouldn't believe it if they just dropped out of the sky.
but these were just legends, nothing more.
(the day he learns legends are folktales turned truth is the day that his eyes burn fluorescent yellow and hair grows on his face where it never could before and the cracks of glass in his hands from his father's glass of scotch stitch themselves up without having to be asked.)
x
sometimes he trolls the hallways, books under arm, hand running nervously through his bronze curls and silently appraises his classmates with personas of the people he once read about in his books.
he snickers to himself, hiding a rare grin.
they are who they are for obvious reasons he reckons, slanted cursive scratching across the page of his notebook, sloping tree branches and initials of a girl, attention barely to the front of the class when he hears his name. "Isaac?"
his sea glass eyes widen in recognition but the words tumble in his throat. "I've got it, Coach," Lydia speaks up from her seat in the front row, smiling showing all her teeth. She would be Aphrodite for obvious reasons.
x
Lydia had always been the beauty with the strawberry blonde waves cascading down her back, hypnotizing emerald eyes, and gorgeously freckled skin. he knows all these things the same way he watched her snare a web of seduction and simpering slavery to every boy in school that wagged their tongue as she strutted down the hallway. each hoping to get their chance to maybe, possibly ask her the one question they all know the answer to already.
but she is much more than that now. she may be Aphrodite in her face, but in her heart, she has some attributes of Apollo with her whole ability to predict what is going to happen and how to work the world around her into what she wants it to be when she wants it to be that way. breathtakingly beautiful and strikingly intelligent, the combination.
x
the locker room is full to the brim with shouts and the rustling of clothing swaps and the banging of lacrosse sticks as he and his alpha quietly discuss the chaos threatening in the world around them. Scott speaks with his voice in low dulcet tones yet commanding like the leader that Isaac knows he is. very little holds him together better than a reassuring nod from his alpha.
"Isaac?" Scott asks, his fingers poised, wrapped tightly around his gym bag, jersey in the other hand, "We're going to figure this out." and his burning crimson eyes calm Isaac's own whimpering wolf burrowed deep in his chest. soft, direct, and completely to the point. if they were appointing leaders in Olympus, Isaac imagines that Scott would be the first selected and then dethroned because of the fact that he cares too damn much about everybody around him, the greatest strength and weakness to have.
x
Scott was always the underdog that he, Isaac, the ultimate underdog looked up to no matter their position nor place and Scott wasn't cruel to rule with an iron fist like Zeus would have. Zeus was all bravado and bragging rights and regulation that always seemed to work out in his favor and no one else's. but the real compassion and care that came from Zeus was instituted by his top in command Hermes.
if anything, Scott is all the care and compassion of the messenger with the power and authority of Zeus. he rules and barters not for his own sake but for everyone else's sake. if the world were ever to fall out of grace and topple to the bottomless black pit that he is so terrified of, then he prays to all holy hell that his alpha is there behind him, hand on shoulder, heart beat steady and betraying all sense of fear.
x
after school and lacrosse, he climbs into the back of Lydia's car with Scott and Allison and drives at break neck speed, though he is certain he'd be faster on foot, to Stiles' house. the walls of his bedroom look like a professional police investigation, papers strewn haphazardly over the carpeted floors, stuffed in between stacks of thick literature, under countless half empty coffee cups. twines of multicolored string rope like air streams over pictures and newspapers, Stiles in the mess of it all with his hands in his mahogany hair and his voice muttering quick and erratic under his breath. he barely acknowledges their entrance, rather puts them all to work immediately. Lydia with Archaic Latin and Scott with the computer files, Allison studying the Bestiary and Isaac right alongside her, close enough to know that she is wearing tangerine on her skin and jasmine in her hair.
"Yo," Stiles breaks the intruding silence with his tones carrying so easily across the room. "Isaac, toss me the volume next to your left foot, yeah, two, not four, okay great." he catches it with practiced ease and then even more so, flips the pages and walks and reads in the same unison. teams brains and brawns, and Stiles is most certainly their brains.
x
Clio was his name. the scribe for the gods, the one that wrote it all down. all the notes and the suggestions and the stories told from every single vantage point that was either truth or not, he penned it into existence and into volumes upon volumes of works for his surpasses to pore over throughout the ages. not that it matters much when you of it in retrospect because they couldn't read it anyway, rather had Clio dictate the tales out so he could mangle and misuse any and all forms if he wanted, but that wasn't his face, his persona, his self. he wanted knowledge and wisdom and the security that years of research and literature gave him, satisfied him, endured and taught long after his time had passed.
Stiles will want the truth to be known someday, in a form that is yet to be dispensable. he has always had all the answers from the beginning back when even Scott who had the damn bite was utterly and completely clueless, it was Stiles with the win, with the upper hand. poor lost puppies they'd be without their scribe. "Lycanthropy, you idiots." Isaac can almost hear the sarcasm popping in the syllables before he knows Stiles vocal rhythm.
x
it's after two in the morning when he bolts through her open window, rolling noiselessly onto the hardwood floors. she barely registers his presence with one open cocoa colored eye, the chestnut waves of hair lying against her starkly porcelain skin, one hand on the quiver of her bow, the other trained on a Chinese ring dagger set that he happens to know she keeps under her pillow shams. "Oh god, it's you. You scared the shit out of me," she scolds him from her sheet set, still halfway under the covers, the glint of a smile on her blood orange mouth.
he admires her from his prostrate position, still and waiting on her floorboards. so utterly beautiful and utterly terrifying in the same breath. the kind of girl you'd never worry about breaking her heart and being scared of her father, the kind of girl that you break her heart and run for the hills so she doesn't stab you in the jugular with an antique Japanese switchblade that she has been using since he had learned to color in kindergarten. not that he'd ever break her heart considering the fact that he'll always land in this position: on the floor with her above him, with her always above him.
x
Allison would be Athena. it's not even a question or a pondering that he had considered beforehand. she is the goddess of the hunt, ever perfect in her tracking and her shot is better than any marks man could ever hope to hit. she is also Artemis with the bow and arrow in hand, more straight and certain than most. ever confident and sure that she will catch her prey and she will strangle her victory with her lovely hands around the beast's neck.
if he had to die, eventually and he will, he hopes it would be lightning quick and painless as could be and the only way he could imagine that to be the case would be with one of her arrows finding its way through the cavity of his chest. she would strike him twice. once with her beauty when he was a simple boy of seventeen and she was fantastically gorgeous in a way that ached like being hunted, always on the run. and the second time, when and if, their kinship finally took a turn and he was handed over to be the prey she had always pursued.
x
a few days pass, his pantheon is full of fakes and phony gods and goddesses because if they are his tier then what could he possibly be. he's not the kind of thing that legends are made of, he is not the boy that is written about or written for, just a footnote in a long book about those that he loves and admires in the way that is so much like worship.
he abandons the text on the table in the library, the pages leafed through and tainted with his fingerprints.
x
Allison lounges in her bed, stares at the constellations on her ceilings that aren't really there and thumbs another page of the text that Isaac left in the library that afternoon, highlighted and noted in the margins, worn down with time and age like something he'd carried just to make sure that it was all real, this was all real.
he should know about legends and myths, she muses, considering they spend most of their waking and sleeping hours drowning in one. he has dutifully assigned them all characters in his little play of the Greek Pantheon, but he himself has no role, no main action, not even a supporting part.
Hercules, Allison decides. Fully mortal and able to feel and ache in every bruise and battering, but underneath not just a man but something more, something to grow into, to hang his stars from and to be proud of.
x
she leaves the page bookmarked in his locker the next day and watches as he traces her notes with his fingers in the yellowed margins at their lunch table while Stiles and Lydia talk Japanese folk stories and Scott counts off the number of days until the next full moon. he catches her eye from his sidelong glance: the sea glass blue and the bronze curls and the sculptured cheekbones, he looks more like a Greek god than should be allowed. Isaac grasps her hand under the slats of the table, slight grin ticking up the side of his cheek.
x
they will be legends one day, nothing more than some words in some heavy, leather bound, gold scripted book.