Thank you so much for your reviews and continuing to read this far into my tale. The song for this chapter is "Read My Mind" by: The Killers. Enjoy!
Chapter 24: "Read My Mind"
"I never really gave up on
Breakin' out of this two-star town
I got the green light
I got a little fight
I'm gonna turn this thing around
Can you read my mind?
Can you read my mind?"
Lucky for Lahey, Argent killed the beasts and did not, in the end blame him for the car despite muttering the whole time at the car dealership in annoyance that he had to pay for more new cars than he had ever owned previously since moving to this town. "Honestly Isaac, this is ridiculous." Chris complained as he drove the new car home and the werewolf looked over at the hunter uneasily, "What's ridiculous?" Isaac asked warily fearing that he already knew the answer and that it would commence another lecture about vehicles, prices, and sleazy car sales men at all levels of the business. Instead of one more automobile comment to drive the teenager insane the hunter surprised him, "How a true Alpha like Scott cannot make up with his best friend?" In classic local werewolf fashion, Isaac completely misunderstood what he was going for and cocked his head in confusion. "But he and Stiles aren't fighting?"
Chris Argent looked over at him shaking his head and giving the boy a look, "And you think Liam asks stupid questions. I meant you and Scott." The tall lean brown haired boy looked over at him and frowned at him with slight anger in his blue eyes. "He started it." Isaac managed with a deeper frown and causing the sixteen-year-old to sound incredibly like a small child. "I mean that he was the one who turned Liam and left him once he'd created something he hadn't meant to." The older hunter frowned in response recognizing that there was a fissure between them greater than Liam and he definitely knew what that fissure was caused by. "When he abandoned her, it hurt me too." Turning away from the hunter to look out the window, the teen's frown deepened and caused him to look ten years older.
"This isn't easy to deal with for either of us." Chris added feeling way too much like Deaton while acing as a mentor to all these supernatural teenagers, including the one who was currently dating his not-so-little girl. "Allison feels it too." Isaac ground through his teeth after a painfully long and tense silence that would have suffocated both men had he not spoken at that moment. "So do I but I still have to work with him, the town won't survive otherwise." The teen continued to sulk in the passenger seat beside him not yet willing to admit to what he knew he had to do. He knew better than most how much of a necessity agreement was especially when those you loved were at stake but this was incredibly difficult to accept. This was both the boy he owed his allegiance to and the one who left him and Allison to die. "He left her to die." Came out of his mouth in an unbidden and inhuman snarl, "All alone and broken and bleeding on the ground."
Despite his earlier words about forgiving the teen for leaving Allison, Argent's hands clenched the steering wheel so tightly that all the blood drained from his knuckles leaving them a ghostly pale white. It took everything in him not to add that part of what Isaac was feeling was the fact that he had been left to die too on that cold pavement in a pool of both his and Allison's blood. "Make it a business association then, you'll have to get along for now but soon he'll earn back your trust." That was wrong, trust once broken was never the same. Sometimes it came back stronger like the kind that he now had with his daughter or the kind that she now had with Isaac but other times it did not end quite as well making it much more similar to what trust he'd had with Gerard prior to the death of his wife and his subsequent semi-transformation into a werewolf. It would not still rub him so raw if Gerard had not convinced the wife he loved, despite all of her flaws, to kill herself when she was bitten.
"Business association?" Had Isaac not just spoken, Argent would have completely forgotten that the boy was in the car next to him. Ironically enough, he was supposed to be the one who was so great at compartmentalizing. Turning to the younger man, Argent forced a grin that looked more than beyond painful and erased it just as quickly before replying, "Yes, a business association. One that you don't have to like but keep up solely for mutual benefit and keeping the balance."
Isaac cocked his head and looked confused for a long moment before his eyes cleared and he nodded curtly. "Business association to keep the balance. I can handle that." Argent smiled despite himself, the boy that he had first seen at Derek's side had been angry and would never have listened to a logical argument no matter how much good it would have done. He paused as he glanced back over and added with a small smile, "Can you tell him this too, Chris?" The hunter laughed and kept his weary-worn watered down green eyes on the road as he reached a hand out and squeezed the boy's shoulder. "That you have to prove to him and it won't be a one-time thing. This will be an over and over again process that will be tough. Just keep your emotions in and remember that this is just to keep the peace."
Isaac nodded and turned his head to look back out the window and resume watching the landscape of constant evergreen trees pass by as they took the main road back into town. As they reached the first stoplight into town, Chris, knowing he would regret it as Allison's father but knowing that she would do it soon if he didn't, spoke up once more, "Living with him might complicate things further. We do have a guest bedroom in our apartment you know." The teen's eyes lit up and he turned to look at Chris in surprise, at this point he could not even mentally refer to the man who had become a huge mentor to him by just his last name. "Do you mean it?" Isaac asked with his eyes wide and his smile contagiously stretching from ear to ear. Smiling himself in response, Chris laughed and tried his best to still sound serious as he added, "Yes, just sleep in it at least a few nights out of the month. Nightmares excused of course."
The rest of the car ride back to the apartment, Isaac never stopped smiling like a kid promised a lifetime worth of ice cream. Chris was smiling too despite the nagging voice in his head telling him he wasn't living up to the overprotective father standard that his badass hunter reputation required of him. As the boy leapt out of the car the second he pulled into the parking spot, Chris watched him sprint with supernatural speed up the stairs and knew that he was rushing to tell Allison the news. Chuckling to himself he asked himself how could he be overprotective when this boy was one of the few things he had left to keep him going? And even if it was not keeping him going specifically, then keep his daughter, the light of his life and his whole world, together and happy. No, he truly didn't feel bad about not being overprotective enough after all; Isaac was part of his small family now and that meant he had a need to protect him too.
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