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“I still hate that tattoo,” Stiles complained as Scott helped him down the tunnel.
“I know.”
Stiles managed to let that go for about five minutes. “Is that all you’re going to say?”
Scott didn’t stop to look at him; instead, the alpha focused on navigating the passage ahead. There was more than a small chance that Theo might have second thoughts about the combat readiness of his chimera gang.
Stiles tried to be patient as they moved on, listening to the sound of their footfalls echoing through the tunnel. Yet, no matter how many terrible things had happened in the last few weeks, Stiles’s archenemy remained silent. “You’re not going to ask me why I hate it?”
“Dude, I already know. You hate needles, but you watched me get stabbed with them about a million times in order to get it. Well, that is until you fainted.” Scott explained absently, his mind obviously on other things.
“Uh-huh.”
“Then, of course, Derek made you hold me down while he took a blowtorch to it. I know you didn’t enjoy that.”
“I smelled your skin burning, Scott. Ugh.”
Scott paused as they reached an intersection. He sniffed the air, most likely trying to confirm which path led back to the power station.
“I don’t like to see you in pain.” Stiles pushed on, since Scott seemed intent on avoiding this conversation. He felt Scott stiffen momentarily before the alpha decided on the right direction. “Yes, even when I cause it, which I know is all sorts of messed up, but it shouldn’t be any surprise to you that I can be self-destructive with the best of them.”
“Stiles …” Scott trailed off, but Stiles let himself smile at the tone in his friend’s voice. He had heard it many times before. It meant that Scott had already moved on after Stiles had crossed a line and was uncomfortable with bringing up the incident again.
For many years, Scott’s habit of shrugging off even the cruelest japes had made being friends with Scott easy. Stiles never had had to worry that Scott would get sick of him and finally look for someone who wasn’t all sharp edges all the time or someone who could offer a compliment without hiding it behind an insult.
If someone had asked Stiles what the worst thing Theo had done, he would say that it was to make Stiles doubt, even for a second, that this would no longer be true. Stiles checked himself: the second worst thing Theo had done.
“I look at that tattoo, and all I see is the pain connected to it. Yes, the needles. Yes, the blowtorch. But also, the sacrifice. Allison. All I see there is the pain you’ve been put through by so many people, including me.”
Scott finally came to a stop. They were very close to the ladder which led back up into the communications station, but the alpha couldn’t evade it any longer. “It’s not only about pain. It’s my pack symbol.”
“That doesn’t really refute my argument, does it?”
The alpha sighed. “Can we not do this now? It doesn’t matter.”
“Really? I think it matters a lot. You should have been able to lift that transformer all by yourself.”
The alpha didn’t say anything.
“And why aren’t you healing?” Stiles demanded, because he couldn’t help it. “Don’t tell me it just takes longer sometimes, because if you think I haven’t bothered to learn how long it takes an alpha to heal, you don’t know me very well.” Because it was such a strong habit, Stiles tried to flail, but with the amount of Tracy’s venom still in his veins it appeared more like a full-body spasm. “Derek got a fucking pipe shoved through him by Kali and he was better in less than six hours. You told me he fell four stories onto an escalator after getting the shit creamed out of him by the Alpha Pack to the point that everyone thought he was dead, yet he was better — if you skip the part about getting a Darach girlfriend — before we got back from the cross-country trip. For you, it’s been days longer than that.”
Scott clenched his jaw hard. He was going to be stubborn about this.
“Have you ever been able to outlast me when I really wanted to know something? Why try now?”
“Maybe I could just lie about it.”
That one stung. Some people thought Scott was incapable of being mean, but Stiles knew that was completely false. Most of the time, he simply chose not to hurt people with his words.
Stiles opened his mouth to answer, but then he thought better about saying the first thing that came to his mind. If he did, they would have to talk about everything, and he wasn’t ready to talk about Donovan yet. His father’s speech hadn’t even helped him come to terms with the whole mess in the library, let alone give him an idea on what to say to the best friend he had betrayed.
Of course, that was the reason Scott had brought it up; he was deflecting. He started moving once again, faster this time. Stiles wasn’t done with this conversation, so the most recent of his regrets could wait for another time.
“You don’t think this is important?”
“Yeah, I do. A lot of things are important but that doesn’t mean I want to talk about them right now.”
Stiles wouldn’t let himself be silenced. “Look, you’re the one who wanted me to say I was part of the pack. You can’t do that and not expect me to be curious about something that definitely affects the whole pack.”
With a sigh, Scott stopped at the ladder up to the main building of the communications center. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.” Stiles repeated, skeptically.
“I’m not sure.”
Stiles looked up the ladder and then decided to give Scott a little break from the interrogation. “Are you strong enough to get me up the ladder or are we going to have to wait until I can climb it myself?”
Scott shifted so Stiles’s arms were around his neck, wearing Stiles like a cape. “Only one way to find out.”
They struggled, and it took a lot longer to get up than it had taken to get down. This convinced Stiles that Scott’s weakness with the transformer wasn’t just a one-time event. Never-the-less, he bit his tongue on the way up; Scott had to concentrate, and Stiles couldn’t do much more than hold on.
The alpha was breathing heavily by the time they reached the blood covered concrete floor. Stiles still couldn’t walk, but he found he could at least lean on his own. “So …”
“I told you before, Stiles, it doesn’t matter. Theo is still out there. He has resurrected chimeras for a pack. The Dread Doctors are still out there. They resurrected something else. I can’t take a few days off to figure out why I’m not healing like I’m supposed to.”
Stiles reached out, jerkily, but he did manage to put a hand on Scott’s arm. “It matters to me.”
Scott took hold of the same arm and squeezed it in return and repeated himself. “I know.”
~*~
Noshiko would never tell the children this, but she found she was enjoying the drive back to Beacon Hills. Kira may not have been cured, but she wasn’t trapped with the Skin-Walkers either.
Her good mood even survived the black smoke that began to pour out from under the hood of the Jeep. Stiles cursed before coaxing the vehicle off the Interstate and into a convenient truck stop.
Grabbing his toolbox out of the trunk, Stiles and Scott went to the front of the vehicle and pulled open the hood. For their efforts, they got a black cloud of smoke in their faces. Both of them coughed, which was reasonable, but Noshiko noted with some concern that the effort almost made the alpha double over. Stiles, his own troubles forgotten for a moment, led Scott away from the vehicle.
Noshiko caught Kira’s eye. Her daughter seemed puzzled by it as well. Sighing, she got out of the car and went to the front. “What seems to be the problem?”
Stiles and Scott paused, as if they were burglars and someone had turned on the light. Stiles suddenly turned to her, all faux innocence and attempted cunning. “Mrs. Yukimura, could you help me with this?”
“Certainly. I would like to get home as soon as possible.” She approached the front of the Jeep and leaned over the engine. “Oh, dear.”
Stiles stepped up next to her, looking down at the haphazardly repaired engine. “It’s not that bad.”
“I have repaired more than a few vehicles in my time, Stiles, and I’m not sure how this one is still capable of moving.” She glanced over at her daughter. “Kira would you and Scott go and purchase some drinks. Perhaps a few snacks? This could take a while.”
“Sure, Mrs. Yukimura. Come on, Kira.”
The moment Noshiko was sure Scott was out of earshot, he turned to the older woman. “So, would you like to tell me what is wrong with him?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Stiles lied. The human was certainly better at lying than the alpha, but not yet good enough to fool her.
Noshiko selected a wrench and began working at the carburetor. “I think you do. Might I remind you I most likely know far more about the supernatural world than you do. I might possibly be able to help.”
“Scott isn’t healing.”
She paused. “What happened?”
“While you were trying to help Kira, Theo set Liam up to kill Scott on the supermoon. He beat Scott to the point of death but didn’t get to finish the job because Mason stopped him. When Theo found him, he shoved his claws into Scott’s chest. He was dead for about fifteen minutes before Melissa resuscitated him. That was like a week ago, but he’s still not healing.”
“He’s not healing anything or that particular wound?”
“Does that matter?”
“It does. A werewolf can keep himself from healing if he is conscious, but Scott has slept since then, has he not?”
“Yeah. He won’t tell me the details, but I think it’s just … I think it’s just the wound Theo gave him.”
Noshiko frowned. “There are examples of werewolves being so grievously injured that the wound does not heal. You, yourself, have encountered such an example.”
“Deucalion. Fantastic. You don’t happen to know of a darach someone’s got stashed somewhere?”
Noshiko found one of the problems with the engine and attacked it with a screwdriver. She did not answer his question.
“You do! You know one.”
“I know of people similar to a darach, but from my culture. It is not worth going down that road.”
Stiles reached out and grabbed her by the arm. “Of course, he’s worth it.”
“I don’t think he would agree. On the other hand, it may not even be necessary.” She looked him in the eyes. “This problem might simply be a spiritual issue that can be resolved in other ways.”
Noshiko thought she might have to go deeper into an explanation, but from the look on Stiles’s face, he had already come to this conclusion. “I … don’t know how to help him. Maybe you could give him a pep talk?”
“Stiles, this type of thing goes beyond a simple pep talk. Scott must have, on some level, believed that he deserved the wound. He must see it as just.”
“It’s not!” Stiles seemed a little frantic about it.
“Scott became a True Alpha through force of will. It is a powerful achievement, but it is not without its risks. All power has risks.”
She watched how her assertion worked its way through his mind. Stiles might not have the best self-image and his intellectual depth could be irregular, but he was quick. He could put things together and come to the conclusion as quickly as any teenager she had ever met.
From the look on his face, he didn’t like the conclusion he was reaching. “Scott said he doesn’t know why he’s not healing.”
“Could he have been lying to you to spare your feelings?” Noshiko scored a very palpable hit. “Even if he might not be aware of the connection, if he thinks that he doesn’t deserve his powers because of his recent failures, it will have an effect on him.”
“So, what do we do?”
Noshiko smiled. “I’m afraid you will have keep on doing what you have been doing. Being his friend. Being his pack. I am very old, and I have learned one very important lesson. No matter how much you care, there is a limit to what you can do for others. Some things they must do for themselves. I am sure that is little comfort to you.”
“You’re fucking right it’s not.”
Noshiko did not mind the language. It was a terrible thing to love someone and be helpless. She would experience this soon enough with Ken. “Let us now focus on fixing the Jeep. Scott and Kira are coming back.”
~*~
“Doc?”
“We’re in the back, Scott.” Alan called out.
Scott walked into the back room casually, only to freeze when he saw who else was present. It warmed Alan’s heart that no matter what was going on, Scott felt safe enough at the clinic to keep his guard down, even after all the violence. The boy was only shocked to find his mother present.
“What are you doing here, Mom? Is something wrong?”
Melissa nodded. “Yes, there’s something wrong, and I think you already know what it is.”
A shadow of awareness and remorse passed over Scott’s face before he banished it. “Well, I have a list of things I have to work on, but tonight we’re going to talk about Valack and the danger he poses to Lydia.”
“We are going to do that!” Stiles said quickly. “But first, we’re going to talk about the dangers you are posing to yourself.”
The alpha sighed and grimaced. “Guys, I appreciate that you’re worried, but— “
“Lift up your shirt,” Melissa commanded.
“Mom.”
“I, too, would like to inspect this wound, if that’s okay with you.” Alan put forward. “With what Stiles told me, I am concerned that because so much time has passed since you were injured and, apparently, the wound is still not healing.”
“It’s not,” Scott replied. “I don’t want to show you and I don’t want to talk about it.”
Alan was a little taken aback; Scott had never refused treatment before. Alan did not like it, but it was a point of pride with him that he did not force his care on anyone. Scott’s mother and best friend, on the other hand, didn’t seem to hold to the same strict understanding of consent.
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” Stiles declared. “You know you might have to fight chimeras again. Or desert-dwelling spirits after your girlfriend. What about the Beast? Any one of those things should scare you enough into giving serous thought to changing zip codes, but on top of it all Grandpa Psycho is now back in fighting shape.”
“Gerard isn’t going to do anything,” Scott said confidently.
At that, Melissa shook her head violently. “You’ll excuse me if I stay terrified. Scott, I didn’t check on your wound because I thought it would heal just like every other time I’ve seen you wounded. Stiles tells me that it hasn’t, and Alan tells me that it could be permanent.”
Scott looked at Stiles with a combination of disappointment and irritation. “If I had snitched on you to your dad, you would have broken a baseball bat over my skull.”
“You mad?” Stiles shot back. “Add it to my tab. I don’t care how pissed you get if it keeps you alive. Doc, you were Duke’s attending physician when he got his eyes burned out. How did that work? Why didn’t it heal?”
“Deucalion had been severely poisoned by wolf’s bane and then had his eyes burned out of his head with phosphorous arrowheads,” Alan explained carefully. “But it wasn’t just the physical damage; he had led members of his pack into an ambush and was in an emotionally compromised state as a result. I examined him several times after he was brought to this room, and there was no sign of any regeneration at all.
Stiles made a Will-Smith-Ta-Da gesture. “Sound familiar?”
“Please, Scott.” Melissa pleaded. “For me?”
For a moment, it looked as if Scott would refuse, but there was a reason that Melissa and Stiles had gone for emotional appeals: when they came from someone he loved, Scott was particularly vulnerable to them. Conflict crawled across his face, before he turned to Deaton and nodded.
“If you would get up on the examination table and lie down,” Alan instructed.
Removing the bandage with one hand and with a tight hold over his own anger, Alan examined the wound. Theo had been precise on his attack, shoving his claws up under the rib cage and probably shredding lungs and cardiac muscle. It would have been a dangerous injury if Scott had been completely healthy; after the beating Liam had reportedly given him, it would clearly have been fatal. That was probably why Theo had made the mistake of not severing the body, which was the standard practice among hunters and other enemies of werewolves when they wanted to make sure the target was dead.
Melissa wasn’t inspecting the wound. She was instead staring at the bandage; Alan wasn’t sure why; it had been expertly applied. Stiles couldn’t bring himself to look directly at the wound, focusing on Scott’s face instead. The human boy had always been naturally squeamish, but Alan suspected that it called back to a previous injury that Scott had suffered very close to that position and in this same room.
As much as he hated thinking about it, Alan forced himself to speculate on exactly how Scott had survived. He was sure his mother’s desperate need in that library had reached Scott, but it still shouldn’t have been able to overcome that damage by itself. He wondered if his survival had been partially due to the strength of the telluric currents under the school, and Scott’s connection through them to the Nemeton.
With some relief, Alan could detect some healing in the wound. Very little when Alan compared to how it should be healing, but enough to keep Scott alive, though in a weakened condition. The heart and lungs were damaged but intact. Scott had made sure the bandages kept the wound from being irritated. This wouldn’t remain like the wound to Deucalion’s eyes, where the tissue had been far more delicate.
He explained as much to the three of them.
“That’s it. You’re coming home and you’re taking it easy until you’re completely better,” Melissa insisted. “You can’t help anyone if you’re that injured.”
“I don’t have time, Mom. I promise I’ll be careful— “
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep!” Stiles all but shouted at him. “You’ve seen what the Beast can do. None of these assholes are going to let you be careful! People are going to be in danger, and you’re going to try to help. You won’t let something like a fucking hole in your fucking chest stop you.”
Strangely enough, in the face of their outbursts, Scott didn’t focus on his mother or his best friend. Scott looked at him.
Alan wanted more than anything in the world at that moment to use his influence with Scott to convince him that his mother and Stiles were right. To tell this young man that the wisest thing to do would be to go home and rest with his friends and his family and let someone else face the dangers that filled the night outside the protective wards of this clinic.
He couldn’t. It would be a betrayal. Scott listened to him for the same reason Talia listened to him, because he gave Scott the best advice he could, and, in most cases, that meant balancing the needs of the pack against the dangers to innocent strangers out there.
Alan looked into Scott’s eyes and saw exactly what he expected. Scott already knew what he had to do.
“We have to rescue Lydia,” Scott said with the type of firmness that shut both his mother and Stiles up. “We have to stop Theo. We have to stop the Doctors and the Beast. I may be physically weaker, but I’m … but we’re the best people to do that. I’m not going to stop, because if I can do something, I have to. You three taught me that, and you don’t get to change your minds now.”
Alan went into his office to get the file on Valack as Scott bid his mother goodbye. Sometimes, he really hated being an Emissary.
~*~
Theo had no idea why he had decided to work in the high-school library during his free period. On the television, detective shows always spouted this bullshit that criminals liked to return to the scene of the crime.
He hadn’t even thought about Scott still being alive for almost an hour.
A few days after the supermoon, Theo had gone back to school. He had had his “father” write him a note saying he had caught the flu, and then he had attended class as if nothing had happened. Compared with the rigor of how the Doctors had taught him, catching up on the work he had missed has been almost stupidly easy.
Well, that was the case in all but Ms. Patton’s English class: the Doctors had little use for literature. In the latest assignment, each person had been assigned a poem from the Romantic Period of United State literature, and they were supposed to write a paper in which they explicated the poem and then, ridiculously, describe how it made them feel personally. It was far more difficult than it had any right to be; Theo was a day from ordering one of his chimeras to do it for him.
He had a pretty good idea about the point Ralph Waldo Emerson had been trying to make. He could easily write some bullshit answer about how it made him feel, so it didn’t make any sense that he was having so much trouble. It started:
Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good-fame,
Plans, credit and the Muse,—
Nothing refuse.
Theo sneered at the sentimental twaddle on the page but refrained from writing a scathing vivisection of Transcendentalism. He would get it done and hand it in like a good little student. After all, the nail that sticks out gets pounded down.
He tapped a pencil on the table. His frustration with the assignment was understandable, but part of what nagged the hind part of his brain was why he chose to work on it here. He could tell himself he could look up the critical works on Emerson on the shelves, but he didn’t care that much about his grades, so it would be a lie.
The truth was that Theo wanted to see Scott again.
He really should be wary of running into the alpha, especially after the ass-whuppin’ Scott had delivered to his chimeras in the tunnels. He really should be plotting Scott’s downfall, or at least a way to keep the McCall pack occupied until he had seized the Beast’s power. Yet, here he was, like a gormless lamb, wandering into the path of the wolf to see if he’d be noticed.
As if on cue, Scott and Stiles entered the library. Over the last eighteen months, they had obviously mastered the art of how to talk about the supernatural in public. The secret was to talk normally, as if they were discussing how excited they were to go see The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Not too loud which would draw attention, and not too soft which might also draw attention. Theo, of course, could hear them perfectly.
“Kind of mystified about how giant clawed werewolf feet turn back into a pair of sneakers,” Stiles complained half-heartedly. Stiles had the unique ability to understand the danger inherent in the supernatural while still being intrigued and even excited by it.
Theo immediately stood, leaving the books where he had been using them. He tracked the pair’s movement through the library and moved quickly to a location where they would ultimately come across him.
“Argent said that it wouldn’t be like anything we’ve ever seen before.”
Chris Argent was back in town. Theo frowned, though it wasn’t unexpected.
What was unexpected was the apparent return of the camaraderie between Scott and Stiles. Scott’s effectiveness as alpha would only be increased with Stiles back by his side. What did someone have to do to permanently ruin this friendship?
“Did he say it was going to defy the laws of physics?”
They came to a dead stop when they saw him. The banter began immediately — or, to be more precise, Stiles demanded answers and threatened him while Theo responded with an elaborate metaphor about Russian winters. Scott, on the other hand, simply stared at him throughout, hurt evident in what even Kate Argent had called his ‘big beautiful brown eyes.’
It pleased Theo on some level that he could still elicit such a response from Scott.
“What do you really want?” The alpha asked at last.
Theo had asked himself that question with no success since the moment he had learned that Scott was still alive. He knew what he didn’t want. He didn’t want to have to fight Scott. He didn’t want to give up his chance to steal the Beast’s power. He shouldn’t share either of those answers, so he made it about survival — something that Scott could understand.
Theo expected anger, and while the scent of Stiles’s rage was easily identifiable, he couldn’t sense any of it coming from Scott. Instead, all he could detect was regret. At first, he thought that Scott must still be upset about how he had mishandled the situations with both Stiles and Liam, but after a few seconds, he had to dismiss the conclusion. Scott’s attention was entirely focused on him.
It made Theo uncomfortable, so he decided to cut the meeting short. “Or we’ll see who gets to her first.”
He walked away, not bothering to look back. While Stiles might have had enough rage to make another run at him, the human wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t do it in public, and Scott wouldn’t have let him in any event.
But where did the smell of blood come from?
A bleeding wound have to be pretty large, and Stiles moved freely with his normal frenetic full-body expressions. Scott, on the other hand, had stayed almost perfectly still. Had he been trying to hide an injury? Yet that didn’t make any sense; it had been days since the fight in the tunnels with his chimera, and Scott hadn’t even been scratched then. Unless there had been a fight Theo didn’t know about. Of course, the wound Theo had caused would have been big enough.
Yet, that had been days ago. It should have been healed completely by now.
As the Surgeon had explained during one of his lectures, the efficacy of a werewolf’s healing could be affected by any number of factors. The severity of the injury. The presence of allergens like wolf’s bane and mountain ash. The lunar phase. Even the emotional state of the werewolf who received the injury.
Theo, having left the library and walking across campus stopped in his tracks. In this case, all of those factors were in play.
“He should have died,” Theo said out loud. A freshman girl looked at him and moved on.
Scott should have died at Liam’s hands, but thanks to Mason, that didn’t happen. Even then, Scott should have died at his hands.
Theo looked down at his blunt human fingers and flexed them. If Scott was still injured, it must have been a very close thing. But, as some people were wont to say, being close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. There was a reason the Argents practiced hemicorporectomy.
He couldn’t smell Scott any longer, but the memory of the blood stung Theo’s nostrils. He closed his eyes and waited for the gut-wrenching frustration at his failure to threaten to overwhelm him. But it didn’t. It didn’t overwhelm him because it didn’t exist. He wasn’t angry that Scott wasn’t dead.
For some reason, he actually did not want Scott dead. “What the fuck?” he asked the sky, hanging blue and bright above Beacon Hills High School.
The sky didn’t answer.
~*~
Liam had gone along with the plan to break Lydia out of Eichen House even though it scared him. He hadn’t been being needlessly negative when pointing out to the pack how much they didn’t know. They weren’t professional secret agents like the people in the movies he and Mason watched.
He had gone along with it because he didn’t have any choice. Lydia was his friend, and she was in trouble. The pack were his friends, and they needed him. The fact that these things were still true after everything that had happened made them all the reasons he needed, even though he had one more very important reason.
Mitigation.
One night, during the terrible days immediately after he had busted up his coach’s car, he had been sitting in his room crying when his stepdad knocked on the door, asking to come in. Liam hadn’t answered him, but finally David had come inside anyway.
“Why am I like this?” Liam had blurted out, and he had immediately felt like a baby for saying it. “It’s not fair!”
“A lot of things in life aren’t fair,” his stepfather had said, sitting down the corner of Liam’s bed. “They simply are.”
Liam had rubbed his eyes as he sat on the floor.
“In my job, I’ve seen a lot of people die on the operating table, Liam. It wasn’t fair for many of them. On the other hand, I’ve helped a lot of people live through things that they did to themselves willfully. Fairness is … rare.”
“How do you deal with it?”
“I force myself to stop thinking about whether it’s fair or not at all, and I focus on what I can do about the patient right in front of me. Can I fix what’s wrong with them? Sometimes the answer is no. If I can’t do that, can I stop what’s wrong with them from hurting them anymore than it already has? Sometimes the answer to that is also no. If I can’t even do that, can I mitigate that hurt so it’s not so bad? Sometimes the answer is no, but sometimes the answer is yes, even if it seems insignificant compared to the problem.”
Liam had felt pretty insignificant at that moment.
David had reached down and grabbed his shoulder. “Some things are beyond our power to change, but there is almost always something we can do.”
Liam couldn’t fix what was happening to Scott. He couldn’t fix the way that Scott, who used to touch him as much as his parents did, would only come closer than five feet to Liam if Scott made an obvious effort to do so. He couldn’t fix the way Scott studied him after the alpha had made a decision to see if Liam’s would explode.
He couldn’t fix the fact that Scott was afraid of him.
He couldn’t heal the wound in Scott’s chest. Liam hadn’t really understood the night of the supermoon how badly he had beaten Scott. He had been pure rage and frustration and the insidious need to do something — anything — to save Hayden. Mason had filled him later, unmercifully so, describing how Scott could barely move when Theo had come for him.
Mason hadn’t been doing it to be mean. It wasn’t some form of petty revenge for Liam leaving him in the library to be endangered by Theo and then having to sit there keeping vigil over Scott’s body. Mason had only been trying to get him to snap out of his self-destructive quest to tell Deputy Clark about his sister and go talk to Scott. Liam wouldn’t ever be able to repay Mason for those twenty-four hours of determined support. Most other people — most other friends — would have taken one look at Liam tearing an innocent person apart and ran the other way.
Instead, Mason had done the best he could to fix things, while Liam couldn’t even fix a little bit of what he had done. When Scott lifted up his shirt in the corridor of Eichen House, Liam realized he couldn’t even stop what was hurting Scott. The wound that Theo had given him — no, scratch that — the wound that Theo and Liam had given him was still there, gaping and ugly. Still open. Still bleeding. Still hurting.
So that left only one thing to do: mitigation.
Scott hadn’t taken any pleasure in punching him, and Liam should have known better than to make that happen. It had been an attempt to make things up, to offer his own pain as a way of helping, but after Scott had punched him hard enough for him to get angry, Liam could tell — it just made things worse.
What did help was when Meredith grabbed Scott’s hand in the cell. Scott didn’t want to use his claws on her, probably still shy from his mistake with Corey, but to have this banshee trust him that much? Liam imagined Scott forgot about the hole in his chest for a second.
So that’s what he could do. He would do the things that would make Scott happy, make Scott believe in himself again. And Liam knew the best place to start.
He’d convince Hayden to leave Theo’s pack, just as soon as they got out of Eichen House.
~*~
"I don’t get it,” Malia complained to Mason as they were leaving the McCall House.
Mason stopped and turned to the werecoyote. He was a little shocked. While he thought that Malia liked him well enough, he had never actually had a conversation with her by himself. “Don’t get what?”
“Scott said that he healed when we were back together. When we were a pack. But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Oh.” Mason hadn’t given that much thought; he had simply been glad that Scott had fully recovered.
“Usually, I’d talk about this with Stiles, but we’re fighting.” Malia bit her lip. “I could also go to Deaton or Morrell, but there are things about all this that I wouldn’t want to talk to them about.”
“You mean how you abandoned Scott so you could go kill your mother.”
The words came out really before Mason had time to think about it. He snapped his mouth shut, and while he thought about taking the words back, he decided not to. It was the truth.
For her part, Malia simply shrugged. “They wouldn’t understand.”
“I don’t think anyone could, to be honest. Scott needed you, and you told him to fuck off.”
“That’s not what I said!” She sniffed the air. “Are you angry with me?”
“Someone has to be. Scott doesn’t seem to be able to get angry.”
“Did you get this pissed off at Liam?”
“I should’ve, but I kept telling myself that Liam was manipulated by Theo and unstable because of the supermoon. What’s your excuse?”
“I did what I thought I needed to.”
“Whatever.” Mason bit his tongue. “It’s the past.”
“That’s what I’m talking about! If Scott wasn’t healing because we weren’t a pack, when did we stop being a pack and when did we start being a pack again? I still want to kill my mother, and I still don’t really want to talk to Stiles.”
Mason squinted at her. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“Yeah. If you didn’t notice, our enemies are still out there. The Doctors are still out there. The Beast is still out there, whoever it is.”
A shudder ran down Mason’s spine.
“If Scott’s going to stop healing anytime one of us does something wrong, that’s bad. You get that? Theo isn’t going to forget it.”
“I think it’s a bit more complex than that, Malia.”
“You think?”
Mason hated to admit it, but Malia had a point. So he did what he always did when a strange problem presented itself. He worked it out.
This was obviously what Malia had been expecting. She crossed her arms, but not out of impatience. “I want to know how it works so it doesn’t happen to him again.”
“I believe … I believe that’s not our call. It’s his.” Mason licked his lips. “I’ve been annoying Liam and Stiles for everything they can tell me about werewolves. Stiles told me that Derek once said that you can’t have a pack without an alpha. He had betas named Erica and Boyd who ran away. He had a sister named Cora who was very angry at him. He had a beta named Isaac who sort of jumped ship to Scott.”
“I remember him. He was there when they got me to change back.”
“And …” Mason trailed off.
“He had my father, who was probably scheming against him the whole time.” Malia rolled her eyes.
“From what I was told, he never stopped healing like an alpha and he was hurt pretty badly multiple times. People thought he had died. I guess … Derek never stopped thinking that he was their alpha, no matter what happened.”
“And Scott did.” Malia nodded. “And when he got Lydia out of Eichen House, he felt like he was our alpha again.”
“Liam told me that the shape you take reflects the person that you are. Scott stopped healing not because of anything we did. He stopped healing because he thought he had failed us. When he stopped feeling that way …”
Malia grinned at him. “Good.”
“Why are you smiling?”
“Two reasons. I just have to make sure that Scott doesn’t act stupid anymore. I never thought he failed me; I thought I failed him. I know Stiles feels the same way. I’ll kick Scott’s ass if he ever thinks like that again, and I’ll kick the shit out of Liam if he tries to blame Scott for stuff that isn’t his fault.”
Mason winced. “Please don’t. And what’s the second thing?”
“You called yourself pack. It’s a relief, honestly. None of this can-I-be-in-the-pack-if-I’m-just-a-weak-human nonsense. You know you belong with us.”
He stared at the coyote for a moment and then he grinned right back. He couldn’t help it.
~*~
Kira helped Scott to bed. It was slow going; the Beast had messed him up quite badly. His body understood on some level that it needed rest, but Scott’s mind kept trying to make him turn around.
“We gotta find them.” He said helplessly. “It’s Mason.”
“I know. Everybody’s looking.” With gentle insistence, she guided him to his bed so he could lay down.
Scott’s trip into the desert to come rescue her had helped convince her that no matter what mistakes he had made before, he still loved her. But this helped too. Once more, he was totally open with her.
He slid across the bed and accidentally sat on an envelope. He picked it up and his face fell.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He stared at it. “It’s just a scholarship. I missed the due date.”
“We’ll figure it out.” They would. She would make it happen. If she had to, she would badger her mother into helping out. Kira had watched her taking silver ingots out of a box, for Heaven’s sakes. “Right now, you’re not going anywhere until you heal. Okay?”
She left him there and took a moment to shoo Stiles away from the door. She couldn’t blame Stiles for trying to get in at all. Both of them wanted to fix things with Scott as quickly as possible, and both of them were afraid that things were never going to go back to the way they were.
She hated it. It hadn’t been a little over a year since she had moved to Beacon Hills, and so much had changed. She wasn’t human; she found out she had never been human. Her mother was centuries old. Monsters were real, both human and non-human ones. Her whole world had turned upside down.
But it hadn’t been all bad. Her mother had reminded her that she had had other friends before, but they weren’t like the pack. None of her friends in New York would have understood. None of them would have seen what she could do and act as if it were cool.
None of them would have believed in her like Scott. It wasn’t that there had been times when he had lied to her or scared of what might be happening. That had happened. What made it special is that after he had doubted her, he hadn’t given up their relationship as a lost cause. He had fought to fix what had happened between them, even if it couldn’t never be exactly as it used to be.
She would do the same.
The first step was to convince him to let himself heal; not just tonight, but every night. She had a plan. The first step was to get him out of those bloody clothes. She got some fresh ones out of his closet.
He stirred as she got up on the bed. “Hey.”
“Here. Let me help you.”
“You don’t have to do that.” He tried to take the clothes out of her hands, but she wouldn’t let go.
“I want to. You understand me?” She looked him straight in the eye. “You’re not in this alone. You never will be.”
“Kira, I …”
“Am I important to you?” she demanded.
“Yes. Of course.”
“Is Stiles? Liam? Lydia? All of us?”
Scott didn’t answer with his voice, but he swallowed.
“You’re important to us, too. We love you. We’d love you even if your eyes didn’t turn red, so you can’t do … what you did, anymore. Do you promise me you won’t?”
He bit his lip. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
She raised her eyebrow and then kissed him. “You can never let yourself think that you don’t deserve to heal or to be what you are. You can never think that our lives would be better if you weren’t in it. Promise me.”
Scott stared at her, and she stared right back at him.
“Okay. I promise.”
She believed him.