Fanfic: Personal Leave [Teen Wolf]
Dec. 9th, 2012 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
argentum_lsTitle: Personal Leave
Characters: Melissa McCall, Scott McCall
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2000
Notes: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
angst_bingo prompt: vacations.
Summary: After "Hang on Tight," Melissa decides that she and Scott need a vacation to help them get a few things figured out.
Melissa cast frequent glances at her son as they drove, trying, as always, to guess what was going on inside his head so that she could figure out the right thing to say. She’d been at a loss in that department for weeks now, since learning about her son’s double life, about the secret that had apparently been a secret only to her. “How clueless are you people?” she remembered the boy, Matt, saying, as he waved a gun in her face. She’d had no idea what he was asking. She known that Scott had slipped away, but she’d thought it was growing pains, the consequence of first love, a child’s need to assert his independence. Then Scott had turned to look at her and saw how wrong she had been. She bit her lip and cast another glance. Scott’s head was pressed against the passenger-side window, his face turned so that he was gazing out at the passing landscape. He held his phone in his lap, twisting at the dangling earbuds as if trying to get up the nerve to put them in.
“We’re almost there,” she offered, her voice sounding overly loud in the otherwise quiet vehicle. They’d turned off the main road about half an hour back and were driving down a single-lane gravel road, the only noises the crunching of the tires and the occasional pinging of a pebble bouncing off the car’s undercarriage. Trees lined the sides of the road, crowding so close that she didn’t know where she’d pull the car if another vehicle came the other way. Tightening her hands on the wheel, she leaned forward, searching the edge of the road for the fallen log she’d been told was the first landmark.
“OK,” Scott responded, flatly. He didn’t move, hadn’t asked a single question since she’d gotten him in the car.
“A vacation will be good for us,” she added, as if she hadn’t already said that too many times. She wondered whom she was trying to convince.
Scott didn’t respond this time.
A couple minutes later, the log appeared, and shortly after that a rusted metal mailbox that was so nearly overgrown that she wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t been looking. She turned the car carefully onto the dirt driveway that belonged with that mailbox, ducking instinctively from the low hanging branches that scraped the top of the car. She stomach fluttered with doubts at what she was doing, but she’d brought them too far to back out now. The driveway stretched on, impossibly long, the trees growing ever denser and closer in, blocking more and more of the sunlight, until suddenly it opened up into a wide clearing and Melissa stomped on the brake reflexively, bringing the car to a lurching halt.
“Wow,” she breathed.
“Mom?” Scott asked, his ennui at last broken.
In front of them sat an honest-to-God log cabin, if one considered a two-story building with wrap-around front porch a “cabin.” It sat in the middle of an expanse of lawn, a huge pile of chopped wood off to the side. Two large gardens bordered the house, the flowers in them vibrant and deliberately overgrown.
“We can’t afford this,” Scott protested.
Melissa swallowed. She felt a surge of guilt at how easily she’d accepted the offer, and a stronger surge of concern about how she’d never be able to pay it back. “It belongs to a doctor,” she answered. “He said we could use it. I-I didn’t know….” Letting up on the brake, she urged the car forward, all the while alert to signs that she’d come to the wrong place. To her relief, no one came out of the house, no sirens went off, no police car appeared from some hidden trap in the woods.
Scott was out of the car as soon as she parked it, and she didn’t miss his nose tipping up into the air, his eyes closing as he surveyed the area with a sense that wasn’t his sight.
Through the windshield, she watched her son as he nosed around the yard, watched the way he tensed his body and lowered his stance as he walked like he was readying himself to attack. These weren’t his old mannerisms, weren’t ones she could trace to herself or his father and laugh at like they used to as they debated whose ears Scott had inherited and who was to blame for the crooked bottom teeth. These were behaviors that someone else had foisted upon her son, and seeing them made her chest tighten with anger.
Melissa let herself out of the car and moved slowly, cautiously toward the trunk so that she wouldn’t startle Scott and bring out more of his new side. That seemed to be happening a lot these days and she didn’t like it—which was part of the reason that she had brought Scott here. A few days without the distractions of work and school and … other things…were just what the doctor ordered. In this case, literally. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken—or been able to take—a vacation, and the reality of a few days without any work responsibilities was off-putting.
Gusting out a breath at the house for its moxie at being everything she had never known she’d dreamt of in a vacation home, she opened the back door. Coolers and luggage packed the inside so high that her rear view mirror had been useless for the trip. The McCalls had been told to bring everything they’d need for the duration. With the nearest convenience store more than half an hour away down rural roads, ducking out for a gallon of milk was not practical.
She stared at the supplies, mentally calculating how many trips it would take her to get everything inside. The number made her knees ache in sympathetic response. She wasn’t going to do this alone, and at some point, she had to start not being afraid of her son. With a quick, subvocalized self-affirmation to bolster her, she called out, “Scott, you want to come help me get everything into the house?”
He was at her side so fast that Melissa felt the breeze. She shuddered, tried to hide it with a sweep of her fingers through her long hair.
“You want everything to go in?” Scott asked. He raised an eyebrow at the contents of the back seat, knowing as well as she did that the trunk was equally stuffed. Somehow the luggage looked like more now that they were removing it from the car than it had seemed putting everything in.
Melissa glanced up at the sky. Light gray clouds had moved in, bunching up in patches that threatened rain. She couldn’t see the sun, its light obscured behind a passing cloud. “Yeah, we should. I don’t want to have to come out here after it starts raining.”
With a nod, Scott started to pull coolers and bags out on the lawn, forming a huge pile.
“What were you looking for?” Melissa asked, tilting her head toward the yard and Scott’s earlier surveillance of it. She hesitated over the verb; he hadn’t been looking at anything, but she didn’t know if she was supposed to acknowledge that or not.
“Nothing,” Scott replied without any hint of sensing her discomfort. “Just wanted to make sure nothing was wrong.” He continued unloading the car, his movements so quick and precise that all Melissa could do was step back and stay out of the way.
“And?”
Scott shrugged. “Someone came out to mow the lawn yesterday. No one else has been around in a long time. Are you sure this is the right cabin?”
Melissa pulled the keys from her pocket and rattled them. “I guess we’re going to find out. If these work, then we must be in the right place. And if they don’t, I guess we’re just going to have to hope the door is unlocked.”
Scott offered a short laugh, turning toward her long enough for her to see his smile. It wasn’t an easy smile, and it didn’t reach his eyes. Though he looked like he was trying to enjoy himself, his features held the wariness of one who had been burned too many times.
He’s only sixteen, she thought, swallowing hard against a new burst of guilt. How did this happen? Why hadn’t she been there to protect him?
“We could always break a window,” he quipped.
“No vandalism, young man. I taught you better than that.”
“Fine, no vandalism,” Scott echoed. He heaved an exaggerated sigh as if he were chafing under the weight of her overly strict rules. Continuing like he was echoing a rule he’d been forced to memorize, he added, “I promise not to break anything on purpose.” Then, without any apparent effort, he slung the largest of the bags up on his shoulders and hefted the two heaviest coolers, and began carrying them toward the house.
Melissa’s hands came up to cover her mouth as she watched this display of supernatural strength, a display that Scott hadn’t hesitated to make. She’d barely been able to lift one of those coolers, and she’d only carried it a few steps before Scott had taken it from her earlier. She’d noticed then that he hadn’t had any trouble carrying it, though she chalked it up to his youth and athleticism. That he was capable of so much more hadn’t even occurred to her. As she watched him now, questions flooded her head about what else he’d shown her, and what else he was keeping hidden.
“You coming, Mom?” Scott called back. “You’ve got the keys.”
“Yeah,” she responded. “Yes.” She selected a couple of the smaller bags, one of them a suitcase with wheels, and followed Scott. The wheels wobbled across the grass, forcing her to go slower than she’d like. She glanced one more time at the sky and the accumulating rain clouds. The sun was still hidden. She couldn’t see the moon, either, though whether it was behind a cloud or had risen yet, she didn’t know. She never thought she’d need to care about where the moon was, or what its shape was, and the habit hadn’t yet hadn’t become fully engrained. She would have to work on that.
Only a few weeks before, she’d allowed her teenage son to spend a night in the woods with a girl, unsupervised, and with only the most perfunctory aid. It had been a full moon, and she’d barely understood what was happening. Scott’s tentative explanations had meant little to her, and she had brushed them off too easily as exaggerations. She still barely understood. But seeing Scott and Erica the morning after, seeing their exhaustion and the destruction of their clothes, she had gotten a glimpse of how far she’d dropped the ball in her duties toward him.
She’d let Scott keep her out of the worst parts of his life for too long, let herself stay protected when she should have been the first one stepping up. For all Scott had shown what he could deal with, and for all that he’d grown from it, he was still a child and she was still his parent.
After what she’d learned over the past months, what she’d seen—and how much more she knew Scott hadn’t let her see—they needed this time to get things figured out. She’d always thought she was the cool mom, the relaxed mom: the one who could roll with whatever her kid dropped at her feet. And when the moment came, she had frozen and all but abandoned Scott to her own denial.
She fingered the keys as she walked, searching for the correct one by feel and readying it. Though she couldn’t bring back Scott’s lost innocence, she had a duty to do whatever she could to help her son lighten his new burden. Melissa only hoped that this vacation would be enough.
END CHAPTER 1
Characters: Melissa McCall, Scott McCall
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2000
Notes: For
angst_bingo prompt: vacations.Summary: After "Hang on Tight," Melissa decides that she and Scott need a vacation to help them get a few things figured out.
Melissa cast frequent glances at her son as they drove, trying, as always, to guess what was going on inside his head so that she could figure out the right thing to say. She’d been at a loss in that department for weeks now, since learning about her son’s double life, about the secret that had apparently been a secret only to her. “How clueless are you people?” she remembered the boy, Matt, saying, as he waved a gun in her face. She’d had no idea what he was asking. She known that Scott had slipped away, but she’d thought it was growing pains, the consequence of first love, a child’s need to assert his independence. Then Scott had turned to look at her and saw how wrong she had been. She bit her lip and cast another glance. Scott’s head was pressed against the passenger-side window, his face turned so that he was gazing out at the passing landscape. He held his phone in his lap, twisting at the dangling earbuds as if trying to get up the nerve to put them in.
“We’re almost there,” she offered, her voice sounding overly loud in the otherwise quiet vehicle. They’d turned off the main road about half an hour back and were driving down a single-lane gravel road, the only noises the crunching of the tires and the occasional pinging of a pebble bouncing off the car’s undercarriage. Trees lined the sides of the road, crowding so close that she didn’t know where she’d pull the car if another vehicle came the other way. Tightening her hands on the wheel, she leaned forward, searching the edge of the road for the fallen log she’d been told was the first landmark.
“OK,” Scott responded, flatly. He didn’t move, hadn’t asked a single question since she’d gotten him in the car.
“A vacation will be good for us,” she added, as if she hadn’t already said that too many times. She wondered whom she was trying to convince.
Scott didn’t respond this time.
A couple minutes later, the log appeared, and shortly after that a rusted metal mailbox that was so nearly overgrown that she wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t been looking. She turned the car carefully onto the dirt driveway that belonged with that mailbox, ducking instinctively from the low hanging branches that scraped the top of the car. She stomach fluttered with doubts at what she was doing, but she’d brought them too far to back out now. The driveway stretched on, impossibly long, the trees growing ever denser and closer in, blocking more and more of the sunlight, until suddenly it opened up into a wide clearing and Melissa stomped on the brake reflexively, bringing the car to a lurching halt.
“Wow,” she breathed.
“Mom?” Scott asked, his ennui at last broken.
In front of them sat an honest-to-God log cabin, if one considered a two-story building with wrap-around front porch a “cabin.” It sat in the middle of an expanse of lawn, a huge pile of chopped wood off to the side. Two large gardens bordered the house, the flowers in them vibrant and deliberately overgrown.
“We can’t afford this,” Scott protested.
Melissa swallowed. She felt a surge of guilt at how easily she’d accepted the offer, and a stronger surge of concern about how she’d never be able to pay it back. “It belongs to a doctor,” she answered. “He said we could use it. I-I didn’t know….” Letting up on the brake, she urged the car forward, all the while alert to signs that she’d come to the wrong place. To her relief, no one came out of the house, no sirens went off, no police car appeared from some hidden trap in the woods.
Scott was out of the car as soon as she parked it, and she didn’t miss his nose tipping up into the air, his eyes closing as he surveyed the area with a sense that wasn’t his sight.
Through the windshield, she watched her son as he nosed around the yard, watched the way he tensed his body and lowered his stance as he walked like he was readying himself to attack. These weren’t his old mannerisms, weren’t ones she could trace to herself or his father and laugh at like they used to as they debated whose ears Scott had inherited and who was to blame for the crooked bottom teeth. These were behaviors that someone else had foisted upon her son, and seeing them made her chest tighten with anger.
Melissa let herself out of the car and moved slowly, cautiously toward the trunk so that she wouldn’t startle Scott and bring out more of his new side. That seemed to be happening a lot these days and she didn’t like it—which was part of the reason that she had brought Scott here. A few days without the distractions of work and school and … other things…were just what the doctor ordered. In this case, literally. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken—or been able to take—a vacation, and the reality of a few days without any work responsibilities was off-putting.
Gusting out a breath at the house for its moxie at being everything she had never known she’d dreamt of in a vacation home, she opened the back door. Coolers and luggage packed the inside so high that her rear view mirror had been useless for the trip. The McCalls had been told to bring everything they’d need for the duration. With the nearest convenience store more than half an hour away down rural roads, ducking out for a gallon of milk was not practical.
She stared at the supplies, mentally calculating how many trips it would take her to get everything inside. The number made her knees ache in sympathetic response. She wasn’t going to do this alone, and at some point, she had to start not being afraid of her son. With a quick, subvocalized self-affirmation to bolster her, she called out, “Scott, you want to come help me get everything into the house?”
He was at her side so fast that Melissa felt the breeze. She shuddered, tried to hide it with a sweep of her fingers through her long hair.
“You want everything to go in?” Scott asked. He raised an eyebrow at the contents of the back seat, knowing as well as she did that the trunk was equally stuffed. Somehow the luggage looked like more now that they were removing it from the car than it had seemed putting everything in.
Melissa glanced up at the sky. Light gray clouds had moved in, bunching up in patches that threatened rain. She couldn’t see the sun, its light obscured behind a passing cloud. “Yeah, we should. I don’t want to have to come out here after it starts raining.”
With a nod, Scott started to pull coolers and bags out on the lawn, forming a huge pile.
“What were you looking for?” Melissa asked, tilting her head toward the yard and Scott’s earlier surveillance of it. She hesitated over the verb; he hadn’t been looking at anything, but she didn’t know if she was supposed to acknowledge that or not.
“Nothing,” Scott replied without any hint of sensing her discomfort. “Just wanted to make sure nothing was wrong.” He continued unloading the car, his movements so quick and precise that all Melissa could do was step back and stay out of the way.
“And?”
Scott shrugged. “Someone came out to mow the lawn yesterday. No one else has been around in a long time. Are you sure this is the right cabin?”
Melissa pulled the keys from her pocket and rattled them. “I guess we’re going to find out. If these work, then we must be in the right place. And if they don’t, I guess we’re just going to have to hope the door is unlocked.”
Scott offered a short laugh, turning toward her long enough for her to see his smile. It wasn’t an easy smile, and it didn’t reach his eyes. Though he looked like he was trying to enjoy himself, his features held the wariness of one who had been burned too many times.
He’s only sixteen, she thought, swallowing hard against a new burst of guilt. How did this happen? Why hadn’t she been there to protect him?
“We could always break a window,” he quipped.
“No vandalism, young man. I taught you better than that.”
“Fine, no vandalism,” Scott echoed. He heaved an exaggerated sigh as if he were chafing under the weight of her overly strict rules. Continuing like he was echoing a rule he’d been forced to memorize, he added, “I promise not to break anything on purpose.” Then, without any apparent effort, he slung the largest of the bags up on his shoulders and hefted the two heaviest coolers, and began carrying them toward the house.
Melissa’s hands came up to cover her mouth as she watched this display of supernatural strength, a display that Scott hadn’t hesitated to make. She’d barely been able to lift one of those coolers, and she’d only carried it a few steps before Scott had taken it from her earlier. She’d noticed then that he hadn’t had any trouble carrying it, though she chalked it up to his youth and athleticism. That he was capable of so much more hadn’t even occurred to her. As she watched him now, questions flooded her head about what else he’d shown her, and what else he was keeping hidden.
“You coming, Mom?” Scott called back. “You’ve got the keys.”
“Yeah,” she responded. “Yes.” She selected a couple of the smaller bags, one of them a suitcase with wheels, and followed Scott. The wheels wobbled across the grass, forcing her to go slower than she’d like. She glanced one more time at the sky and the accumulating rain clouds. The sun was still hidden. She couldn’t see the moon, either, though whether it was behind a cloud or had risen yet, she didn’t know. She never thought she’d need to care about where the moon was, or what its shape was, and the habit hadn’t yet hadn’t become fully engrained. She would have to work on that.
Only a few weeks before, she’d allowed her teenage son to spend a night in the woods with a girl, unsupervised, and with only the most perfunctory aid. It had been a full moon, and she’d barely understood what was happening. Scott’s tentative explanations had meant little to her, and she had brushed them off too easily as exaggerations. She still barely understood. But seeing Scott and Erica the morning after, seeing their exhaustion and the destruction of their clothes, she had gotten a glimpse of how far she’d dropped the ball in her duties toward him.
She’d let Scott keep her out of the worst parts of his life for too long, let herself stay protected when she should have been the first one stepping up. For all Scott had shown what he could deal with, and for all that he’d grown from it, he was still a child and she was still his parent.
After what she’d learned over the past months, what she’d seen—and how much more she knew Scott hadn’t let her see—they needed this time to get things figured out. She’d always thought she was the cool mom, the relaxed mom: the one who could roll with whatever her kid dropped at her feet. And when the moment came, she had frozen and all but abandoned Scott to her own denial.
She fingered the keys as she walked, searching for the correct one by feel and readying it. Though she couldn’t bring back Scott’s lost innocence, she had a duty to do whatever she could to help her son lighten his new burden. Melissa only hoped that this vacation would be enough.
END CHAPTER 1
