#hayden & scott share zero (0) one-on-one scenes?

[momentofmemory]

FICTOBER 2020 - day seven

Prompt #6: “That was impressive.”

Fandom: Teen Wolf

Characters: Hayden Romero, Scott McCall

Triggers: Discussion of Death

Words: 1711

Author’s Note: Hayden’s adjusting super well to being a werewolf. Adjusting is what she does. But adjusting to everything else that happened to her... That might be a little more of a struggle. Set post-5B, pre 6A. Hayden POV. For @daughterofluthien

>> incremental steps

Running.

So fast and so far and so strong it feels like she’s flying, leaves kicking up under the balls of her feet and wind ripping freely through her hair.

It’s her favorite part of her new body.

She’s always loved to run, first out in the backyard with her sister and then on the field for soccer, but running alone has always been her favorite. It feels like nothing—no one—can ever catch her, ever tell her to stop.

There’s a power that thrums through her veins now, buzzing in time to the rhythm of her steps. This is running the entire preserve in under a half hour without pausing for breath; it’s pushing up off the ground and landing a dozen yards away without even trying, it’s leaping off a ledge and flipping three times midair to land—

“Oh, shit!”

It’s the quick pivoting of the body below her that saves her from crashing headfirst into it more than anything else, but the impact still sends both of them tumbling into the dirt.

“Sorry!” Hayden scrambles upright first, spitting leaves and shaking twigs out of her hair, slowly bringing her senses back down to the present. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t—”

She takes in the grey henley, crooked jaw, and surprisingly chill attitude at getting blindsided from a height of thirty feet. “Wait, Scott?”

“That’s me,” he says, sounding far too cheerful for the situation as he brushes his shirt off.

Hayden blinks, trying to refocus her eyes and tune out the sound of their heartbeats, hers purring gleefully along from her run, and his idling at a much more sedate pace. Her brow furrows.

“But—what’re you even doing out here? I thought you guys had lacrosse practice—” A new thought occurs to her and her blood pressure spikes, crashing her fully back into reality. “Wait, were you following me?”

“Uh.”

That’s a yes.

All the freedom she’d felt to just be from earlier vanishes, now viewed from the perspective of an outsider.

“So you saw—” Hayden flushes, remembering the excessive flipping she’d done. “Oh, god.”

“No, it’s okay, really.” Scott heaves himself back onto his feet, nodding towards the ledge she’d just jumped from. “Actually, I, uh—I was just going to say that was impressive.”

Hayden feels like the words should be mocking, but there’s nothing but sincerity in his voice.

“…Oh.” She hadn’t been expecting that, and a warm rush of pride overtakes the heat of embarrassment. “Really?”

“Yeah.” Scott’s smile is warm, too. “I just—you’ve been adjusting to your powers really well. Faster than most people.”

Hayden’s pretty used to adjusting to things. Losing her parents, her kidney, her life. Gaining something for once is a nice change.

She shrugs like it’s not a big deal. “I had powers before the bite, even if they were a little different. Guess being a fish boy’s science experiment has some perks.”

Scott arches his eyebrows.

“Mason’s fault,” she says. “Their outfits looked like those weird old diving suits with like, the copper plating and tubes and stuff, and fish are—look, it doesn’t have to make sense.”

Scott laughs, and Hayden’s startled to realize it’s a sound she’s never heard it before. “Probably a good mindset for most of the things that happen around here.”

“Yeah, I’m getting that idea.” Hayden fidgets, her muscles upset at the sudden end to her workout. Too much thinking, not enough running.

Since Scott seems unbothered by the delay, she pursues it herself. “So like. If I’m doing great at the whole werewolf thing, why did you follow me?”

Instead of answering directly, Scott looks over at the ledge that’d started the whole altercation and nods towards it. “How’d you know you could fall that far?”

“I just—did? I mean, I’ve jumped pretty far by myself. And it’s not like it’s the first thing I’ve jumped off of.”

Scott nods. “Incremental training. You do something at lower levels of risk until you know you’re ready for the real thing.”

“Sure, I guess.”

Scott falls quiet, his hands slipping into his pockets. Hayden senses—something radiating off him, that wasn’t there before. She’s good at controlling the physical aspect of her powers, but the finer points like chemosignals or whatever are a little fuzzier.

Not that she has any intention of telling him that. She can figure it out on her own.

And if not, she can still read body language well enough to know that what she’s sensing in Scott is unease.

She really doesn’t want to have that kind of conversation right now.

“I probably need to—”

“The full moon’s coming up in about a week.” Scott winces, either at interrupting her or at the statement itself. Probably both. “I know we already gave you the basic run-through before you got bit, but. If you have any questions, I can help. Your first time can be a little… intense.”

“Apparently not just your first.”

It’s a terrible thing to say; she realizes that the second after it crashes into the conversation. But she’d be lying if she said she hasn’t thought about it.

A lot.

“Um.” Scott rubs at the back of his neck, turning into the massage just enough to avoid eye contact. “That doesn’t usually—I mean—”

He sighs. “There were a lot of factors involved.”

Despite how much she doesn’t want to have this conversation, Hayden doesn’t miss the way Scott’s hand drifts over his chest.

She checks her eyes for mercury sometimes, too.

“I’m sorry,” she blurts out, before she can think better of it.

For his part, Scott just cocks his head to the side. “For what?”

“I’m kind of—I mean, he used me—” Hayden gestures vaguely, hoping he’ll get the point. She’s not good at this. “With Liam.”

Scott, obnoxiously, just looks even more confused. “What—”

“Liam chose me over you.”

It’s blunt, but. Judging by the way Scott flinches, it gets the point across.

“He shouldn’t have done that. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d have been a fan of not dying, but…” Hayden shrugs and her eyes focus on the scuffed up toes of her shoes. “…He shouldn’t have done that.”

Scott bites his lip, his eyes clearly focused elsewhere, then slowly drops down into a crouch on the forest floor. He looks up at her, and she takes that as an invitation to do the same. He only starts speaking after they’re both settled.

“Liam wasn’t…” Scott sighs. “Anger’s not exactly like that.”

Hayden’s own anger flares. “What, moral?”

“No, it’s like… you dying was a reality for Liam at the time, right? Whereas me dying was just… a hypothetical.”

“Pretty messed up hypothetical.”

“No argument there,” Scott agrees. “But being angry that you were dying—that was a good thing. The problem is that anger is really, really powerful. And sometimes we’re so angry about one thing, we let it make us do some other thing that winds up being just as bad.”

Hayden’s angry about a lot of things. Even before all this.

“So is that gonna be me? I’m just angry all the time until one day I snap and try to kill someone?”

“No,” Scott says. “You’re not a monster.”

“Then what am I?” There’s the anger again, and wouldn’t it be so ironic if this were what made her snap? “Because so far all I’ve accomplished is helping to get you killed, working for the guy that did it, and then just getting saved again.”

She can feel her claws wanting to come out, and she wants to run, to run where she can’t hurt anyone and no one can stop her and—

“Hayden, hey, it’s okay.”

A sense of calm washes over her, and when she glances up, Scott’s eyes are tinged crimson. She takes a deep breath, then another.

The claws recede.

“See? Incremental steps.” Scott smiles. “And I’m still here, so you didn’t get me killed.”

“You still died, Scott.” The anger’s gone from her voice, replaced by its worser cousin: fear. “And don’t tell me that didn’t matter because I—because I did, too.”

And there it is.

Treacherously, a tear escapes her eye, and she hastily wipes it away.

But not before making sure it isn’t bright and silver.

Scott doesn’t comment on it. “If it makes you feel better, it’s not the first time I’ve died.”

That is definitely not the sentence Hayden had expected to come out of Scott’s mouth, and if it’s meant as a distraction, it works pretty well. “That mean anything?”

“Means I’ve had more practice.”

Hayden snorts. She wipes at another tear, one that’s definitely still just salt and water. “Didn’t know it worked that way.”

Scott smiles ruefully. “I’m pretty sure I got worse at it every time, actually.”

“Your pep talks suck.”

The laugh from before returns. Hayden counts that as a win, somehow.

“Look,” he says, eventually. “The thing about anger is that it’s really easy to let it get anchored in the past. And life’s like that, too. But… if you get too focused on the past itself, instead of what it means for now, or even for the future, it’s easy to let it take you to some messed up places.”

“Like with Liam?”

“And a bunch of other people that had it even worse, yeah.”

Hayden considers this. “So what do you do?”

“Well, you don’t ignore it.” The way Scott says the words makes it abundantly clear that he’s tried. “And you can’t go at it all at once. So—” Scott nods towards the ledge—“you work at it a little bit at a time.”

The corners of Hayden’s lips quirk upwards. “Incremental steps?”

His responding grin is blinding. “You got it.”

Scott rises to his feet, dusting off his jeans again, while Hayden watches—this time, a sense of shared understanding between them.

Hayden clears her throat and looks up at him. “So what’s the first step?”

“For now,” Scott says, and he reaches his hand out to her, “think you beat me in a run?”

Hayden looks at Scott’s deep red eyes, then his hand, then his eyes again.

They’re a rich, warm brown.

She takes his hand.

“You’re on.”