#FOR AS MUCH AS THE STAKES UNIFORM IS LITERALLY EVERYTHING TO ME. wow ive only drawn one (belphie) since the reread

[joelletwo]

[ID from alt: umineko fanart of a calmly smiling ange holding mammon up in her arms, hands around her thighs, mammon discombobulated and flustered. they're nose to nose]

what a beautiful day for drawing them :DDDD ange is STRONG (mammon is also floating)

@ninthtwilight happy birth!!!

[momentofmemory]

FICTOBER 2020 - day twelve

Prompt #12: “Watch me.”

Fandom: Teen Wolf

Characters: Melissa McCall, Scott McCall

Words: 1306

Author’s Note: A series of four vignettes featuring Melissa & Scott’s relationship, culminating with the fallout of 2x10 (Fury). Fluff that slowly descends into angst. Melissa POV.

>> i saw your eyes (they looked like they were mine)

“Watch me, mama!”

Scott’s head just barely peaks up over the counter, his hands reaching up to grab for her attention. “Look!”

Melissa laughs, gently hip checking him to the side so she can cover the bolillos with a towel to rise. “Just a minute, mijo, I’m coming. You don’t want flies to get into your food, do you?”

Scott pauses, having somehow managed to get flour in his hair already. “Do flies need it?”

“I’m very sure they can get food somewhere that isn’t my house,” Melissa says, dusting Scott’s nose with flour until he falls back, giggling. “Now, what’ve you got for me?”

Scott’s eyes light up as he grabs her by the hand, decorating the floor with even more flour, and drags her into the living room.

“I fixed Roxy!”

The dog in question is sitting placidly on one of the couch pillows, the McCall’s medicine kit open and its contents strewn all over the floor. She’d gotten into a fight with the neighbor’s cat the day they’d gotten her, and while the cut she’d sustained on her ear had long since healed, Scott’s been rather taken with making sure she’s okay ever since.

Which is probably why there appear to be over a half dozen bandaids covering the poor terrier’s ear, along with an incorrectly though painstakingly placed Ace bandage.

“Wow,” she says, making sure to give Roxy a few extra scratches as a reward for her patience. “You do this all by yourself?”

“Yeah!” Scott bends Roxy’s ear up, eager to show off his handiwork. “I even got one on the—scapha, like Dr. Deaton said.”

“Oh ho, I see. Scapha’s a big word.” She moves from ruffling Roxy’s fur to Scott’s hair. “You gonna be doctor someday? Dr. McCall?”

Scott shrugs. “Is that what you do?”

“Sort of, sweetie. No doctorate here, but. Yeah. Close enough.”

“Then I’ll be close enough,” Scott says. “So I can be like you.”

Melissa feels a swell of warmth, and kisses the top of Scott’s head. “You’re already far better than that, mijo. And I’ll be there to watch the whole thing.”

_________________

“Mom.”

Melissa looks up from the pamphlet she’s been reading, and Scott looks so small on the hospital bed. “Yeah, sweetie?”

“Am I breathing?”

Melissa’s heart twists in her chest. “Yeah, baby. You’re breathing. Does your chest feel okay?”

Scott nods, his lips pursed close together. “It felt okay before, too.”

“I know.” The signs were there—the coughing at night, the perpetual fatigue, the muscle and determination for sports but not the stamina. “But you’re okay now, I promise. The doctors have got you fixed all up and you’ve got plenty of medicine in case it happens again.”

Scott frowns, staring down at his hands. “So it’s going to happen again?”

“Not this bad, mijo. Not this bad.” She nods towards the inhaler on his bedside table. “That’s what the medicine’s for, remember?”

She wishes, sometimes, that she didn’t know quite so much about everything that was happening in her baby boy’s body. The bronchodilator via nebulizer to open his airways. Corticosteroid drugs in his IV to lower lung inflammation. Oxygen via nasal cannula to bring his blood oxygen levels back up. The trigger that’d caused the swelling and mucus production to threatened him to begin with, still lurking in his genes to strike at any moment.

Not that she’d tell him that.

“You’re okay, Scott,” she says. “I promise.”

“But what if it happens again while I’m sleeping?”

Melissa sets the pamphlet down and goes to sit on the edge of the bed. She takes his hand into hers. “Then I’ll be here the whole time, okay? If you stop breathing, I’ll make sure you start again.”

Scott bites his lip, tracing patterns on the hospital sheets. “You’ll watch me?”

“I won’t look away for even a second.”

She doesn’t, and Scott sleeps, uninterrupted and unafraid and breathing, through the entire night.

_________________

“You couldn’t have picked literally any other extracurricular?”

Melissa frowns at the dollar signs on the sign-up sheet, mentally tallying the costs of the uniforms, equipment, and not to mention rescue inhalers he’d need to play lacrosse, of all things.

“Lacrosse is like, the football of Beacon Hills!” Scott says, all but bouncing on the balls of his feet. “I can definitely do this.”

“I don’t know, Scott,” she says. “Your asthma’s been even worse than usual this season, and I don’t want you to commit to something like this and have to bow out halfway through.”

“I won’t,” Scott says, with all the total confidence only a teenager could have.

“Uh-huh.” Melissa sets the paper down and folds her arms over her chest. “Scott, I know you’re angling to get more popular than you were in middle school—”

“Mom!”

“—but I don’t think picking something that’s going to be—” Melissa hesitates, fishing for the most tactful word—“unconducive to your health is the best way to go about it.”

Hurt blossoms across Scott’s face. “You don’t think I can do it.”

‘Oh, no,” Melissa says. “You wander around the house without a shirt on more than enough for me to know you’ve got the muscle tone for it.”

“Mom.”

Scott’s incredibly tenacious once he gets his mind set on something—which is what moves his chances up from snowball’s chance in hell to snowball’s chance in, say, Nevada.

“I just don’t want to see you get hurt,” she says.

“And you won’t. I can do this, mom—just watch me.”

It’s a bad idea. From definitely a financial standpoint, and probably a health one, too..

She sighs. “What time to tryouts start?”

“You’re coming?”

It’s painfully obnoxious and incredibly adorable how quickly he goes from sullen and determined to exuberant.

“Yeah, you dumbass,” she says. “If you’re going to go on some ill-fated mission to rise through the ranks at risk of life and limb, I’ll be there.”

His answering grin is so bright, she thinks he might actually do it after all.

_________________

“So.” Melissa licks her lips, fingers threaded together on the counter in front of her. “You’re a werewolf.”

They’re standing in the kitchen, the single unburnt bulb in the ceiling light shining down on them. Scott’s slouching, or maybe hunching, in the corner of the room; the island staking out the neutral ground between them. He’s not meeting her eyes, or maybe she’s the one that’s not meeting his.

Scott clears his throat. “Yeah. I’m, uh—a werewolf.”

It feels like the setup for an interrogation.

(She wishes she knew which of them was on trial.)

“Uh-huh.” Melissa taps her fingernails on the granite, waiting for him to expound. He doesn’t. “Okay, so how does it—is this a once-a-month thing? You change when the moon’s out?”

"No. I can—I can shift whenever I want, now.”

Now implies it hasn’t always been that way. Now implies a then. Now implies her son’s been a werewolf (a werewolf) for more than just a few days, and she hasn’t noticed anything other than a few slipped grades and out-of-character absences. Now means he did all that without her.

“Do you want to watch me do it?”

Melissa flinches before she can think twice about; Scott flinches in return. “Watch…?”

“Watch me shift,” he says. “I can control it really well, I could—we could just do claws maybe, or my eyes?”

Scott’s beautiful, deep brown eyes stare hopefully at her, eyes he got from her, and the thought of them turning the angry gold he got from someone else hurts too much.

“That’s okay, baby,” she says. “Maybe—maybe not right now.”

“Okay, yeah. Sure.”

His lips quirk up in a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and Melissa can’t get her mouth to open far enough to handle the promises he needs.

She says nothing.