Archive of Our Own ^beta

There's a reason Boyd doesn't talk much. Controlling the shift, the hot ripple of flesh rearranging, that's easy compared to controlling the sound of your own voice. After the cramped details of fine-tuning your body for as long as you've been aware of the feeling of your own skin, to change it all in five or ten minutes of crackling tendon and bone is heaven. That's the goal, anyway, and it's why he's so quick to bend before those red eyes and white teeth.

Yeah, sure, he'd said, why not. As few words as possible, because even when he's sure he's got it right, the vibrating pitch, the texture of the sounds leaving his mouth doesn't match what he'd planned in his head. None of this does, really. Boyd, public school all the way, had been shown diagrams and videos that carefully pointed out the differences between what his classmates were now and what they were expected to become, in body and role both. To Beacon Hills and the world beyond, the two things were near inseparable; this message was not from the teachers' words, though, but in everybody's silences, and so it was in the silence that Boyd found himself.

He told Scott he didn't want to eat lunch alone--the words carefully chosen, the intonation practiced--but what he left out at the time was that he'd probably still be eating alone. He'd just feel safer now. (There was no accounting for Erica and Isaac, as though there could ever be, but that's a different story.) Back in grade six, the first day he showed up to school with all his hair shaved off and his chest bound, there had been some words, some fists. He went quiet after that, ducking attention through the end of middle school until he'd found a way to get what he needed. Shrinks and doctors were too complicated for a boy whose parents weren't part of this, but the girls from the Jungle could help him find what he was after. This was Beacon Hills, after all, where most folks knew what was out there but didn't dare to make it real with a proper name.

It'll be dangerous, Derek had said, pressing his lips together like he was marking a border. When he opened his mouth again there were fangs jutting out needle-sharp and Boyd knew that here was familiar territory. He rested his hands on the wheel, fingers loose and crooked, and kept his eyes open as Derek pressed dry lips and wet breath to his skin, the man's mouth warm and terrible after the familiar cold of the ice rink's air.

By the time Boyd got to high school his first name had dropped away, discarded because it didn't sound right. He picked a new one from his family records, not out of admiration but of competition--the distracting joy of the fight. The fourth, a written IV with its medicine of formality, was to set him apart. His name would be recorded, and there would be no confusion about his legacy. The job at the rink was a holdover from middle school: a low-wage steady flow that was as much a comfort as the flattening layers of clothes needed for the cold. He would stop thinking about Alicia. Everything else was new, or at least seemed new enough to satisfy people; if they didn't remember him they didn't recognize him. His boss didn't care what he did or who he was as long as the surface was smoothed out, made useable again, and it's Derek's promise of something like this, too, that held Boyd there through the blood running down between them.

He finds that the transformation's an incomplete one: claws, fangs, and not much else - a desire to be close to the ground, a heat in the stomach like swallowed spurs, but these aren't new. His Alpha's looking at him with pride, though, the sort of expression that he could only get from his parents after a brutal push towards academic success, and deep in there Derek's got the eyes of a younger brother asking him to stay.

Surely now he's closer to being his own thing--his own person. Boyd corrects himself years too late but at least he's caught himself. There might be time now to unlearn what the world has taught him. Scott might know the feel of someone using their eyes to carve a map into your skin, trying to transpose color and place, but there are differences between them that cannot be bridged. Boyd is sure of this. He does not have Scott's practiced, patient kindness.

Isaac's life is predicated on affection, the want for an unconditional touch, and Derek brings Boyd to him in the rusted-out subway like a prize for waiting. They get along well enough, yet the terms are wrong; Derek keeps them close to the hip, training them as hard as gunmetal. Isaac has little to talk about beyond this new life, the thrills still fresh to his icebox eyes. But Erica, Erica moves like she's years ahead of them. She owns her strange skin, displays it like a badge of hard-won gain, and when Boyd looks at her he wishes he could do the same.

The night he's called out of the stands, it feels like he's reached the threshold of a rite of passage--now that he is this new man, the view seems to be, he's allowed to prove himself. The cold air and the uniform's concealing layers are familiar comforts, yet even as the thrill of the game turns his eyes gold regret coils itself in his belly. He is an interloper in this world, has always been.

I wish I could be like you, Boyd tells Erica later, stretched out in the abandoned railway depot. His unused muscles ache, though not for long.
Like me?
Confident. Comfortable with-- He gestures at her, himself.
Erica looks at him for a long time. I still don't know what to do with my body, she says, and in response Boyd reaches out and holds her with a feeling he does not know how to name.
Can I kiss you, he asks, and her answer is to beat him to the press.

Another cold night they're running, loping through the woods best as they can on human limbs, away from Alison with her bow drawn ruthlessly tight. Werewolf blood heals scars but his body is as smooth as it's ever been, so maybe this is his chance to get some.

Later, on the floor of the loft, Boyd lies in his own blood and thinks of the wild nights, when he struggled to control his body under the full moon. He tells Derek they were worth it. This is a kindness.