[Fic] housekeeper (Teen Wolf) (Gen)
.housekeeper
Fandom: Teen Wolf
Summary: The world thinks you need two parents to be happy. Scott McCall knows the world is wrong.
Rating: PG
Characters: Scott McCall, Melissa McCall
Genre: pre-series gen
Warnings: brief allusions to abuse
Wordcount: ~1500
Disclaimer: Teen Wolf doesn't belong to me.
Notes: Written for beacon-hills, challenge 4: story time.
There's a scent of cinnamon and vanilla in the air, a smell which anyone else would say was the aroma of home baking, but his mom's just put a pan of water on the stovetop and filled it with spices.
Scott doesn't think it's necessary, but what does he know: he's just a kid.
The water bubbles, the burner underneath peeking out from beneath the saucepan, like an orange scar that's smiling at him. He scowls back at it. The house doesn't suit a smile today.
His mom flits like a ghost from room to room, a panicked pulse pronounced on her forehead that she normally only wears when Great Aunt Naomi comes to town. It doesn't happen often, and Scott's glad, because her glasses seem to malfunction and only filter through faults. She likes to list Scott's flaws from one to ten, and sometimes back again; she used to be the sole high point of leaving Mom and going back home with Dad.
Nobody likes Great Aunt Naomi, and Scott wears his dislike with a frown, but his mom wears that dislike like a permanent wrinkle.
For a moment, Scott wonders if the bad word he's not allowed to use means that Great Aunt Naomi won't ever be coming back, but he remembers the tight curl of her hair and the sun-kissed color of her skin, and despairs that she's his mom's aunt, that he can't cast her aside into the decay of his dad's lot.
The house smells like home baking, and Scott's stomach rumbles, but the smell is a lie. He's not too upset. It's not like his dad ever baked, and since his mom had to double her shifts to compensate for the floor in her life disappearing, she doesn't have time.
Scott doesn't blame his dad. Not out loud. But he resents the fact that he'll never be able to paint his father's skin in the cold dark colors he deserves, because that would be growing into his father's flaws, and that would be dishonoring his mom to the highest extent that Scott knows how.
The burner smiles at him, its glow edging into red. The social worker's due within the next hour, and his mom is a ghost with a cleaning cloth, flitting from room to room.
"Your mother," his dad said before Scott left in a fog of feeling that smelled like ash and day-old cigarette smoke, "is a great housekeeper," and he smiled like it was a great joke. Scott hoisted his duffel bag higher, gripped onto his junior lacrosse stick, and marched out of Kyle McCall's cold apartment with his unbalanced chin held high, mentally writing the goodbye card.
Thanks for the DNA. No thanks for the way you broke us so even actual home baking can't fill up the cracks. Thanks for the things you gave me, like doubt and fear, that follow us around like a lingering stink. No thanks. Not ever. Not ever.
Scott tries to help his mom, but the vacuum cleaner gets looped around his neck like a noose, so he wriggles free and tries not to pant too loudly, so his mom doesn't know close he nearly came to strangling himself today.
Bad enough on any day, but this day, when the house is full of cinnamon and vanilla and no baked goods? It would be the worst day.
"My good boy," Melissa breathes on seeing the vacuum cleaner, upright and abandoned; she pushes the words warm and wet into the skin of his cheek, and she brings the vacuum to life with a practiced push and twist. She is an excellent housekeeper. She's learned to be quick at it, with a job that eats her time, and a husband that ate her dignity and joy at life a crumb at a time. Scott wants to hold her up like a trophy, as proof his dad's bitter sarcasm is always so completely, comprehensively wrong.
The house is too big really for his mom to cope with on her own, but she is as stubborn and proud as she is beautiful and kind. The world is sceptical and brutal, and his mom wants proof to throw up to the sky: this is what she can do, this is what she has done, she can perform miracles one-handed. She doesn't need a man.
Scott doesn't blame her for wanting proof, although sometimes he dreams of a two-person flat, where footsteps and rain intermingle with the distant sounds of neighbors fighting. There's no proof of what his dad did to them, no scar or wound that the world can see, no ridges or breaks to raise out to those who demand evidence. Kyle McCall broke them on the inside, shattered them from the inside out. Took his own flaws and fashioned them into a weapon, to take them all down with him. It makes sense they would cling for what little proof they could find.
The house smells like baking, and there is nothing being baked. It's all smoke and mirrors and it's all entirely fake, but Scott would pretend in magic and monsters if it meant keeping his mom safe.
Today the social worker comes. Today Scott could be taken away.
There's a possibility they will, his mom says, because she doesn't lie to Scott's face the way his dad did to both of them. I will come home, dad said, I will love you more. Lies and lies and lies. So she'll clean the house and paint it with fake scents, because the world thinks Scott needs a mom and a dad to be happy.
His mom turns off the burner, and the orange smile fades, but the smell of baking lingers behind. The house smells like an American dream. She tips the water away, but the smell lingers behind. Scott's antsy as the stranger with the clipboard comes into the house, and ask them both questions after questions. He answers until his mouth burns dry.
The questions are burning and fire. Does she treat you right. Does her job make her stressed. Does she yell at you. How does that make you feel. Do you feel safe.
Scott speaks the truth because that's the trick his father never learned, and his throat is filled with the smell of home baking, the scent that lingers in the air for the whole time that the social worker stays.
He cries when she leaves, and he doesn't know why.
He cries for the fact that they had to fake the smell of baking to pass as functioning human beings. He cries for the way his mom pulls him in, and the way he feels better, because she quakes like she's sad and he only wants her to smile. He cries for the two-parent family his mom wanted them to be, and the dream that his father ripped in two.
Divorce is worse than any four-letter word.
His mom smells like rosewater, underneath her tiredness. She's tired of cleaning, of painting the house with fake scents, because the world thinks Scott needs a mom and a dad to be happy.
The world is wrong.
His mom makes him happy, but all his dad does is make him sad. If the world wants his life to be neutral, for his mom's smiles and his dad's frowns to cancel each other out into a flat line, then the world itself is wrong.
Scott's seen what flat lines are. A buzz of constant noise, all on a single tone.
A flat line means the heart is dead.
Scott used to think the scars his father gave them, the ones no one could see, were permanent. But maybe they'll fade like the smell of cinnamon and vanilla. They probably won't fade as fast as the smell does.
The notification comes faster than expected; a letter in the post on narrow paper that cuts Scott's finger when he rushes to take it out of the box. His mom kisses the pain away before opening the letter, and Scott braces himself to return the favor, even though he knows if the world is trying to shove back into his father's cold apartment and cold life and cold lies than the world is more wrong than Scott's ready to believe. There are probably no kisses strong enough to pull the pain away from that, but if there was, it's a power Scott will want until his dying day, to be able to soothe the pain from his mother's tense forehead with just the brush of the tips of his fingers, because god knows she deserves it, even though her baking is a lie and the scent is make-believe.
She's still a great housekeeper. In the divorce, she kept the house.
The envelope opens; Scott's paper bloodstain is discarded to the floor in the rush to rip away the band-aid of the envelope's gummed seal. All the air leaves his mom's lungs in a second, and she pulls him from the floor, lifting his feet clean off the air, even though she told him last month you're getting too big for this now.
"You're mine, you're mine," she sings, and Scott's smile burns wider than any stovetop burner could ever mimic.