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It starts out as a joke, because yes, Chris can make those too from time to time.
What it is, is that Allison and her two stooges are studying at the kitchen table, or at least doing a good job of pretending at it, when Chris comes in with the mail for the day. Keys hanging off of one hand, kicking the door shut with the back of his foot, he’s already tearing open an envelope self-importantly labelled Property of Beacon County School District.
The first quarter of Allison’s junior year came and went in a flurry of color-coded history flashcards and human sacrifices, and here is the fruit of her labors to prove it. A little voice in the back of Chris’ head wonders what the kids are even supposed to be studying with three of their classes looking for replacement teachers, and what could possibly require the entire pack of highlighters they have scattered across the table now, but that’s left to die out as he scans the letters marking the cardstock in front of him.
Every day, he’s finding more reasons to be proud of his daughter and the woman she's growing into. Allison has been through countless trials in this past year, so the fact that she's kept her head enough to even receive something like a high school report card fills him with increasing warmth. It helps though, that her grades remain spectacular as always. He suspects Lydia and Stiles’ tutelage is to thank for the improvement in her chemistry grade, or maybe that’s the result of that bully of a teacher vanishing at the hands of the Darach.
At the table, the kids carry on quietly. He hears the occasional flutter from their spread of loose sheets, but never the scratch of a pencil that would be expected from students hard at work. From his initial, cursory glance, the scene is set like this: Scott’s denim jacket thrown over the back of his chair, Allison’s mechanical pencil flicking between her fingers, Isaac’s long legs stretched out in the space between them all. They hadn’t acknowledged him much upon his entrance except for quick greetings—a Hi Dad and two Hey, Mr. Argent’s, one managing to sound slightly guiltier than the other.
Seated across from each other, Allison and Scott converse in low tones, but Isaac's sheepish wit is absent from their discussion. When Chris glances over the edge of the card at the boy on the far side of the table, Isaac has moved from openly sprawled back to nearly bent over himself. The sleeves of his blue cardigan stretch over his knuckles as he fidgets with the cuff. The fabric is the same shade as Allison’s favorite nail polish, Chris notes, absently wondering who bought it for him.
Sensing his attention on them, Allison cranes over her right shoulder and is quickly caught by the paper in his hands. Her lips quirk playfully.
“So,” she drawls out, “how did I do?”
Wiping his face blank, Chris keeps his voice level and unimpressed as he says, “A C+ in Art. Really, Al?”
It’s a joke, because Allison knows the last thing Chris cares about is her ability to paint a banana or whatever the Beacon Hills High curriculum calls for these days. She'll hit back with a blithe comment about the teacher not understanding her budding Michaelangelic vision and then he’ll crack, and it'll be one of those good moments Chris can keep for the longer nights. But some hunter Chris is, for not considering all the variables in his environment.
A sharp breath cuts through the air and all at once, their attention is yanked to Isaac, his fists pressing into the table and curled in a way that Chris knows hides freshly sprouted claws. For a moment, he’s so taut and so still, looking as if he could just snap cleanly into pieces. Then, he starts to shake.
Already, Scott has a hand stretched out to encircle one wrist, rubbing unconscious circles into his beta’s skin. There are pains even Scott’s brand of alpha can’t absorb, though he’ll try.
Allison, eyes full of fire, fixes her father with a look of warning as she reaches for the boy—protective—but Chris lets it slide off. He knows the one she's really mad at is herself, for not spotting the trigger until the bomb already went off.
"Isaac," Scott says, like butter in his mouth. "It's not—"
"I know," Isaac bites out, his eyes squeezed as tight as his fists. Dark blond bangs fall over his face as he draws himself inward. "I know, I just— I— Fuck." His chest heaves with ragged breaths as he fights both the shift and the panic alight under his skin.
Scott looks up at Chris with a stern gaze of his own, probably not even realizing as he does it. More on some impulse within himself, either his burgeoning alpha instincts or those planted there by Melissa McCall to care, help, protect.
Allison, always his quick-thinking strategist, jumps in.
“Dad’s just jealous," she says, levity willed into her tone. "He can’t even draw a beach ball. There's been so many times he’s tried to sketch some creature for me during training and they all just turned out like Teletubbies.” She giggles, leaning conspiratorially towards Isaac at this last part. “I’ve had my eye out for Laa-Laa on every patrol.”
This doesn’t earn her any laughs, but the kid at least no longer seems to be gouging out his own palms on Victoria’s mother’s dining table. Blood pools through his loosened fists and drips onto the surface, but Chris never cared much for that varnish anyway.
Chris keeps his body language open, his face lightly amused, as Isaac peeks from under his flop of curls to take in this new information—this new dynamic—with a cautious, curious expression.
Allison adds another touch for his benefit.
“Not to mention the fact that in high school, Dad actually got an F in ceramics.”
It’s a true story, one Chris had once shared to make her feel better about burning her home economics project in sixth grade. Acrid smoke in the air. A hysterical girl in his arms. His game-faced daughter spilling tears and apologies, and begging him not to tell Victoria. Chris was overcome, feeling fiercely protective and secretly glad she didn’t pick up a taste for the culinary arts. The aroma of Gerard’s cakes in the oven still turns his stomach over to this day.
Gerard hadn’t found his failures as funny as Allison or, back then, little Katie had. Perhaps that’s why Chris always finds himself uncharacteristically generous to the Lahey boy. He too grew up in the house of his father.
Scott perks up, wiggling Isaac's captive arm in his enthusiasm.
“I’m taking ceramics this year. I’m actually pretty good at it.”
His dopey McCall grin is offset by the minute twitch of Isaac’s head and the full-spirited shake of Allison’s just out of the True Alpha’s view. Chris has frowned at the cavalcade of lumpy jewelry boxes and mugs building up on Allison’s desk, but he figured it was some new ironic decor trend among young people. Maybe the especially ugly cat paperweight that greeted him last week at Deaton’s clinic should have clued him in on the gifty yet ungifted alpha on the loose.
“I made my mom a teapot,” Scott continues, easy and unaware. “Or I almost did.” He looks at his hands mournfully. “I got frustrated by the handle and accidentally put a claw through my spout.”
That piques Chris' disapproval.
“And is Derek helping you with that?”
“With my teapot?”
God help Beacon Hills.
“With your control, Scott.”
Somehow it's more exasperation than real anger that bubbles up at the teen's cluelessness these days.
“It was mostly a full moon thing,” Scott reassures. “I’ve really got a... heh, a handle on it now.” He looks around for reactions, far too proud of himself—all Stilinski in his eyebrows—and Chris yearns for the times he didn’t have to talk to more than one teenager on a regular basis.
“Dude,” Isaac says, fear fallen by the wayside in the face of his friend’s questionable humor. And maybe this is what Scott was going for all along by the guileless grin on his face. The alpha’s always been more tricky than anyone gives him credit for.
As much as Chris is impressed by the show of teamwork from his daughter and Scott in lightening the atmosphere, he knows it's his job as the adult and the one who sent Isaac's panic spiraling in the first place to lay it to rest. He enjoys the healthy amount of caution Scott and his cohorts express at his presence, but he finds himself uneasy at the sight of Isaac sinking into the shadows under the threat of Chris' attention.
An Argent who doesn't relish in the terror of a wolf. What a shame Chris turned out to be.
Chris can't do the work of the years of therapy that Isaac truly needs, but he can give a voice to what every open chair in his home, every offered ride in his backseat, every nudge behind the right side of Chris' gun has really been trying to say. You are safe here. You are safe with me.
"Isaac." He tries to say it gently, but that never came to him like it did Allison. Maybe this is Gerard. Maybe this was always going to be him. His consonants fall harsh and his vowels unyielding. The boy reacts to it like he would a bullet. Like he does to all pain. With a flinch that is quickly smothered by the echo of lessons taught long ago.
Chris takes a breath.
He can see his daughter and Scott trying to be supportive in the peripherals of his vision. All big eyes and tight smiles. An almost condescending nod of encouragement coming from a teenager. He narrows his focus to Isaac. Haltingly, because the kid deserves his patience, he tries again. "Isaac."
Body open, he approaches the table, hands resting on the back of the chair across from Isaac. He leans to meet the gaze of the teen, whose posture brings him much lower than his height should allow.
"Look," Chris says, meeting cool blue eyes with his own. There's the faintest supernatural sheen, a glaze of amber, but mostly there's uncertainty.
"I'm not gonna make any promises," he starts, "because I know talk is cheap and it's never done much for you before. But I want you to know—I want you to believe—that I'm not trying to hurt you." For good measure, Chris adds, "Or anyone at this table." He looks around at each of them. At the tangle of Scott's fingers in Isaac's sleeve. At Allison's hand hooked over Isaac's shoulder. The points of contact that connect all three together. An unbroken chain.
"I'm ashamed to admit that I wasn't far from being that kind of man once." This is the essential element of a truce. A piece from you, a piece from me. A painful truth for a painful truth. Isaac's is written into his body. The hunch of his shoulders. The hang of his neck. Chris has to dig his out, give it away willingly. The tension of his spine. The hardness of voice. "I'm trying not to be."
He pauses, a space for some response because he wants Isaac to get it, he wants him to understand. Chris is reaching out, trying to do right for every time he greeted Scott McCall with the barrel of his gun forward.
"You can hold me to that. Even if you trample every footprint in the preserve or drive my car into a curb or fail your art elective, you can hold me to that."
Every word is a surrender. An admittance of the places where he is soft, given away to a would-be enemy, and it's not as sweet as a boy like McCall can make it sound, but it's not as punishing as his father would make it feel. Isaac's not an enemy. He's a boy, and Chris is feeling something that's intimidatingly close to responsibility. He is losing ground, but it's ground he doesn't need. Not anymore. "I will hold myself to that."
Glancing between the two bodies pasted to Isaac like shadows, Chris tacks on, wry yet truthful, "And I know my daughter and your alpha will as well."
Slowly—the barest of movements stretching into a marathon between seconds—Isaac lifts his gaze from where it'd been lingering just a centimeter under Chris' actual eye-line and nods. For all his body visibly stifling the urge to bolt, a cage dog in rehabilitation, Isaac's conviction is clear in this. It's partly his usual devil-may-care bluster, but enough of it is genuine that the soft spot in Chris' chest tightens. Whether this sudden confidence is really meant for the two at his side or Chris himself, the man is ready to prove he's worthy of it for the rest of time Isaac is in their lives. A long time, if the way Allison holds him is any cue.
"Actually," Isaac speaks up, his lips lifting a little, half shy and half seeming to remember that he's the wolf, not the lamb, "I got an A+ in Art."
Chris has two choices here. In the spirit of the day, he chooses the one to make his forefathers roll in the grave.
He raises his eyebrow. "Can I see?"
Isaac, bolstered by Chris' words or something in his scent or maybe just taking a chance—because no matter what Beacon Hills throws their way, the McCall pack was built on flickering, miraculous trust—ducks to pull a crumpled sheet of paper from the backpack dangling off his chair.
No sudden movements, Chris takes the card with light fingers, pressing out careless folds against the tabletop as his eyes trace down the report. Sure enough, under the subject of Art with Mrs. Greenberg is a bold A+ in serif font, along with a little O for Outstanding behavior.
Isaac's other grades are about as decent as his werewolf skills, but he's been through his own piece of hell this past year and Chris is suddenly far more invested in bothering his dear daughter, who has grown way too comfortable bringing werewolf boys into their apartment for dubious schoolwork.
In for a penny.
He crosses the kitchen in steady strides, making sure they only get his back when he lets himself smile over Allison's bemused, "No way," as she realizes his target. Scott, ever Beacon Hills’ esteemed alpha, lets out something like a squeak.
Brandishing this delightful perk of fatherhood—teasing his daughter in front of the guys she's clearly over the full moon for—he selects a souvenir magnet from Paris to hang Isaac's achievement on the front of their stainless steel fridge.
He turns to see Allison twisted in her seat, mouth fallen somewhere between laughter and outrage, and the boy himself looking flummoxed and pleased and embarrassed all at once. Apparently, Isaac's teenage urge to pull pigtails wins out and a smirk rolls out across his face.
"See, Alli, that's what real academic excellence looks like. Better luck next quarter."
Maybe the smug affect would pass easier when he was still wearing leather instead of cardigans and his own flaking blood on his hands, but Chris will grant Isaac the attempt.
Allison glares, but she’s even less convincing than him now that Chris stands at an angle where he can see their ankles locked together under the table.
Someone needs to teach Scott McCall how to school that approving expression off his face because Chris does not need a 17-year-old boy to be proud of him. A 17-year-old girl, on the other hand, he will always accept the pride of. The smile she shoots him when Isaac turns away is worth every dumb remark from McCall's lips and every piece of furniture Lahey stains.
"Hey," Chris says, because being a father can gut him quicker than any dagger, but it can also just be plain fun. "What exactly are you three supposed to be studying for right now?"
The boys look at each other, blues and browns all wide and caught, but Allison bats off without a breath.
"Strains of wolfsbane and their various uses," she says, so cool that Chris bets if he could hear her heart, it'd beat steady. "We never said we were studying for school."
A moment passes as Chris decides that he's content enough, this entire situation shaped into a good moment he can set beside the others, to let this slide.
Later, after the boys returned home on McCall's bike—looking so much like a death trap with Isaac hanging off Scott's back that Chris nearly demands he drive them himself—when Chris goes to grab creamer for his late night decaf, he finds himself face to face with that roughed up sheet of cardstock with Lahey, Isaac typed neatly across the top.
His hand hovers over the magnet, the fun having run its course with the day over. Some small, illogical part of him stops the movement in action. He hesitates. There’s no real harm in leaving it up. Maybe Melissa McCall would want it for her own fridge, but from the way Isaac had it shoved to the bottom of his bag, Chris was clearly the first to ask. From the way he carried it around instead of throwing it away, maybe a part of Isaac wanted someone to ask.
Chris resolves to take it down if the kid seems bothered. But in the meantime...
He smirks over the rim of an oddly lopsided mug and thinks of Allison’s face when she sees it waiting there in the morning.
It starts out as a joke, and it's funny for the first week. Every day, as Chris reaches for the eggs or butter or orange juice, he lets his lips quirk at the scrawl of "FAST. MAYBE ANGER ISSUES." in the section where Isaac's earned an A- for cross country. Apparently assaulting another student during a field trip only earns you a half of a letter grade deduction. Allison takes the report card in good humor because her dad is oh-so-old and should be allowed all the little joys he can get.
It starts out as a joke, but after a little too long past the point of deniability, when Allison's eyes have stopped rolling at the sight of it, Isaac's never lose their startled awe, and so then it's not so much a joke as it is just Isaac's report card on their fridge.