Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/576500.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Major_Character_Death, Underage
  Category:
      Gen, M/M
  Fandom:
      Teen_Wolf_(TV)
  Relationship:
      Isaac_Lahey/Scott_McCall, Derek_Hale/Stiles_Stilinski_if_you_squint
  Character:
      Scott_McCall, Isaac_Lahey, Derek_Hale, Stiles_Stilinski, Allison_Argent,
      Chris_Argent, Sheriff_Stilinski, Vernon_Boyd, Erica_Reyes
  Additional Tags:
      End_of_the_World, Gore, Dark
  Stats:
      Published: 2012-11-28 Words: 1638
****** this is how the world ends ******
by fightingtheblankpage
Summary
     Apocalypse!au; Scott wakes up one day and the world has ended.
Scott wakes up one day and the world has ended.
No, that’s not quite right.
Scott wakes up one day and it finally sinks in: the world has ended. It’s been
ending for three years now, slowly but surely. Three years is how long it takes
for people to exit the stage, and three years is how long it takes Scott to
actually let them go.
He’s seen quite a few movies about apocalypse in his life. Stiles liked those,
and Scott remembers how there was always somebody who fought for humanity’s
survival, some tangible danger.
There was no way to fight the virus – and everybody called it just that, ‘the
virus’; everybody knew what you’re talking about when you said it – and three
years later, the world has ended.
***
Stiles is the first to go. Not the first in the world, not even the first in
Beacon Hills, but the first in their tight little circle. With seven billions
people dead, give or take, you learn to treat them like statistics and numbers,
not actual human beings.
This is how Scott thinks about it: Stiles is real. Scott’s Mom is real. And
Allison’s real, Derek is, and Isaac, and Erica, and Boyd, Jackson and Lydia,
and the Sheriff, and maybe a few other people, too. Mr Jonson, who dies on the
same day as Stiles? Not real. Not a person with a wife and two daughters, an
avid cyclist, owner of a nicotine-yellow smile. Just a number, not even an
obituary. They’ve stopped printing those some time ago. They’d have to put them
in an actual book every day, there are so many of them, Stiles joked. Pretended
to joke.
Derek pretended to smile, for Stiles’ benefit, and then, when Stiles dies,
Derek steals a gun out of the Sheriff’s room.
It’s an interesting thing, that the werewolves are immune to the virus. Well,
they don’t get sick, but they die because of it anyway. They find out about it
much, much later. When it doesn’t matter anymore.
Erica finds Derek, brains and blood smeared across the wall in the old Hale
house. And they’ve painted the walls not so long ago, too, is Scott’s first
thought. And then he thinks what a twistedly Stiles thing to say that would be,
and then it all goes south from there.
So, Derek is the second one to go.
Scott feels bad about treating Derek’s death as a sort of an afterthought to
Stiles dying, so it’s good that Boyd keeps them all clinical about it. He talks
about how Peter will be their alpha now, by the right of seniority or just
because none of them wants the job.
Peter should be their alpha, but Peter is the third one to go.
He doesn’t die, he just… Goes. Disappears one night, without a single word to
any of them. They have no idea how, because travelling is forbidden and the
army makes sure people stay put. Scott thinks Lydia knew, but Lydia doesn’t say
anything. She doesn’t talk a whole lot these days. Scott understands that.
Conversations seem like too much trouble, forming words is exhausting in the
silence that Scott came to associate with the virus.
That makes Scott the alpha, but nobody really cares. Scott gives just one
order. They take Derek’s body to the Hale house, lay him on the floor, and then
they burn the house down.
This time they make sure that nothing remains, just ash and the foundations.
The Hales are history now, and history that will be soon forgotten.
Nobody cares. It’s another thing about the virus: the apathy.
Once, Scott finds Isaac in his room with a small, utterly useless letter opener
that Scott’s Mom got from her cousin. Isaac is driving the blunt knife into his
thigh, time and time again. When Scott walks in on him, Isaac shrugs and says,
“Just‒ checking.”
He doesn’t stop, though, and Scott just stands there and watches him.
Scott’s Mom dies a month later. The letter opener goes missing from the house.
***
Lydia is the fifth one to go.
It’s somehow more terrible to watch her decaying from the inside, rotting while
still alive, than it was to watch Stiles or Scott’s Mom. Lydia was always so
carefully beautiful, and now she’s just this. Meat, Scott supposes.
It’s hard not to look at people this way, when every day you watch them going
bad like something you’ve left in the fridge for too long.
Scott doesn’t know who’s the sixth and who’s the seventh, because Allison and
Chris die on the same night, and nobody bothers with doing autopsy anymore.
What Scott knows is, Jackson is the eighth one to go.
Isaac kills him.
***
Jackson goes rabid. No particular reason why – he just does, one day. It’s too
much, all of it, and maybe one morning it just dawns on him. So he shifts and
never shifts back, and adds some numbers to the count of the virus’ victims,
but none to Scott’s private count.
They hunt him down, and Scott is grateful that he isn’t the one who gets to
Jackson first. Isaac does – he finds Jackson in Lydia’s old room. After that,
Isaac goes missing.
Scott doesn’t think ‘Isaac is the ninth one to go’, for some reason. He thinks
Isaac will be back.
He’s right.
Three days later, Isaac comes back. Scott is lying in his bed, in his empty,
haunted house, and he’s not sleeping. Not sleeping seems to be what he’s doing
all the time. Not being awake, just keeping his eyes open and drifting through
it all.
Isaac is paler than usual, and his eyes are darker. When he undresses quietly
and lies down next to Scott, Scott says nothing.
Speaking seems like too much effort.
Isaac curls around him, tucks his head into the crook of Scott’s shoulder,
splays his hands over Scott’s chest. His breath is warm and moist, just like
decay is.
“I’ve killed him,” Isaac says, his fingers brushing against the waistband of
Scott’s sweatpants. Scott thinks they shouldn’t go there, and he really wants
to go there.
“Yes,” Scott says. He doesn’t move a muscle, just lets Isaac take whatever
Isaac needs. His warmth, maybe. The sound of his heartbeat.
“Would you kill me if the same happened to me?” Isaac asks, and he’s so close
his lips brush against Scott’s neck.
Something clenches inside Scott and it never lets go after that moment. He’s
stuck forever with that thing inside him, that dull-edged thing that feels like
Isaac has stuck the letter opener into his chest.
“I’d like you to be the one to kill me,” Isaac says. “And then you could add me
to your list.”
Scott hasn’t told anybody about his counting, and he doesn’t know how Isaac
knows.
Isaac’s hand strays down, and into Scott’s sweatpants. Isaac shifts around
until he’s comfortable before he starts moving his hand, and Scott bites at the
inside of his cheeks not to let a single sound slip out.
“I dug a lot of graves when I was still human,” Isaac says. “I don’t do it
anymore, you know. But I’d dig one for you.”
***
The Sheriff refuses to die. He tells it Scott one day, in that blank way he’s
got ever since Stiles died a year and a half ago.
“There is too much to do,” the Sheriff says. And then, “People need to know
that something’s still right in the world. That someone’s still trying to
control this madness.”
The Sheriff is the tenth one to go.
After that, nothing’s right anymore.
***
It takes two years, but people finally figure out that some of them don’t get
sick. There aren’t so many people left, but they are like animals pushed to
their limits by how unfair all of this is.
And the fact that the werewolves don’t get sick is that one last shove, and
suddenly they are being hunted for. They run, and Scott feels alive for the
first time since that whole this has started. This, at least, is something they
can control.
With the whole world  against you, there is only so much running you can do.
Erica is the eleventh to go, and Boyd is the twelfth.
Scott thought he’s used to seeing corpses by now – nobody bothers with burying
them anymore – but he’s wrong. After looking at Erica and Boyd, their bodies
ripped apart by vengeful hands of the survivors, he starts getting nightmares
that never really go away.
This is the first time it occurs to him that he’s a different species than the
people who did this. He stops thinking about himself as a human, and neither
does he think that about Isaac.
This is the day Scott fucks Isaac for the first time. It’s hurried and hard, in
an abandoned hospital of all places, and afterwards Scott tells Isaac that if
he sensed a human anywhere near, he’d kill them.
Isaac kisses him.
***
Scott wakes up one day and the world has ended.
There is just him and Isaac, curled together in a bed in a no-name town. Scott
hears a racoon outside – the animals, just like werewolves, are immune to the
virus, and Scott wonders if it means they’re animals, too. Everything is in its
place: the sun, and the sky, and Isaac’s hand where it rests on his chest. It’s
just that there are no humans anymore.
They should probably try and find the werewolves that survived.
So he stops counting in his head, and when Isaac and him go, it’s to leave this
life, and the ghosts populating it, behind.
The world has ended, and now that Scott is ready to face this fact, he thinks
he may be ready to start a new one, too.
~fin~
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