How It Works
by Sandrine Shaw

Allison kisses Isaac for the first time on a rainy October afternoon. They're in Isaac's room at Scott's house, studying for a chemistry test scheduled for the next day. Even if their teachers have been dropping like flies lately, the curriculum hasn't eased up even a little, as if there's an infinite number of replacements waiting in line to pump some knowledge into the student population of Beacon Hills High.

She's leaning towards Isaac across the desk to point out a string of equations in their text book, and when he looks up to her, it brings their faces closer together, just inches between them. She can feel his breath ghosting over her skin like gentle, warm fog, and his gaze darts down from her eyes to her mouth, as if he's thinking about kissing her.

So she beats him to it, closing the last bit of space between them and pressing their lips together. Isaac's mouth is soft against hers, his lips half-open in surprise, and Allison pulls back before either of them can deepen the kiss.

Isaac looks wide-eyed, panicked, like he's afraid he's done something wrong or overstepped an invisible line even though it was her who initiated the kiss, and she's about to apologize when suddenly the door flies open and Scott barges into the room. Allison startles, but Isaac's reaction is even stronger: he visibly shrinks back.

"Are you okay?" Scott asks, and Allison is about to reassure him that she's perfectly fine, when she realizes that he's not looking at her at all. "I just heard your heartbeat go through the roof and I thought you were having a panic attack or something."

Rubbing the back of his neck, Isaac is clearly torn between looking at Scott and avoiding eye contact at all costs. "I'm fine. I was just– We were–"

He doesn't finish the sentence, and Allison knows she should help him out and try to somehow defuse the situation because this awkwardness is her fault to begin with.

"Oh." Even without Isaac supplying any more information, Scott seems to get it, looking both dejected and guilty. "Sorry, I didn't want to interrupt. I just heard you freak out and thought you needed help. I didn't–"

His apology is painful to listen to. Allison can't stand it any longer, so she puts on a fake smile and brightly asks, "It's fine, don't worry about it. You wanna study with us?"

"Um. What are you studying for?"

"Chemistry. Ms Abbott said we'd have a test tomorrow."

"Oh. Okay." Scott pulls up a chair and settles down next to Isaac, and for a moment Allison thinks it's going to be super awkward. But then Scott starts asking stupid questions that he should have learned the answers to months ago, and as Isaac looks up at Allison, rolls his eyes and smiles with fond exasperation, she thinks they're going to be okay.

They're in the woods, on the run from what Deaton said was possibly a ghoul, though Stiles is refusing to rule out the existence of zombies yet, when suddenly the ground is giving in under Scott's and Isaac's feet, dropping them a good fifteen feet down onto cold, hard stone. The impact drives the air out of Scott's lungs, and he can hear his bones crack. There's a sharp flash of pain from his left leg, and when he looks down, it's twisted at the knee in a freakish angle.

"Isaac?" he whispers into the darkness. "Are you okay?"

"Fine. You?"

"I think my leg is broken." He gives it an experimental tug and winces. It hurts when he moves to right it, but the pain is nothing compared to the weird sensation of the bones mending themselves, sped up unnaturally by his werewolf physique.

Isaac crouches down next to him, looking like he's freaking out a little. "It's too high to jump out of here and I think I lost my phone."

Scott reaches around to get his phone out of his back pocket, but when he looks at it, the screen is hopelessly cracked and it won't even switch on. It's the third one this year. His mom is going to be pissed.

On second thought, as scary as his mom is when she's angry, it might not be their most pressing problem right now, because there's rustling coming closer above them, heavy sounds, like an eight-foot monster with sharp claws and hollow eyes moving in on them.

Isaac must hear it too, because he's gripping Scott's arm so tight that it hurts. "We're going to die down here, aren't we?"

"Not without a fight," Scott says. What he thinks, privately is, Yeah, probably and I hope Stiles and the girls got away. And he hates that Isaac is in there with him because Isaac should be somewhere safe, not about to be torn to shreds by a monster in a cave, but at the same time, he's glad that Isaac's with him because there's no one he'd rather have at his side.

And then suddenly he can't think anything at all anymore because Isaac is kissing him, harshly and desperately, like he thinks that it's the last thing he'll ever do. His fist clenches in Scott's shirt, claws going through the fabric and pricking against Scott's skin, and it awakens something feral and needy inside him that wants, wants, wants so much.

Isaac breaks away, breathing hard. There's a smear of red on his lip, and Scott isn't sure which of them bit who.

"Sorry," Isaac says, like he has anything to apologize for. "I've been wanting to do that and I thought now would be a good time. Just in case we–"

He doesn't finish, but it brings Scott abruptly back to the here and now, and the looming danger of the approaching ghoul. Part of him wants nothing more than to lean back in and kiss away the unhappy downward slant of Isaac's mouth, but there's no time for that now. "I wish you'd done it sooner," Scott says.

There's a noise from above them, and his head snaps up, features changing into his wolf in the split-second it takes for him to raise his head to where he expects the ghoul to be crouching. Instead, it's Allison he finds standing at the edge, pointedly clearing her throat, looking somewhere between scandalized and amused. "Um, guys. Anytime you want to get out of there, we have rope."

It seems uncharacteristically careless for her to just stand there, and Scott starts to panic. "There's no time. Allison, you need to run. The ghoul is out there, and it's definitely real and I don't think your arrows are going to hurt it."

The amusement written all over her face intensifies. "Actually, the ghoul is dead. We killed it." She sounds only a little smug.

"What? How?" He looks at Isaac, who looks back at him and shrugs. Beats me, the gesture seems to say. It's a little embarrassing that three humans (well, two humans and a banshee) succeeded within five minutes in something two werewolves failed to do in the better part of an hour.

"Lydia ran it over with her car. And then I chopped its head off just to make sure it's really dead."

"Any more questions, or do you want to get out?" Lydia says, appearing at the edge with an impatient expression on her face. "Or we can go home, have a shower and come back after dinner, if you two want to make out some more."

Scott flushes bright red, and so does Isaac beside him. They get landed with grave-digging duty, but he figures it's only fair since the girls basically did all the work.

They don't talk about it.

Allison knows they should because things are complicated enough without adding a love triangle into it. But it's a miracle that Isaac is as comfortable around her and Scott as he is, and Scott has enough on his plate without her sitting him down for a serious talk about relationships, so she lets it go.

They don't talk about it, and the tension builds and builds between them all until something has to give.

It happens when she's training with Scott, practicing hand-to-hand combat and self-defense against creatures with claws and fangs – something they've been doing regularly ever since the Nemeton starting throwing random malevolent creatures at them. They were the ones who brought this on themselves, and it's their job to protect the town from the consequences of their ritual, but it's not getting any easier and Allison knows she has to step up her game if she wants to have any chance against whatever monster of the week leaves a trail of destruction in its wake.

She spins around and slices one of her daggers across Scott's chest, cleanly cutting through his shirt and drawing blood, but it doesn't even slow him down. The next thing she knows, she's backed against the wall with Scott right there in front of her, caging her in. His fingers are wrapped tightly around her wrists so she can't use the blades she's still holding on to, and there's not enough room to kick him. If this were a real fight, she'd be in trouble – all he'd need to do is lower his head a few inches and he could rip out her carotid with barely any effort at all.

But this is Scott, who'd never hurt her, and he doesn't close in on her neck. Instead, he holds her gaze, and his fingers draw small circles against the skin of her wrist. It's suddenly hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to remember that they're broken up and possibly moving on, even if it's with the same person.

She tries to think of Isaac and remember why this would be a bad idea. Isaac would feel betrayed by both of them, and it was hard enough to build that trust as it is.

But Isaac's out with Stiles and Lydia to search for an old text on fairies in the library, and Scott is here right in front of her, and he's warm and close and familiar. When he closes the last remaining inch of distance between them, Allison doesn't stop him. She lets herself kiss back and revel in the familiarity of it. It feels a little like coming home, and she finds herself smiling into the kiss.

She loses herself in it for a minute or five, closing her eyes and just letting the feelings wash over her. But those hunter senses they've been training won't be put on the backseat forever, and it doesn't take long until she realizes that Scott's grip on her wrist has waned and his attention is obviously focused elsewhere.

Before he knows what's happening, she spins them around until his back is to the wall, and it takes him another ten seconds for the goofy smile to slip from his face when he realizes that there's a dagger against his throat and Allison has no intention to continue making out.

She smiles sweetly, gleefully. "Aaaaand, I win."

"Hey, no fair," he protests. "That's not how you win a fight!"

"Not all of us have claws. The rest of us have to work with what we got."

Maybe if she can pretend that there was nothing else to the kiss, they can ignore it just like they ignore the rest.

When Scott invites Allison over to make Christmas cookies with him and Isaac, he doesn't have ulterior motives. He really doesn't. He just wants to spend some time with his friends. Stiles is doing a father-son thing with the Sheriff, and Lydia is off to visit her dad in New York, so it's just the three of them. He doesn't mean it to be anything but what it is, three friends enjoying the rare lull of supernatural activity and impending doom to share some festive activities.

But Allison has a smear of chocolate frosting on the corner of her mouth and it's driving him crazy because he wants nothing more than to kiss it off, and he sees Isaac stealing furtive glances at the streak of brown chocolate against pale skin that mean that he's probably thinking the same thing.

Scott tries to ignore it, but it's a lost battle from the start. He's seventeen, and he's in a reasonably small, enclosed space with two people he wants so badly that it aches. There's only so long he can resist the temptation.

"You have chocolate on your cheek," he tells Allison helpfully. She reaches up to wipe it off, but only proceeds to mess it up further, looking positively adorable while doing so, and Scott gives up on self-control.

The chocolate is sweet, but Allison tastes sweeter, and it doesn't take long until her lips open under his and she kisses back, flour-stained fingers leaving white imprints on his clothes. Behind them, Isaac makes a choked little sound. When Scott pulls away from Allison and turns around, Isaac's expression is a little dazed, like he's not even mad that Scott kissed Allison because he's enjoyed the show way too much.

And, okay, Scott can definitely work with that. He's more cautious with Isaac than he was with Allison, moving in slowly, as if not to spook him, and when he presses his lips to Isaac's, the kiss is soft and tentative, because he still isn't entirely sure if Isaac even likes him like that or if the kiss in the cave was just a we're-going-to-die-so-I'll-make-out-with-the-only-person-within-reach kind of thing.

But Isaac responds almost immediately, like he's been waiting for this for a long time. It's gentler than their first kiss, less frantic, but almost more intense, months and months of pent-up emotions flaring up between them.

When they break apart, Scott lets his forehead rest against Isaac's for a few seconds, enjoying the moment, before he looks from Isaac to Allison and back, all of them a little confused and unsure how to proceed. "Is this okay?" he asks. "Because I'm kinda in love with you both, and I know you like each other and you also like me, and I thought maybe this doesn't have to be a bad thing."

Allison stares at him. "Are you saying you want us all to–" She falters.

"We all like each other. How hard can it be?" He knows it's not that simple, but at the same time – yeah, it really is that simple.

Allison doesn't look convinced, though, and her expression is growing unhappier by the second. Scott wishes he knew how to wipe it away. He's tempted to try and kiss it away, but he knows that would only make things worse.

"Scott, most people don't know how to make a relationship with two people work. It's probably not any easier when it's three of us."

He shakes his head, because he gets what she's saying. Things are not going to be easy between them, but when have things ever been easy for any of them lately? "So what? We're not exactly most people, are we, and we have a good history of beating the odds. So why not give it a try?"

"I'm in if you are," Isaac says, and he sounds so eager and hopeful, like a happy little puppy, that even Allison has to laugh, rolling her eyes at the two of them like they're crazy and she doesn't know how she got landed with two hormonal werewolf boys.

"Fine, all right," she finally says. "Let's see how it goes."

Scott can't stop the grin from taking over his entire face.

It takes them a while to figure things out – emotionally, physically and in terms of relationship dynamics. They decide early on that it's perfectly okay for just two of them to fool around without the third party being present, just because it makes things easier. Between overbearing fathers, pack duties and life-threatening situations, it's hard enough to get any sort of privacy at all. It would be silly to let jealousy stop them from enjoying whatever stolen moments they get to have.

And still, Isaac likes it best when it's all three of them – just the three of them – curled up in bed together. When there's for once no one calling about a gargoyle sighting, when Mr Argent is out of the house and won't be back for hours, and all the homework – both regular and supernatural – is done and dealt with.

When he's stretched out on top of Allison, buried deep inside her until her body is arched tightly like a bow, the long, pale line of her throat exposed in front of him. When he feels the steady, anchoring weight of Scott at his back, pushing into him with long, almost torturously slow thrusts. When the world narrows down to this room, this bed, Scott and Allison and him, and it feels like something he can't quite put into words, more tangible or intimate even than friends or pack.

Afterwards, they share languid, unhurried kisses and time seems to stand still.

Scott makes some stupid, horrible pun and Allison buries her face in Isaac's shoulder and laughs that quiet little laugh of hers that's become just a little more carefree lately. From his other side, Scott's arm reaches around them both, pulling them all just a little closer until there's virtually no space left between them.

Isaac wouldn't have it any other way.

End.