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It’s still warm. Scott can see the steam coming off its blood like the air from his nose if he turns the world over to red.
Moments ago, it was alive, and afraid, and now it's meat.
It lights up at the attention of Lydia’s Sharp FX, and Scott wonders what the insurance agent will see. Stiles hurries to tuck the Nokia he’s had since 2008 back in his pocket before she notices. The top half of a woman’s body flashes in Scott’s mind’s eye, milkwhite and smattered with crimson in the fleshy leaves illuminated by his phone screen.
If it was a human hanging out of Lydia Martin’s windshield, it would be a different Sunday night. There would be police lights and panic, mourners, later a burial and a wake. Yesterday a turkey vulture hiked its wings over a dead squirrel too far from the curb, its feathers sputtering out of the way of Stiles’ swerving jeep, and Scott’s long since human eyes could just barely make out the bulging of the rodent’s, pupils too large, wide to swallow the sky. Scott could smell its death from the passenger seat, but not its fear. It was quick.
It was still there the next morning, eyes still wide. Watching. Scott couldn’t look away.
The distinction has always been something he’s struggled to hold together since he was a kid.
Maybe ‘struggle’ isn’t the right word. Scott knows funerals are more of a ritual that they do, something made real and solid in their hands only because they know something untouchable’s just slipped through their fingers forever. The body is just a doorway to whatever’s behind there, whatever puppets the arms to open, to close back around you, whatever uncontainable thing tugs at the edge of a loved one’s mouth every time they spot you in a crowded room. Their body is still yours to bury, still cold to the touch, but something’s gone away without it.
He knows Stiles’ mom was missed far more than roadkill. Loved twice that. Scott knows people only grieve what isn't theirs, what was, and then wasn't, what they wish still was.
So he doesn’t know why it feels like such a shame that something has to be loved in order to be mourned. Some childlike part of him still wants to turn to his own mother and ask if it can be enough that it was alive. That it was alive and afraid, and now it's dead.
He thinks of Laura Hale, split in two.
She never even knew the name Scott McCall, so why was it him who found her body?
“Alright, Scotty, all you,” Stiles croaks, posture gone light and spring-y, but the whites of his eyes glare too bright off the streetlight a block away. Prey-wide, limbs coiled. When Scott steps forward, he steps with him.
It’s heavy. He has to hitch a knee on the hood to reach it, and it knocks down against the wind-wiper, the pebbles of broken glass there digging in through his jeans.
“You don’t have to–”
“I know,” he cuts Lydia off, trying to keep his voice as gentle as his hands on the buck, trying not to look at her. At Allison beside her. Stiles hovers awkwardly on the other side of her car, a thumbnail in his mouth while his free hand reaches for the condensation on the sheet metal instead of the animal in front of him, rolls it out beneath his knuckles like a distant thunder in Scott’s ears.
He feels too seen, suddenly. The moon is bright as a floodlight above them.
“We should at least pull it off to the side until you decide what you wanna do with it,” he adds, making himself meet her eye, this time, “just to be safe. That’ll be a lot easier to do without a deer sticking out of the windshield.” He waits for her to nod, jerky and wet, before he looks away.
It’s heavy, the very air around it. Tastes coppery and shrill like the incisors threatening his bottom lip.
Half a year ago, a sophomore fumbled his inhaler in the woods not far from here, a stampede of cloven hooves just like these softening the meat on his bones for a mouthful of teeth a moment later.
Half a decade ago, an eleven-year-old Scott injured a wolf spider while rearranging his bedroom. He wheezed and sweat through his comforter until the bed beneath it was flush with the other side of the room, and the arachnid had hobbled frantically out of his way, one of its legs crumpled and tripping up the other seven. Scott had watched it for a moment, smaller and slighter than most the other wolf spiders he’d grown used to seeing in the dark nooks and crannies of the house over the years, even smaller cowering next to the trim that only came up to his ankles while it struggled just to climb the lip of it. Maybe it was his age in spider years. Maybe it was already hurt before Scott caught a glimpse of it, maybe it wasn’t.
Sorry, dude, he’d whispered anyway as he herded its body into a cup with shivering hands and poured it on the sidewalk leading to the porch. Still human, curious eyes watched it trip away from him before settling just in the grassline, half its tiny, whole feet pressing back into the blades. Scott had sat with it for a few minutes, just breathing. Still.
The next morning, he found it dead two squares down.
They’d buried Roxie in the backyard just a few years earlier. He remembers feeling a little too close to distraught; enough that his mom helped him fashion a little cross out of popsicle sticks for a little grave in the barren flowerbed underneath the kitchen window, but he remembers feeling glad, too. Relieved, that he’d given it a few more hours in the sun. That he’d cared to, when he could’ve left it with the dust bunnies on his floor or even sped up its end with the sole of a shoe. Stiles does when he sees one, his mom, too, if Scott isn't home for her to holler for, and Scott doesn't think they’re bad people, or that he's a good one. Evicted from human homes likely means they’ll wind up in a bird’s beak or drowned in a puddle, the mud, squished under an unsuspecting child’s foot.
Or maybe they’d live.
Scott never got to find out most of the time.
If that's all true at once, why shouldn’t he allow the world to be kind in that moment, even if it's just that single one? One less thing out to kill you. One more that thinks you're worthy of a chance, even if it's just to die in the sun instead of the dust. How could that ever be a waste?
He remembers wishing that when it was his turn to die, Stiles wouldn't be as sad as when his mom did, or Scott’s mom as sad as he’d be if it was her. He hoped the world would be kind to him, though, at least as kind as Stiles and his mom were with his life. That the world would continue to be kind to them in his absence.
Everyone deserved at least a kind after if nothing gave it to them before. Even spiders.
The popsicle-cross stayed there for months. It's probably still there now, a couple layers below the weeds, just above the dark pieces of earth that used to be a living thing.
Getting the antlers back out the way they came opens a seam along Scott’s forearm and nibbles the backs of his hands, but he manages. It feels almost light in his arms once they’re free, fur matted where his hands have touched, gleaming and slick. Stiles’ hands have given up on the deer and landed on Scott instead, following him to the treeline and beyond right where his neck meets his shoulder. They retreat once Scott shifts and claws at the earth the way he's wished to claw at other things. No names, no faces. They have them, but they don't, not once Scott’s through with them. Smudged out and redacted, unless they want to be made unrecognizable. Unless he wants to be. It’s easier, this way.
No mourners, no wake, but he can make it a grave with his bare hands, so that’s what he does. He doesn’t realize he’s shaking until the body hits the cradle he’s made for it. The wolf in his bones has shifted, contorted and shivered down to something slighter, its fear still ripe on his tongue and tasting too much like its blood gone cold. It’s all over his hands, his shirt. He stares at it, almost black this far from the sky, sediment at the bottoms of the trees.
It’s not his, he doesn’t think. The fear. He watches it splay about his fingers, contract the tendons, the pupils, tremble.
No one else will know it but him.
“... Scott?”
“It was alone,” is what comes out of his mouth. He can hear Stiles’ breathing somewhere behind him, almost feel the warm puffs of it on his neck even though he sounded several paces away. He shivers. “Deer are herd animals, but it was alone.”
The wet earth gives under converse soles. Once, twice, three times, itching the inner ear.
“Something scared it away from…” Its family. Friends. Whatever deer have that will mourn them. Notice their absence and move around it.
“You’re shaking, dude.” That hand lands on him again and he can feel his skin bump back against it like chattering gums. The words are soft, and low, like Scott might bolt. He leans into it instead of away, though, even if he can feel the earth all over him transfer like ink into the fine grooves of Stiles’ fingerprints.
“It’s not me,” he slurs around the canines in his mouth. Swallows them down and stares at the body below them. Maybe it’s both.
He should do something. Say something.
The grip on his shoulder squeezes warm and solid around his silence.
He should, but he doesn’t. It’s what humans do, anyway, and the claws in his hands haven’t gone away with the teeth.