#moth tag

He doesn’t answer, doesn’t even look at her, just keeps fussing at it, dabbing here, smoothing there, his shoulders and the tense line of his neck all she has to go off of.

“Leon,” Quinn tries. “Hey, it’s not that bad. It doesn’t even hurt, honest.”

“What if it is?” he asks, looking up at her at last. His eyes are red with unshed tears. His fingers are white and trembling around her ankle.

“Leon—“

“We don’t know what the fuck that thing was,” he says, and it sounds like he’s trying for angry, but mostly he just sounds scared. “What if— I mean, it looked like—“

She waits.

Leon takes a deep and shuddering breath. In a very small voice, he says, “What if you…what if something happens to you? What if you turn— into something?”

“Like a monster?” she asks, unimpressed, and Leon looks away, caught somewhere between embarrassed and sincerely worried. It’s sweet. “That’d be pretty sick.”

“Quinn!”

She gently tugs her foot from his grasp and prods at his chest until he looks at her. Once he finally meets her eyes, she says, “First, you’ve watched every werewolf movie ever made. If I turned into one, you’d handle it. Second, you can’t tell me you don’t think having a werewolf for a best friend doesn’t sound awesome.”

(He snorts at this, though it still sounds shaky.)

“Third,” Quinn continues, blowing a weft of hair from her eyes, “it clawed me, dude, not bit. Who ever heard of claws turning you into a werewolf?” When he opens his mouth, she adds, “Teen Wolf doesn’t count and you know it. And fourth, you know what?”

He’s properly smiling now, small as it is, and rolling his eyes as he asks, “What?”

“If I were a monster, I’d be your monster, and I think that sounds all right to me. Okay?”