the whole truth (so help me god)
Like everyone else, I’m apparently writing Teen Wolf fic now. Like everyone else, I’m not really sure how this happened, but I tend to blame Stiles. :)
And this is a Stiles character study, so there you go. It’s multiple POV and set around “Night School.” Mostly because it will never stop being hilarious to me that Stiles punched Jackson viciously in the face and the only person who was remotely surprised was Allison. XD WHAT WERE YOU LIKE AS A CHILD, STILES?
Teen Wolf does not belong to me. I am not the right combination of awesome and ridiculous to have thought up this show. SADNESS. (Also on AO3)
The Whole Truth (So Help Me God)
“Would you like the bite?”
Would I like the bite. Uh. Yeah. Obviously. I’d love to be first line, I’d love to be kicking Scott’s ass all over the field-it would probably be good for him-and yeah, I’d love to be able to actually, physically protect my people.
I’d be good at it, too. Stiles Stilinski: Best. Werewolf. Ever. But that’s not the whole story, is the thing.
“If it doesn’t kill you-and it could-you’ll become like us.”
“Like you?”
Like Peter? Because what I know about Peter basically boils down to him calling Scott out, making Scott want to kill the people he loves best, even Scott having a hard time fighting against that, and all for Peter’s crazy, crazy (okay, yeah, justified, and yet still crazy) revenge.
“I don’t want to be like you.”
“Do you know what I heard just then? Your heart beating slightly faster over the words I don’t want.”
He thinks I’m lying. He thinks a heartbeat is all it takes to understand someone. It’s like he’s never heard about all the ways to beat a lie detector test.
If you’re crazy, you can lie while totally convinced you’re telling the truth. If you’re in pain or freaking out, it messes up your heartbeat and makes that kind of test unreliable. If you’re a sociopath, you can lie all day long and physically there’s no sign of it, because you really, truly don’t care. And then there’s me. I’m always leaving something out, and always feeling like a guilty, horrible fraud about it. Is there a label for that kind of mental…thing? I can’t even tell people my name without feeling like a liar, because, technically, Stiles isn’t my name. But the name my mom gave me…that’s not my name either. It was her name for me; it never belonged to me. Not really.
Can’t tell the truth when nothing’s true. That’s what makes sarcasm so awesome. Sarcasm is telling the truth by means of lies, and you don’t have to feel bad about any of it.
Peter thinks I don’t know what I want? Peter doesn’t get me at all. I actually have a depressingly good understanding of what I am and am not allowed to want. It’s just…there was a lot of emotion wrapped up in my incomplete answer, okay? Because I don’t like what the complete answer says about me as a person, so yes, my heart rate climbs when I think about it.
Doesn’t mean I’m lying, except in the sense that I’m always lying.
* * *
Scott sees where Stiles is looking, and he knows where this is going. He knows exactly where this is going, shit. “No.”
“Yes.”
“Stiles, no! Don’t-”
And Stiles slams the door open and runs out into the night toward the crazy, murdering alpha. Of course he does, because he’s Stiles, and this is exactly like the time he ran down a broken pier and jumped in the ocean because he thought Scott was drowning, like the time he tackled some crazy dog that was trying to bite his dad, like the time he climbed into a police car to chat with the pissed off, accused-murderer werewolf in it. This is how Stiles has always been.
Well, this is how Stiles has been as long as Scott’s known him-since his mom died. He’s not showing any signs of ever getting over it, though, fuck Scott’s life.
But he makes it back alive this time, like he always has so far. It’s not even-Scott’s pretty sure it’s not a death wish. Couldn’t be, right? Because this is Stiles, so, obviously, it can’t be that simple. No, it’s like he’s playing chicken with the whole universe. Honestly, sometimes Scott’s glad he’s the one that got bit, because if it’d been Stiles? If Stiles was a werewolf? Holy crap. Scott doesn’t even have the imagination to think up the details of how bad that would be, but he knows Stiles, and he knows it would be very, very bad. Stiles would be having fun, see, and as much as Scott loves the guy, he can’t deny that it can be a seriously scary thing, Stiles having fun. And if he was a werewolf, no one could stop him. They could slow him down, maybe. That’d be Scott’s job. Slowing werewolf Stiles down. And man, it would suck.
Scott hadn’t realized until it was too late how much he used to rein Stiles in just by not being able to keep up. Asthma, dude. Scott’s asthma saved their asses so many times when they were younger, and it’s totally typical that he didn’t appreciate it until it was gone. If he’d just managed to have a really crippling attack the day they looked for Laura Hale’s body, he’d never have gotten bit, and none of this werewolf crap would’ve happened. Not to them, anyway.
Now, though, they’ve got a problem, and it’s this: Scott’s a werewolf, right? So if anyone should’ve run out there, it should’ve been Scott, because he has an off-chance of surviving an alpha attack. But they haven’t readjusted their thinking yet, him and Stiles. They’re still acting like Scott’s the breakable one. Like Stiles is the one who needs to protect Scott.
They met when they were ten, which was around the time people started thinking it was a good idea to pick on Scott. That was a year after Stiles’s mom died, and Stiles…well, when he talks about it now, he says he’d definitely hit the anger stage of grief. He probably spent more time in the principal’s office than he did in the classroom. He’d beat the crap out of anyone with even the tiniest hint of an excuse. It’s the reason nobody’s ever physically bullied him and Scott since, not even in eighth grade, when most of the class shot past them in height. Because they remember. They remember that Stiles goes nuts when he’s mad.
So yeah, back then? Scott needed a lot of defending. And back then, Stiles really needed somebody to defend. It worked for them. It’s worked for them for years. Now, though, with this whole werewolf thing…it’s messing with their dynamic. Now it’s Scott’s turn to defend Stiles, and he needs to get that straight in his head. Things aren’t the way they used to be.
And it has to be Scott who remembers it, because Stiles never will.
“Move now?”
“Move now.”
They run.
* * *
They’re trapped in the school with a murderous…thing…and they are also, for some reason, being forced to watch the Scott McCall I’ve-never-learned-to-lie floor show. Lydia violently disapproves of the last month of her life in general, and this evening in particular.
No one bothers to ask Stiles what’s going on, of course. Even Allison doesn’t bother, though she keeps looking nervously over at him. And that, Lydia thinks with the only part of her mind left that isn’t gibbering in terror, shows an impressive level of perception. She knew she liked Allison. Allison is new, but she already realizes there’s no point in asking Stiles anything in a situation like this, even though he obviously knows everything, and, moreover, thinks that Scott’s explanation was idiotic.
But for some reason, Stiles decided that Scott should deliver the party line, and he did, and now Stiles will stick to it. Even if it kills them all. Stiles is nothing if not insanely, debilitatingly loyal, see above, re: I would rather let all of us die here than call my father, the sheriff, and see him get hurt.
Stiles must secretly hate his father being in law enforcement. Lydia has never thought about that before.
And she’s a tiny bit offended, she realizes distantly. She knew there was a hierarchy to Stiles’s affections, but she didn’t realize his father was so far above everyone else (so far above her) that Stiles would sacrifice everyone else to keep him safe. She wonders if his father knows that. Probably not. Stiles (like Lydia, like Jackson) is not a great communicator of truth.
In any case, Stiles and Scott know more than anyone else, and they are not panicking. Oh, they’re afraid. They’re very afraid, but they’re not panicking, not like Allison, not like Jackson. Not like Lydia.
That’s embarrassing. It is, it’s embarrassing. Lydia is near-hysterics, Allison is near-tears, and Jackson was charging around acting crazed until Stiles punched him in the face, at which point he went all sneeringly bitter at the world. It’s not a good showing for Lydia’s…well, for her team. If Stiles and Scott know something she doesn’t, and are therefore not panicking, then there’s no need for her to panic, either. Okay, Scott might not be panicking because he has the common sense of a puppy, but Stiles is more reliable.
Lydia takes a deep breath and considers Stiles, who looks extremely stressed and unhappy, but not panicked. She takes another breath and forces her own panic back and down. She’s never lost to Stiles academically, and she’s not losing to him here, either. Especially not here. After all, this is where it really counts.
She will be at least as good in a crisis as Stiles Stilinski. For God’s sake.
“In there is everything you need to make a self-igniting Molotov cocktail,” she points out.
Now they’re all looking at her like she’s scarier than the rampaging murderer. Wonderful. This entire situation is too ridiculous to be believed, she resents being made to believe in it, and she plans to wipe it from her memory as soon as possible.
Assuming she survives, obviously.
* * *
The sheriff doesn’t bother to call Stiles back. He just rounds up half the department and drags them to the school, and he makes no apologies for it. Fortunately, half the department knows Stiles, so all he had to do was play the message back for them, and there were no arguments. Stiles would never mess around with something that serious, and besides, that was definitely not the sound of Stiles pulling a prank.
That awful crashing noise, and then, “We’re at the school. Dad? We’re at the school.”
Careful clarity, forced calm. It was an older version of the voice Stiles had once used to leave a message that went, “Dad, Mom just fainted in the kitchen. I called 911; we’ll be at the hospital.”
Of course John brought everything they had. And he wasn’t wrong. He just wishes he had a better grasp of the details, because he knows his son, and, sad to say, a lone killer wouldn’t have been enough to cause that voice. A lone killer would’ve brought on, oh, enthusiasm.
“You’re sure it was Derek Hale?”
“Yes,” Scott insists, determined.
“I saw him too,” Stiles throws in gamely. Nicely done. Not exactly an accusation. Stiles could’ve seen Derek Hale walking his dog, and it would still be a true statement. It’s only a lie in spirit.
It’s not a shock to find Stiles lying for Scott (ha, if only), but baselessly accusing someone of being a serial killer is crossing a new and upsetting line. It reminds John that his wife had nothing but contempt for wives who testified against their husbands. Well, not for domestic abuse-there she cheered for them. But wives who testified against husbands who’d killed their bosses, bookies, drug dealers, or anyone else not a friend or relative of the wife’s: contempt. If you kill someone, she told him, I’ll help you bury the body in the woods. No matter who it is. I’ll assume you had your reasons.
Please never admit that to any of my coworkers, he’d said, not sure whether to be pleased about or terrified of this wild woman he’d married. This woman who held her loved ones so far above the rest of humanity that they might as well have been different species.
He never doubted that she was deadly serious, though. And she and Stiles are sometimes disturbingly alike.
Well, if nothing else, John’s confident that Scott hasn’t killed anybody. For one thing-Scott. Just, no. And for another thing, John has, God help him, categorized his son’s lies by level of seriousness, and this is no more than a three: lackadaisical at best. It probably means that Stiles doesn’t actually know who the killer is and is just backing Scott out of solidarity.
If Scott had killed someone, that would be level ten lying, complete with shaking voice, blinked-back tears, and a visibly impending panic attack. And Stiles would stick to the story even if they’d found Scott standing over a body, covered in blood, and holding a knife.
The three is a nice change, actually, because there’s been an awful lot of level seven lying going on lately. For-your-own-good lying. It’s a flashback to Stiles in fifth grade, when he would try to convince John that, despite what the school might’ve claimed, he hadn’t really gotten into three fights that day in a fit of grief-fueled rage. Level seven lies mean Stiles is under insane pressure but doesn’t want John to worry about it.
So what’s causing the insane pressure this time? John’s gonna have to figure it out on his own, because Stiles is never going to tell him.
“What’s going on over there?” he asks instead, pointing to Scott and Allison, who’re having some kind of intense conversation in the parking lot. John’s trying to redirect, lower the tension.
It doesn’t work. “…I suspect that that is Allison breaking up with Scott. Over there.”
“What? Why?” John was sure they were one of those creepy, codependent high school romances that would last at least until they graduated.
“She didn’t like the way he handled things tonight.”
“Really? He’s sixteen. That seems a little harsh of her.”
Stiles shrugs, not offering comment. Stiles is not offering comment; something is seriously wrong here.
“Did you like the way he handled things?” John asks, worried.
“He was a high school student in a near-death situation,” Stiles says, oddly detached, like he’s talking about something he wasn’t a part of. “I think he did the best he could.”
And that? That’s a lie, too.
* * *
“Lydia, do you think I made the wrong decision?”
“Hello. Scott locked us in that classroom and left us for dead,” Lydia says, like it’s the most ridiculous question Allison’s ever asked. And maybe it is. Maybe it is, it’s just…Scott left Stiles locked in that classroom, too. He left Stiles, too, and Stiles-
Stiles obviously doesn’t care.
And yes, they’re best friends, but it’s not like Stiles never gets mad at Scott. Allison’s seen him really mad at Scott, actually. And Jackson mentioned to her, in a tone split evenly between total confusion and total glee, that a few days after her birthday he saw Stiles duct tape Scott’s hands together and then spend twenty minutes hurling lacrosse balls at his face. (And Scott just stood there and let him do it, which…what? Maybe it’s a mistake to ever expect Scott to make any sense at all.)
So Stiles must know something about that night that Allison doesn’t. He must, and he’s not mad. The question is, does that mean that Allison’s wrong, or does it just mean that Stiles is, well, crazy? Or both?
She’s afraid the answer is both. But she’s not asking Stiles about it. She’s had the experience of asking Stiles questions he doesn’t want to answer, and God, never again. He could give Dad lessons on deflection, it’s a nightmare.
Besides, Stiles is a little…unfriendly isn’t the word, distant? When Scott isn’t around. Stiles looks at Scott like he’s family, at Lydia like a guy with a crush, at Jackson like he’s willing him to spontaneously burst into flames, but Allison? He hardly looks at Allison at all, and when he does, it’s like he hasn’t decided yet if he even considers her to be real. Like he’s weighing her up, and the jury’s still out on whether or not she gets to be part of Stiles’s world.
So yes, Stiles is probably the best source of information on everything that happened that night, but Allison’s not going to ask him. Her dad also clearly knows more than he’s admitting to, but she’s not asking him, either. Of course she’s not. If this experience has taught her anything, it’s that she’s a coward.
* * *
It’s been a long and confusing day, and Danny would at least like to make it inside the door before getting attacked by wild-eyed family members. But of course that’s a pipe dream that cannot be.
“So?!” demands Danny’s sister, Alana, who’s leaning over the railing on the second floor. “How was it? What did he say? Did he do anything crazy?”
Sometimes Alana actually reminds him of Stiles. It’s upsetting. Danny sighs, coming the rest of the way in and shutting the door behind him. “He lied badly, same as always.”
“About?” She’s literally bouncing with the need to know. Definitely Stiles-like, how has Danny never noticed this before?
“Derek Hale was hanging out in his bedroom. In a blood-stained shirt.”
Alana laughs insanely and punches the air. “Yes. He’s got the man he totally just accused of being a serial killer hanging out in his room. Covered in blood. That is just. I love that guy. I’m serious, Danny, I mean it, I am marrying him someday.”
“You are not marrying Stiles.”
“Stiles is the best thing ever.”
“Stiles is the biggest liability ever.”
“He is not! Because Scott is. So how did he explain a bloodied-up Derek Hale in his bedroom?”
“He claimed Derek was his cousin Miguel. Who has terrible nose bleeds.”
Alana laughs so hard her legs give out, and she sinks to the floor, propping her head against the railing. “He does know, right, that you went to the same grade school as the Hales.”
“He has to know. We’ve gone to the same school forever.”
“His cousin Miguel.”
“Right.”
“Did he seriously want you to do lab work with Derek Hale?”
“No, he wanted me to trace a text.”
“And you said no.”
“And then he bribed me into it by forcing Derek to strip.”
“You’re making that up.”
“As God is my witness, Alana.”
“Oh my God. Oh, hang on. You let yourself get seduced into crime by an accused murderer? Danny.”
“Shut up! He’s a ridiculously hot accused murderer; you’d have done the same thing. Anyway, Stiles was the one who accused him, and he was hanging out in Stiles’s bedroom. So apparently things have changed.”
“What kind of relationship is that, even? Where one day you call a guy a murderer, and the next day he’s hanging out in your room illegally tracing texts with you?”
“It’s a Stiles relationship. This is a new low, but it’s still pretty much to pattern. Kind of like that time he shoved Scott face-first into a tree and then Scott had an asthma attack and Stiles freaked and then dot dot dot best friends for life.”
“Wow. Stiles. God, what am I gonna do when you guys graduate? My class is so boring! No murderers or werewolves at all! …Wait. There aren’t, are there?”
“Not as far as Scott and Stiles know.”
“When are you gonna tell them you know about all their crazy werewolf stuff?”
“The fifteenth of never.”
“Danny!”
“What? I am not getting involved in this. I’m not happy that Jackson’s getting himself involved, either, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna follow him down. I want to live long enough to legally buy alcohol, Alana. I don’t feel like that’s an unreasonable thing to want.”
“Boring. I can’t believe you’re not even telling Jackson you know. He’s your best friend.”
“He doesn’t want me to know, so I’m not telling him I do.”
“Out of spite?”
“No! Because he’d freak out if he knew I knew, and that’s…it’s not good for him. He freaks out way too much as it is.”
“…Yeah, I don’t understand you and Jackson’s relationship, either.”
“Well, that makes you and everyone.”
* * *
Laura would have loved Stiles. It’s a simple fact, and Derek recognizes it, but he’s not sure what to do with it. Stiles would’ve fit in with the rest of Laura’s friends seamlessly. He might even have been her favorite, and that would’ve been horribly embarrassing-for Derek, at least. Laura would’ve taken shameless, open advantage of Stiles, too, which…Derek gets the weird feeling Stiles might’ve liked. Derek would’ve watched in horror and not understood a thing, but that wouldn’t have mattered, because Laura was the alpha and Derek wouldn’t have needed to understand.
But Laura’s dead. Laura’s dead, and Derek’s alone, and there’s no one to tell him what to do, about Stiles or anything else. He was never meant to be alone. His mother used to laugh and tell him he had all the leadership skills of a prey animal, and then Laura would knock him down and sit on him to prove the point. It was gentle teasing, though, because he didn’t need leadership skills; it wasn’t important. He was always meant to be a beta, by nature and by upbringing. He was meant to be the backup, the muscle, the yes-man. He was good at that. The worst mistake he ever made was trying to control his own love life. If he’d left that up to Laura, too, he wouldn’t be living in this nightmare.
He needs an alpha. He needs instruction. He needs someone to tell him what to do and want and say, but he emphatically does not want that person to be Scott McCall, because he kind of resents Scott’s entire existence. (And vice-versa, clearly.)
He thinks he could handle it if Stiles were his alpha. Or Lydia Martin. Or Sheriff Stilinski. None of whom, inconveniently, are werewolves at all, let alone alphas. And of the three of them, he spends the most time with Stiles, which makes Stiles the most confusing.
“So,” Stiles says slowly when he comes back upstairs after letting Danny out. “Now what do we do?”
“I don’t know, Stiles,” Derek says, trying very hard to sound like he’s being sarcastic. “What do you think we should do?”
And it works. It works like magic. “Yeah, okay, I know,” Stiles sighs. “We have to talk to Mrs. McCall. Give me a break, here, I don’t even want to think about how awkward this is gonna be. She goes off shift at seven-we should wait until then.”
“Thank you for your input, Stiles,” Derek says with perfect sincerity and a tone of voice that makes it a lie.
“What do you even want from me, dude?” Stiles mutters resentfully.
I want you to become a werewolf, Derek thinks idly. I want you to be my alpha. I want you to talk Scott into being in our pack, and I want you both to outlive me. “Nothing,” he says. It’s the most ridiculous lie he’s told in a while, and Laura would laugh herself sick if she were here. Of course, if she were here, it wouldn’t be a lie.
“Noth-wait, does that mean you seriously think I’m letting you go to the hospital without me? Seriously? Because no, just no. I am not letting you interrogate Mrs. McCall,” Stiles says indignantly, grabbing his keys, though it’s early yet. “I’ll talk to her. And I’m driving.”
“What? No. You’re not coming with me.”
“Then I’m going without you, but I am going to the hospital, so you can ride along or you can run there on your own. I really don’t care.”
Derek rolls his eyes, but he follows Stiles downstairs.
It’s a good thing Stiles isn’t an expert on pack dynamics, because if he were, he’d know what it means that Derek first stripped on command and is now obediently trailing after him, letting him drive, letting him call the shots.
But even if Stiles doesn’t know what it means, Derek knows, and he’s going to have to make up for it somehow, and soon. For the sake of his sanity.
Stiles is not and never will be his alpha, and he needs to get that idea out of his head right now. Stiles can’t stand Derek, and he’s too young, anyway. He’s about the age Derek’s youngest siblings would’ve been, if they’d lived. So Derek should be treating him like a little brother. That makes sense. He can talk himself into that. All he has to do is keep his eyes up and his chin down, and he’ll get through this. He’s gotten through everything else.
He knows Laura wouldn’t like this plan, but she never liked any of his plans, and this is all he’s got. It’s her fault, anyway. She knew better than to leave him on his own.
* * *
“You may believe that you’re telling me the truth,” Peter says, “but you are lying to yourself.”
That seems pretty unlikely. I’ve never really mastered the art of lying to myself, though God knows I spend a lot of time trying.
Here’s the thing: I have it on good authority that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, all that. And if I were a werewolf, the first thing I’d do would be to kill Peter Hale, and then I’d either go back to being human, or I’d become the alpha. Human, no problem, but if I became the alpha? It would take me no time at all to talk myself into biting everyone I love to keep them safe, maybe even whether they liked it or not. And then they’d be my responsibility, so I’d have to wipe out everyone who was a threat to them. The Argents would have to go, no matter how sad it made Allison. Who might be a werewolf by then, anyway.
How far would I go? I don’t know. I have no idea, in fact, and that scares the crap out of me. I wouldn’t put it past myself to become the very image of Peter Hale, and one take on that dude is definitely one more than the world needed.
In the words of Galadriel, all would love me and despair. Which is why Galadriel didn’t take the Ring, and, you know, there are worse role models in life. Fiction. Whatever, I can hardly tell the difference anymore. (Not that I was ever all that great at telling the difference, and there’s a whole separate issue.)
Basically, I don’t trust myself with that kind of power. I don’t trust myself not to be worse for the people I love than anything I could protect them from. I’d trip out on it, I know full freaking well I would.
So yeah, there’s that. And then there’s the fact that the bite might kill me, and maybe there’s a part of me that thinks, hey, not an entirely bad idea. At least I could stop panicking about everything all the time, right? All the worrying and the struggle to focus and the fighting to keep people safe when it seems like nobody’s on my side including them-it could just stop. And I could pretend it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t think it could really happen. If I could just keep myself from thinking about how much it would completely ruin Dad’s life, I might go for that.
I open my mouth to try to explain all this to Peter in what would probably be a totally incoherent mess of babble, but he shuts the car door, and the moment’s lost. No complete answer for him. He’ll just have to go on thinking my drug of choice is self-delusion. Whatever.
The complete answer is: yeah, it’s not totally accurate to say I don’t want the bite. I actually want it way too much, but I don’t want to want it as much as I want it. It’s safer not to want it at all.
Good luck figuring all that out from my heart rate.
And this is a Stiles character study, so there you go. It’s multiple POV and set around “Night School.” Mostly because it will never stop being hilarious to me that Stiles punched Jackson viciously in the face and the only person who was remotely surprised was Allison. XD WHAT WERE YOU LIKE AS A CHILD, STILES?
Teen Wolf does not belong to me. I am not the right combination of awesome and ridiculous to have thought up this show. SADNESS. (Also on AO3)
The Whole Truth (So Help Me God)
“Would you like the bite?”
Would I like the bite. Uh. Yeah. Obviously. I’d love to be first line, I’d love to be kicking Scott’s ass all over the field-it would probably be good for him-and yeah, I’d love to be able to actually, physically protect my people.
I’d be good at it, too. Stiles Stilinski: Best. Werewolf. Ever. But that’s not the whole story, is the thing.
“If it doesn’t kill you-and it could-you’ll become like us.”
“Like you?”
Like Peter? Because what I know about Peter basically boils down to him calling Scott out, making Scott want to kill the people he loves best, even Scott having a hard time fighting against that, and all for Peter’s crazy, crazy (okay, yeah, justified, and yet still crazy) revenge.
“I don’t want to be like you.”
“Do you know what I heard just then? Your heart beating slightly faster over the words I don’t want.”
He thinks I’m lying. He thinks a heartbeat is all it takes to understand someone. It’s like he’s never heard about all the ways to beat a lie detector test.
If you’re crazy, you can lie while totally convinced you’re telling the truth. If you’re in pain or freaking out, it messes up your heartbeat and makes that kind of test unreliable. If you’re a sociopath, you can lie all day long and physically there’s no sign of it, because you really, truly don’t care. And then there’s me. I’m always leaving something out, and always feeling like a guilty, horrible fraud about it. Is there a label for that kind of mental…thing? I can’t even tell people my name without feeling like a liar, because, technically, Stiles isn’t my name. But the name my mom gave me…that’s not my name either. It was her name for me; it never belonged to me. Not really.
Can’t tell the truth when nothing’s true. That’s what makes sarcasm so awesome. Sarcasm is telling the truth by means of lies, and you don’t have to feel bad about any of it.
Peter thinks I don’t know what I want? Peter doesn’t get me at all. I actually have a depressingly good understanding of what I am and am not allowed to want. It’s just…there was a lot of emotion wrapped up in my incomplete answer, okay? Because I don’t like what the complete answer says about me as a person, so yes, my heart rate climbs when I think about it.
Doesn’t mean I’m lying, except in the sense that I’m always lying.
* * *
Scott sees where Stiles is looking, and he knows where this is going. He knows exactly where this is going, shit. “No.”
“Yes.”
“Stiles, no! Don’t-”
And Stiles slams the door open and runs out into the night toward the crazy, murdering alpha. Of course he does, because he’s Stiles, and this is exactly like the time he ran down a broken pier and jumped in the ocean because he thought Scott was drowning, like the time he tackled some crazy dog that was trying to bite his dad, like the time he climbed into a police car to chat with the pissed off, accused-murderer werewolf in it. This is how Stiles has always been.
Well, this is how Stiles has been as long as Scott’s known him-since his mom died. He’s not showing any signs of ever getting over it, though, fuck Scott’s life.
But he makes it back alive this time, like he always has so far. It’s not even-Scott’s pretty sure it’s not a death wish. Couldn’t be, right? Because this is Stiles, so, obviously, it can’t be that simple. No, it’s like he’s playing chicken with the whole universe. Honestly, sometimes Scott’s glad he’s the one that got bit, because if it’d been Stiles? If Stiles was a werewolf? Holy crap. Scott doesn’t even have the imagination to think up the details of how bad that would be, but he knows Stiles, and he knows it would be very, very bad. Stiles would be having fun, see, and as much as Scott loves the guy, he can’t deny that it can be a seriously scary thing, Stiles having fun. And if he was a werewolf, no one could stop him. They could slow him down, maybe. That’d be Scott’s job. Slowing werewolf Stiles down. And man, it would suck.
Scott hadn’t realized until it was too late how much he used to rein Stiles in just by not being able to keep up. Asthma, dude. Scott’s asthma saved their asses so many times when they were younger, and it’s totally typical that he didn’t appreciate it until it was gone. If he’d just managed to have a really crippling attack the day they looked for Laura Hale’s body, he’d never have gotten bit, and none of this werewolf crap would’ve happened. Not to them, anyway.
Now, though, they’ve got a problem, and it’s this: Scott’s a werewolf, right? So if anyone should’ve run out there, it should’ve been Scott, because he has an off-chance of surviving an alpha attack. But they haven’t readjusted their thinking yet, him and Stiles. They’re still acting like Scott’s the breakable one. Like Stiles is the one who needs to protect Scott.
They met when they were ten, which was around the time people started thinking it was a good idea to pick on Scott. That was a year after Stiles’s mom died, and Stiles…well, when he talks about it now, he says he’d definitely hit the anger stage of grief. He probably spent more time in the principal’s office than he did in the classroom. He’d beat the crap out of anyone with even the tiniest hint of an excuse. It’s the reason nobody’s ever physically bullied him and Scott since, not even in eighth grade, when most of the class shot past them in height. Because they remember. They remember that Stiles goes nuts when he’s mad.
So yeah, back then? Scott needed a lot of defending. And back then, Stiles really needed somebody to defend. It worked for them. It’s worked for them for years. Now, though, with this whole werewolf thing…it’s messing with their dynamic. Now it’s Scott’s turn to defend Stiles, and he needs to get that straight in his head. Things aren’t the way they used to be.
And it has to be Scott who remembers it, because Stiles never will.
“Move now?”
“Move now.”
They run.
* * *
They’re trapped in the school with a murderous…thing…and they are also, for some reason, being forced to watch the Scott McCall I’ve-never-learned-to-lie floor show. Lydia violently disapproves of the last month of her life in general, and this evening in particular.
No one bothers to ask Stiles what’s going on, of course. Even Allison doesn’t bother, though she keeps looking nervously over at him. And that, Lydia thinks with the only part of her mind left that isn’t gibbering in terror, shows an impressive level of perception. She knew she liked Allison. Allison is new, but she already realizes there’s no point in asking Stiles anything in a situation like this, even though he obviously knows everything, and, moreover, thinks that Scott’s explanation was idiotic.
But for some reason, Stiles decided that Scott should deliver the party line, and he did, and now Stiles will stick to it. Even if it kills them all. Stiles is nothing if not insanely, debilitatingly loyal, see above, re: I would rather let all of us die here than call my father, the sheriff, and see him get hurt.
Stiles must secretly hate his father being in law enforcement. Lydia has never thought about that before.
And she’s a tiny bit offended, she realizes distantly. She knew there was a hierarchy to Stiles’s affections, but she didn’t realize his father was so far above everyone else (so far above her) that Stiles would sacrifice everyone else to keep him safe. She wonders if his father knows that. Probably not. Stiles (like Lydia, like Jackson) is not a great communicator of truth.
In any case, Stiles and Scott know more than anyone else, and they are not panicking. Oh, they’re afraid. They’re very afraid, but they’re not panicking, not like Allison, not like Jackson. Not like Lydia.
That’s embarrassing. It is, it’s embarrassing. Lydia is near-hysterics, Allison is near-tears, and Jackson was charging around acting crazed until Stiles punched him in the face, at which point he went all sneeringly bitter at the world. It’s not a good showing for Lydia’s…well, for her team. If Stiles and Scott know something she doesn’t, and are therefore not panicking, then there’s no need for her to panic, either. Okay, Scott might not be panicking because he has the common sense of a puppy, but Stiles is more reliable.
Lydia takes a deep breath and considers Stiles, who looks extremely stressed and unhappy, but not panicked. She takes another breath and forces her own panic back and down. She’s never lost to Stiles academically, and she’s not losing to him here, either. Especially not here. After all, this is where it really counts.
She will be at least as good in a crisis as Stiles Stilinski. For God’s sake.
“In there is everything you need to make a self-igniting Molotov cocktail,” she points out.
Now they’re all looking at her like she’s scarier than the rampaging murderer. Wonderful. This entire situation is too ridiculous to be believed, she resents being made to believe in it, and she plans to wipe it from her memory as soon as possible.
Assuming she survives, obviously.
* * *
The sheriff doesn’t bother to call Stiles back. He just rounds up half the department and drags them to the school, and he makes no apologies for it. Fortunately, half the department knows Stiles, so all he had to do was play the message back for them, and there were no arguments. Stiles would never mess around with something that serious, and besides, that was definitely not the sound of Stiles pulling a prank.
That awful crashing noise, and then, “We’re at the school. Dad? We’re at the school.”
Careful clarity, forced calm. It was an older version of the voice Stiles had once used to leave a message that went, “Dad, Mom just fainted in the kitchen. I called 911; we’ll be at the hospital.”
Of course John brought everything they had. And he wasn’t wrong. He just wishes he had a better grasp of the details, because he knows his son, and, sad to say, a lone killer wouldn’t have been enough to cause that voice. A lone killer would’ve brought on, oh, enthusiasm.
“You’re sure it was Derek Hale?”
“Yes,” Scott insists, determined.
“I saw him too,” Stiles throws in gamely. Nicely done. Not exactly an accusation. Stiles could’ve seen Derek Hale walking his dog, and it would still be a true statement. It’s only a lie in spirit.
It’s not a shock to find Stiles lying for Scott (ha, if only), but baselessly accusing someone of being a serial killer is crossing a new and upsetting line. It reminds John that his wife had nothing but contempt for wives who testified against their husbands. Well, not for domestic abuse-there she cheered for them. But wives who testified against husbands who’d killed their bosses, bookies, drug dealers, or anyone else not a friend or relative of the wife’s: contempt. If you kill someone, she told him, I’ll help you bury the body in the woods. No matter who it is. I’ll assume you had your reasons.
Please never admit that to any of my coworkers, he’d said, not sure whether to be pleased about or terrified of this wild woman he’d married. This woman who held her loved ones so far above the rest of humanity that they might as well have been different species.
He never doubted that she was deadly serious, though. And she and Stiles are sometimes disturbingly alike.
Well, if nothing else, John’s confident that Scott hasn’t killed anybody. For one thing-Scott. Just, no. And for another thing, John has, God help him, categorized his son’s lies by level of seriousness, and this is no more than a three: lackadaisical at best. It probably means that Stiles doesn’t actually know who the killer is and is just backing Scott out of solidarity.
If Scott had killed someone, that would be level ten lying, complete with shaking voice, blinked-back tears, and a visibly impending panic attack. And Stiles would stick to the story even if they’d found Scott standing over a body, covered in blood, and holding a knife.
The three is a nice change, actually, because there’s been an awful lot of level seven lying going on lately. For-your-own-good lying. It’s a flashback to Stiles in fifth grade, when he would try to convince John that, despite what the school might’ve claimed, he hadn’t really gotten into three fights that day in a fit of grief-fueled rage. Level seven lies mean Stiles is under insane pressure but doesn’t want John to worry about it.
So what’s causing the insane pressure this time? John’s gonna have to figure it out on his own, because Stiles is never going to tell him.
“What’s going on over there?” he asks instead, pointing to Scott and Allison, who’re having some kind of intense conversation in the parking lot. John’s trying to redirect, lower the tension.
It doesn’t work. “…I suspect that that is Allison breaking up with Scott. Over there.”
“What? Why?” John was sure they were one of those creepy, codependent high school romances that would last at least until they graduated.
“She didn’t like the way he handled things tonight.”
“Really? He’s sixteen. That seems a little harsh of her.”
Stiles shrugs, not offering comment. Stiles is not offering comment; something is seriously wrong here.
“Did you like the way he handled things?” John asks, worried.
“He was a high school student in a near-death situation,” Stiles says, oddly detached, like he’s talking about something he wasn’t a part of. “I think he did the best he could.”
And that? That’s a lie, too.
* * *
“Lydia, do you think I made the wrong decision?”
“Hello. Scott locked us in that classroom and left us for dead,” Lydia says, like it’s the most ridiculous question Allison’s ever asked. And maybe it is. Maybe it is, it’s just…Scott left Stiles locked in that classroom, too. He left Stiles, too, and Stiles-
Stiles obviously doesn’t care.
And yes, they’re best friends, but it’s not like Stiles never gets mad at Scott. Allison’s seen him really mad at Scott, actually. And Jackson mentioned to her, in a tone split evenly between total confusion and total glee, that a few days after her birthday he saw Stiles duct tape Scott’s hands together and then spend twenty minutes hurling lacrosse balls at his face. (And Scott just stood there and let him do it, which…what? Maybe it’s a mistake to ever expect Scott to make any sense at all.)
So Stiles must know something about that night that Allison doesn’t. He must, and he’s not mad. The question is, does that mean that Allison’s wrong, or does it just mean that Stiles is, well, crazy? Or both?
She’s afraid the answer is both. But she’s not asking Stiles about it. She’s had the experience of asking Stiles questions he doesn’t want to answer, and God, never again. He could give Dad lessons on deflection, it’s a nightmare.
Besides, Stiles is a little…unfriendly isn’t the word, distant? When Scott isn’t around. Stiles looks at Scott like he’s family, at Lydia like a guy with a crush, at Jackson like he’s willing him to spontaneously burst into flames, but Allison? He hardly looks at Allison at all, and when he does, it’s like he hasn’t decided yet if he even considers her to be real. Like he’s weighing her up, and the jury’s still out on whether or not she gets to be part of Stiles’s world.
So yes, Stiles is probably the best source of information on everything that happened that night, but Allison’s not going to ask him. Her dad also clearly knows more than he’s admitting to, but she’s not asking him, either. Of course she’s not. If this experience has taught her anything, it’s that she’s a coward.
* * *
It’s been a long and confusing day, and Danny would at least like to make it inside the door before getting attacked by wild-eyed family members. But of course that’s a pipe dream that cannot be.
“So?!” demands Danny’s sister, Alana, who’s leaning over the railing on the second floor. “How was it? What did he say? Did he do anything crazy?”
Sometimes Alana actually reminds him of Stiles. It’s upsetting. Danny sighs, coming the rest of the way in and shutting the door behind him. “He lied badly, same as always.”
“About?” She’s literally bouncing with the need to know. Definitely Stiles-like, how has Danny never noticed this before?
“Derek Hale was hanging out in his bedroom. In a blood-stained shirt.”
Alana laughs insanely and punches the air. “Yes. He’s got the man he totally just accused of being a serial killer hanging out in his room. Covered in blood. That is just. I love that guy. I’m serious, Danny, I mean it, I am marrying him someday.”
“You are not marrying Stiles.”
“Stiles is the best thing ever.”
“Stiles is the biggest liability ever.”
“He is not! Because Scott is. So how did he explain a bloodied-up Derek Hale in his bedroom?”
“He claimed Derek was his cousin Miguel. Who has terrible nose bleeds.”
Alana laughs so hard her legs give out, and she sinks to the floor, propping her head against the railing. “He does know, right, that you went to the same grade school as the Hales.”
“He has to know. We’ve gone to the same school forever.”
“His cousin Miguel.”
“Right.”
“Did he seriously want you to do lab work with Derek Hale?”
“No, he wanted me to trace a text.”
“And you said no.”
“And then he bribed me into it by forcing Derek to strip.”
“You’re making that up.”
“As God is my witness, Alana.”
“Oh my God. Oh, hang on. You let yourself get seduced into crime by an accused murderer? Danny.”
“Shut up! He’s a ridiculously hot accused murderer; you’d have done the same thing. Anyway, Stiles was the one who accused him, and he was hanging out in Stiles’s bedroom. So apparently things have changed.”
“What kind of relationship is that, even? Where one day you call a guy a murderer, and the next day he’s hanging out in your room illegally tracing texts with you?”
“It’s a Stiles relationship. This is a new low, but it’s still pretty much to pattern. Kind of like that time he shoved Scott face-first into a tree and then Scott had an asthma attack and Stiles freaked and then dot dot dot best friends for life.”
“Wow. Stiles. God, what am I gonna do when you guys graduate? My class is so boring! No murderers or werewolves at all! …Wait. There aren’t, are there?”
“Not as far as Scott and Stiles know.”
“When are you gonna tell them you know about all their crazy werewolf stuff?”
“The fifteenth of never.”
“Danny!”
“What? I am not getting involved in this. I’m not happy that Jackson’s getting himself involved, either, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna follow him down. I want to live long enough to legally buy alcohol, Alana. I don’t feel like that’s an unreasonable thing to want.”
“Boring. I can’t believe you’re not even telling Jackson you know. He’s your best friend.”
“He doesn’t want me to know, so I’m not telling him I do.”
“Out of spite?”
“No! Because he’d freak out if he knew I knew, and that’s…it’s not good for him. He freaks out way too much as it is.”
“…Yeah, I don’t understand you and Jackson’s relationship, either.”
“Well, that makes you and everyone.”
* * *
Laura would have loved Stiles. It’s a simple fact, and Derek recognizes it, but he’s not sure what to do with it. Stiles would’ve fit in with the rest of Laura’s friends seamlessly. He might even have been her favorite, and that would’ve been horribly embarrassing-for Derek, at least. Laura would’ve taken shameless, open advantage of Stiles, too, which…Derek gets the weird feeling Stiles might’ve liked. Derek would’ve watched in horror and not understood a thing, but that wouldn’t have mattered, because Laura was the alpha and Derek wouldn’t have needed to understand.
But Laura’s dead. Laura’s dead, and Derek’s alone, and there’s no one to tell him what to do, about Stiles or anything else. He was never meant to be alone. His mother used to laugh and tell him he had all the leadership skills of a prey animal, and then Laura would knock him down and sit on him to prove the point. It was gentle teasing, though, because he didn’t need leadership skills; it wasn’t important. He was always meant to be a beta, by nature and by upbringing. He was meant to be the backup, the muscle, the yes-man. He was good at that. The worst mistake he ever made was trying to control his own love life. If he’d left that up to Laura, too, he wouldn’t be living in this nightmare.
He needs an alpha. He needs instruction. He needs someone to tell him what to do and want and say, but he emphatically does not want that person to be Scott McCall, because he kind of resents Scott’s entire existence. (And vice-versa, clearly.)
He thinks he could handle it if Stiles were his alpha. Or Lydia Martin. Or Sheriff Stilinski. None of whom, inconveniently, are werewolves at all, let alone alphas. And of the three of them, he spends the most time with Stiles, which makes Stiles the most confusing.
“So,” Stiles says slowly when he comes back upstairs after letting Danny out. “Now what do we do?”
“I don’t know, Stiles,” Derek says, trying very hard to sound like he’s being sarcastic. “What do you think we should do?”
And it works. It works like magic. “Yeah, okay, I know,” Stiles sighs. “We have to talk to Mrs. McCall. Give me a break, here, I don’t even want to think about how awkward this is gonna be. She goes off shift at seven-we should wait until then.”
“Thank you for your input, Stiles,” Derek says with perfect sincerity and a tone of voice that makes it a lie.
“What do you even want from me, dude?” Stiles mutters resentfully.
I want you to become a werewolf, Derek thinks idly. I want you to be my alpha. I want you to talk Scott into being in our pack, and I want you both to outlive me. “Nothing,” he says. It’s the most ridiculous lie he’s told in a while, and Laura would laugh herself sick if she were here. Of course, if she were here, it wouldn’t be a lie.
“Noth-wait, does that mean you seriously think I’m letting you go to the hospital without me? Seriously? Because no, just no. I am not letting you interrogate Mrs. McCall,” Stiles says indignantly, grabbing his keys, though it’s early yet. “I’ll talk to her. And I’m driving.”
“What? No. You’re not coming with me.”
“Then I’m going without you, but I am going to the hospital, so you can ride along or you can run there on your own. I really don’t care.”
Derek rolls his eyes, but he follows Stiles downstairs.
It’s a good thing Stiles isn’t an expert on pack dynamics, because if he were, he’d know what it means that Derek first stripped on command and is now obediently trailing after him, letting him drive, letting him call the shots.
But even if Stiles doesn’t know what it means, Derek knows, and he’s going to have to make up for it somehow, and soon. For the sake of his sanity.
Stiles is not and never will be his alpha, and he needs to get that idea out of his head right now. Stiles can’t stand Derek, and he’s too young, anyway. He’s about the age Derek’s youngest siblings would’ve been, if they’d lived. So Derek should be treating him like a little brother. That makes sense. He can talk himself into that. All he has to do is keep his eyes up and his chin down, and he’ll get through this. He’s gotten through everything else.
He knows Laura wouldn’t like this plan, but she never liked any of his plans, and this is all he’s got. It’s her fault, anyway. She knew better than to leave him on his own.
* * *
“You may believe that you’re telling me the truth,” Peter says, “but you are lying to yourself.”
That seems pretty unlikely. I’ve never really mastered the art of lying to myself, though God knows I spend a lot of time trying.
Here’s the thing: I have it on good authority that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, all that. And if I were a werewolf, the first thing I’d do would be to kill Peter Hale, and then I’d either go back to being human, or I’d become the alpha. Human, no problem, but if I became the alpha? It would take me no time at all to talk myself into biting everyone I love to keep them safe, maybe even whether they liked it or not. And then they’d be my responsibility, so I’d have to wipe out everyone who was a threat to them. The Argents would have to go, no matter how sad it made Allison. Who might be a werewolf by then, anyway.
How far would I go? I don’t know. I have no idea, in fact, and that scares the crap out of me. I wouldn’t put it past myself to become the very image of Peter Hale, and one take on that dude is definitely one more than the world needed.
In the words of Galadriel, all would love me and despair. Which is why Galadriel didn’t take the Ring, and, you know, there are worse role models in life. Fiction. Whatever, I can hardly tell the difference anymore. (Not that I was ever all that great at telling the difference, and there’s a whole separate issue.)
Basically, I don’t trust myself with that kind of power. I don’t trust myself not to be worse for the people I love than anything I could protect them from. I’d trip out on it, I know full freaking well I would.
So yeah, there’s that. And then there’s the fact that the bite might kill me, and maybe there’s a part of me that thinks, hey, not an entirely bad idea. At least I could stop panicking about everything all the time, right? All the worrying and the struggle to focus and the fighting to keep people safe when it seems like nobody’s on my side including them-it could just stop. And I could pretend it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t think it could really happen. If I could just keep myself from thinking about how much it would completely ruin Dad’s life, I might go for that.
I open my mouth to try to explain all this to Peter in what would probably be a totally incoherent mess of babble, but he shuts the car door, and the moment’s lost. No complete answer for him. He’ll just have to go on thinking my drug of choice is self-delusion. Whatever.
The complete answer is: yeah, it’s not totally accurate to say I don’t want the bite. I actually want it way too much, but I don’t want to want it as much as I want it. It’s safer not to want it at all.
Good luck figuring all that out from my heart rate.