Those Who Favor Fire (1/3)
Title: Those Who Favor Fire (1/3)
Author: ifeelbetter
Word Count: 3,494
Summary: Kate chose Stiles as her new protegee when he was seven and his mother was just killed. She told him a wolf ate his mother's heart. When they return to Beacon Hills years later, Stiles begins to doubt the party line.
Disclaimer: I own nothing of value.
Notes: The title is taken from the Robert Frost poem called, "Fire and Ice." Thanks to ofgeography for all her wonderful help and encouragement.
When Stiles was seven, he was told that a wolf ate his mother’s heart.
Later, he was able to understand that this is the way you explain things to a child; you make it a fairy tale. But at the time, he only understood that it was monstrous.
It happened like this:
His father was in the kitchen, speaking quietly but angrily with other hunters. The timbre of his anger was wrong, though, and it frightened Stiles. He knew that much without knowing anything. He’d hidden in the garage because his father had told him to stay out of the way and someone had left a fold-out chair in the garage where the car usually sat. The car was gone and the garage felt hollow without it. Stiles pulled the sleeves of his shirt down over his fingertips and gripped the sides of the chair. His dad’s voice rose again--he was shouting something about his rights and family first--but then it cut off. Someone else was speaking quietly and his dad--why was his dad listening?
The door of the garage opened and closed. Stiles didn’t want to turn to see who it was.
Kate knelt on the floor in front of him, bringing them to an equal eye level. He’d been crying because he could tell something was wrong but he didn’t know what and she was the first one to look him straight in the eyes all day.
“Baby boy, what do you know about the big bad wolf?” she asked bluntly, but with a candy-sweet lilt to her voice. She put a hand on the back of his head, making him look at her straight in the face. He couldn’t have flinched if he wanted to. Her fingers dug into the skin behind his ear.
He sniffed and shrugged.
“There are monsters in the dark,” she said solemnly but--somehow--still slippery-sweet. It would have sounded stupid coming out of someone else’s mouth, but she made it sound like the sort of thing you tuck away and never forget. She made it sound important.
“And the wolf is the worst one, you need to know that first.”
His fingers had been drumming against the side of the chair, a nervous tap-tap-tap against the silence of the room. She looked him dead in the eye.
“Baby boy, he just killed your mother. He stole her heart away and he ate it.”
The way she kept looking at him-all sharp edges and unflinching cruelty, nothing like the way her voice slid like molasses, like something sweet you could stick in until you died--was like looking into a snake’s eyes. He couldn’t look away and he could barely breathe.
“Doesn’t that make you angry?” she asked. The hand at the back of his head gripped his hair, pulling it painfully.
“Yes,” he whispered. He still didn’t understand.
“When the monsters steal from you,” she said in that voice adults use when they want you to memorize something, “you steal from them. Say it.”
“When the monsters steal from me,” he whispered and she nodded, encouraging and grim, “I steal from them.”
“That’s my baby boy,” she said, releasing her grip of his hair and patting it. “That’s what we do.”
And she walked away, closing the door behind her.
Stiles didn’t cry anymore.
But his fingers weren’t tapping; they were shaking.
* * *
When Kate burned down the Hale house, she left Stiles in the car outside. He crawled into the front seat and could see her haloed in the flames like an angry god. He couldn’t see her face, not really, just the reds and yellows licking up the air around her. The air tasted like ash, even in the closed car. Stiles’s breath came shallow and harsh; a different child would have called it a panic attack.
When she got back to the car-it felt like years later-she pulled him out and made him kneel in the dirt. Only one of the walls was really on fire, but smoke was pouring out of all the edges of the windows and through the keyholes. Kate dropped Stiles in front of the cackling heat of the burning wall. The heat blasted off the house and baked him where he knelt. He could hear the roar of flames devouring, crashing like something alive--like something wild.
And he could hear screams. Not many, not loudly, but screams. There were the sounds of fists pounding on the doors that Kate had barred and feet running up and down the stairs. But Kate had left them nowhere to run to.
“When they steal from us, what do we do?” she asked, shouting herself raw over the roar of the house crashing down in front of them, “what do we do, baby boy?”
“We steal from them,” he answered because he knew that answer, he’d said it a thousand times since that first time, but his voice came out quiet and hoarse. We do this, we take this: that was what he’d been reciting, that was what he’d been promised.
They stole a mother from him, that’s not a hole that gets filled back up. But something was dripping into that vacuum that night and Stiles knew now that this was what the bargain meant. This is what we steal, this is what they steal.
We’re stealing lives, he realized.
Kate grinned.
“We burned the wolf’s house down, baby boy,” she said, pulling his ear right up to her lips so he could hear her clearly and feel the wetness of her breath against his skin. “Don’t you feel proud.”
(It wasn’t really a question.)
(Stiles wouldn’t have been able to answer anyway.)
She drove him home.
* * *
His dad found him throwing up in the bathroom later that night.
Stiles lifted his head from the porcelain lip of the toilet seat and looked at his father. He’d have given anything to have his mother back, just for a second, just for her to stand in front of him like she used to do, bracketing him from the rest of the world with her strong legs like a fortress. He’d have given anything to believe that his parents could save him from the things that go bump in the night.
His father couldn’t help him.
Stiles could see that in his face. And he knew his father could see Stiles looking back at him, wanting something his father couldn’t spare. But it was better that than the alternative; better Stiles do this thing that had to be done than his father. Better that someone didn’t know what a body smelled like while it burned.
There was a difference between that day and the day before. The monsters had stolen from Stiles--from his father, from their family--and Stiles had made them pay in the only currency the system understood. Kate had just been the bill; it was Stiles’s debt.
The Sheriff ran a washcloth under warm water in the sink next to Stiles and handed it to him, folded carefully. Stiles wiped his mouth.
Kate had been his bill, yes, and now she had a claim on him. They both knew that.
* * *
Kate took him with her when she left Beacon Hills. He was twelve.
He heard his dad shouting at Chris Argent about it the day before they left-- “He’s a child, Chris, he’s not ready”--but Kate had the Council on her side and Chris was trying to distract her from Allison anyway and Stiles was too smart to think that anyone else had a say in this.
So he climbed into the passenger side of Kate’s car and she grinned, big and sharp and shiny white.
“Let’s go find some monsters,” she said, patting him on his knee.
If Stiles was honest--and his major selling point as a hunter was that he hardly ever was --he’d have told her that maybe they didn’t have to look far.
Instead, he said, “And we’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow their houses down,” and he made his face grin too.
Her hand stayed on his leg.
* * *
Five years later, Kate told him they were going back to Beacon Hills.
He shrugged. Given fifteen minutes and internet access, he could delete or insert himself into any school system. It wasn’t even hard to make himself show up on the roster for Allison’s class.
It would have been his anyway if--if everything had been different.
He’d like to be near Allison again. He liked the way she could look out her window on a full moon and not be scared. He liked the way she looked at him and didn’t see a killer. Allison did funny things: she grabbed his hand once to pull him towards a stranger’s bassett hound and just assumed she could kneel at the dog’s head, scratching behind its ears and smiling a wonderfully dimpled smile up at the owner.
Stiles wondered whether he could sit next to her in homeroom. He could pretend she really was his sister, that he was just a transfer student like her.
When Kate took a shower, he called his dad. He waited until the water was running loud enough to cover his voice and he spoke in an almost-whisper.
It rang twice before his dad picked up. “Stiles?”
His heart clenched tightly at the voice. He didn’t let himself call all that often. Kate’s mouth hardened into a thin line when he did, like he was failing a test. He probably was.
“Hey, dad,” he said, “we’re coming home.”
His dad made a sound--halfway between sighing and choking back a cough--and then there was a pause.
“You have room for me?” Stiles prompted, his heart pounding in his ears.
“I’ve always--yeah,” his dad said, “I’ve got room.”
Stiles would have said more but the water turned off in the bathroom and he hung up quickly. His dad knew the drill.
* * *
On the way into town, Kate flipped between radio stations and Stiles’s leg tapped nervously. Stiles was always aware of every movement Kate made when they were in a room together, his attention zeroing in on her like she was a magnet, but the rest of him just buzzed with nervous energy all the time.
She laughed when they said something on the radio about so-called animal attacks.
She didn’t tend to laugh a lot, not really, not the kind that came with a smile that reached her eyes. The exception, of course, was when she was going to kill a monster in the near future. She could peel the paint off buildings with her smile then.
“Come on, you know this one,” Kate said, finding a song she liked. Stiles didn’t know it, of course, but he could fake it. This was the sort of thing Stiles was good at faking. It was a skill he’d picked up after about the eighth school Kate had dumped him in, around when it stopped being acceptable that Stiles wasn’t naturally the kind of kid other kids flocked to. Kate hadn’t been pleased.
He’d figured out how to make the show of knowing the sort of thing normal kids know. He could carry on conversations about bands he’d never heard of, movies he would never see, and places he’d only visit if a werewolf started painting the scenery with blood. It was easy, comparatively, to guess where the lyrics would go next.
Kate grinned at him as they sang along--her sharp, snake grin--and reached across the car to put her hand on the back of his head, her fingers still too insistent behind his ear, just like they had been all those years ago. She did it often--possessively--but Stiles had long since stopped questioning the way she chose to handle him.
Then she froze.
Stiles froze too, waiting for her to tell him what to do next. When she pulled up at the stop sign, she almost side-swiped a passing pickup.
And then something landed on the roof. In the split second that Stiles had to hear the thump and to think the word (werewolf), a hairy arm had smashed through the roof of the car and grabbed him by the throat.
Kate’s shotgun was in her hand and she’d shot straight through the roof before Stiles had a chance to grab his own gun, the one he kept under his left arm.
Kate rolled out of the car--one of those unnecessarily dramatic gestures she loved and that Stiles rolled his eyes at when she couldn’t see him--and just fired two rounds into the air, daring the world to come and get her.
“Come on!” she called. “Come on!”
“Is it the Alpha?” Stiles asked, joining her. “Did you hit it?”
She didn’t answer. She watched the rooftops for a second, took her aim, and fired another round. Stiles could just barely make out the figure that fell. It looked...small.
“Not the Alpha,” she said finally.
“Did you get a beta?” Stiles asked, squinting into the darkness to try to catch a hint of movement.
“Handle this,” she ordered. “I’m going to go find Chris.”
“Handle this, she says,” Stiles said as she slammed the door and the tires screeched on her way out. “We have a surprise werewolf, a mystery Alpha, and me with no car to call my own. Handle this.”
The arm that had grabbed his throat had definitely been an Alpha, he knew that much. No beta has that much fur. But the figure that Kate had shot down on the rooftop had been too close to human for an Alpha. Chris had said there was just the one, just the Alpha--so was it building a pack? Would the Alpha even come back for its beta? Was it already there, had it never left? Was Stiles alone with an Alpha and a wounded beta in the middle of the night without backup?
Stiles did the stupid thing and climbed up the fire escape to where the werewolf would have landed. Who needs backup when you’ve got stupid, right?
He probably should have been more scared. Something smelled foul on the roof--an acrid sort of smell, but different from the smell of burning flesh. (He would always know the difference.)
For all that Stiles had helped Kate hunt down werewolves for the past five years, he’d never been this close to one alone before. He’d kept Kate’s car running and invented new kinds of bullets and chased after her with backup ammo and handed her the sword. All those werewolves had lit him up with terror from a distance. From a distance, they all looked like rabid dogs.
This werewolf growled as Stiles approached, its lip curling up to show its fangs. Despite that, its face was undoubtedly a face, a real face.
“You don’t scare me,” Stiles said in lieu of greeting. “Just so you know.”
It growled again, pushing itself backwards and away from Stiles.
Shockingly, it seemed to be afraid of him. Tiny, backup, hold-the-bag Stiles.
There was a smear of blood across the roof; it must have dragged itself out of Kate’s line of sight after it was hit. Clever.
“Was that your Alpha that just tried to kill me?” Stiles asked, keeping his gun steadily pointed at the werewolf’s heart.
It hissed. It sounded like a tea kettle.
Stiles needed to think of a clever interrogation tactic. He’d read the books, he could probably come up with something. He’d build a clever ruse, right, and then he’d slip the important questions in when the werewolf was least expecting it...or...
“How likely is it that you’ll tell me what I need to know?” Stiles asked conversationally. Not the sort of interrogation technique that would win him any awards, no, but probably worth trying for shock value alone. “Like, on a scale of one to ten--one being the super-dramatic ‘death first!’ and ten being ‘I’ll trade you some info for the wolfsbane I know you have, puny human, and also maybe a light’--where do you fall on the scale?”
There was a pause.
“You have wolfsbane?” it asked. “You’d...give it to me?”
“No, see, you missed the important bit,” Stiles said with an exasperated sigh, why was interrogation so hard? “But then again, most people lose the track of my exposition. I have to admit, I did bury the lead there.” He pulled the spare box of ammo out of his back pocket with his free hand, the one not holding the gun level with the werewolf’s heart.
“Here’s the deal: my boss’s spare wolfsbane in exchange for information.” Because Stiles always carried a pack of Kate’s ammo around in his pocket, right next to his own spare.
The werewolf made a small noise--something like a whimper but it reminded Stiles of how his dad’s jaw always clenched when he had to mention his mother and that was a weird thing for it to remind him of, Jesus--and Stiles took a step closer. It was almost irresistible, moving closer to that pain. It smacked of something familiar.
“I don’t know who the Alpha is,” the werewolf spat out. “I have nothing you want.” It spoke proudly, like it wanted to make Stiles kill it. Like it would be proud to be killed here, on this rooftop in the middle of nowhere, with no one to call foul afterward.
“Man, you’re supposed to wait until after we’ve made a tenuous deal before you admit that,” Stiles said, stepping another step closer. “You have no survival instincts.”
“You’re the one alone with an angry wolf,” the werewolf said. “You’re going to lecture me on survival instincts?”
“Maybe I’m a child prodigy,” Stiles said, still edging closer, “Maybe they called me in because I’m the best in the business.”
“You must know that I can tell when you’re lying.” The werewolf sounded incredulous, annoyed, tired--and pained. Still very pained.
“Do you want my help or not?” Stiles asked, waving the box of ammo.
“I could kill you and take that from your corpse,” the werewolf pointed out.
Stiles swallowed. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He was too close to get away before it moved now.
“I have excellent aim,” he said. “And this gun has a different brand of wolfsbane.” That had been his innovation, actually. First he’d come up with the bullets filled with wolfsbane; then he’d realized how one stray bullet cured any wound and he’d fiddled with the wolfsbane until each gun had a unique signature.
The werewolf grunted. It was unclear whether it was a scoff or an agreement.
“My point is that my death would be futile,” Stiles said. “Just to be clear.” This interrogation had gotten...away from him.
“I wouldn’t have killed you anyway,” the werewolf said, resigned or brave, Stiles couldn’t tell. “I just wanted you to know I could.” It hissed with a new pain, still trying to edge away from Stiles even though it had backed itself against the wall of the stairwell. “Just to be clear.”
Stiles had gotten close enough that he could see the werewolf clearly, even in the dim lighting of the streetlamps. He--it--looked--
It wasn’t hard to guess what Kate would have told him to do; he’d been following her orders for years, he knew what he was supposed to do. But she hadn’t said that, not explicitly: she told him to “handle it,” and that meant this time--this time Stiles got to make a call all of his own. He got to follow his instincts, not hers.
And Stiles’s instincts were telling him that you don’t shoot a wounded man.
As much as he knew that this was a failure--that he could barely call himself a hunter anymore, not when he behaved like this--he also knew enough to know he’d already made the decision, for good or bad.
He tossed the box onto the ground between them. The werewolf glanced at the box and then back at Stiles. Obviously, he--it, dammit--hadn’t believed that Stiles would really hand over the ammo. Interesting.
“I’m gonna need to--” Stiles said apologetically, pulling a taser out of his other pocket, “--sorry, nothing personal, I just can’t handle a healthy werewolf alone.”
The werewolf turned his head slightly, definitely resigned now, but the movement looked generous to Stiles. It looked like the werewolf was giving him the moment, the moment when the werewolf would be unconscious for a split second before he’d be up and healing his wolfsbane wound. The gift of a head start, maybe. But the gift of a moment.
Stiles hit him with the taser as quickly as possible and ran away even faster.
Even so, he could hear a howl as he raced down the almost-familiar streets towards his father’s house.
* * *
Author: ifeelbetter
Word Count: 3,494
Summary: Kate chose Stiles as her new protegee when he was seven and his mother was just killed. She told him a wolf ate his mother's heart. When they return to Beacon Hills years later, Stiles begins to doubt the party line.
Disclaimer: I own nothing of value.
Notes: The title is taken from the Robert Frost poem called, "Fire and Ice." Thanks to ofgeography for all her wonderful help and encouragement.
When Stiles was seven, he was told that a wolf ate his mother’s heart.
Later, he was able to understand that this is the way you explain things to a child; you make it a fairy tale. But at the time, he only understood that it was monstrous.
It happened like this:
His father was in the kitchen, speaking quietly but angrily with other hunters. The timbre of his anger was wrong, though, and it frightened Stiles. He knew that much without knowing anything. He’d hidden in the garage because his father had told him to stay out of the way and someone had left a fold-out chair in the garage where the car usually sat. The car was gone and the garage felt hollow without it. Stiles pulled the sleeves of his shirt down over his fingertips and gripped the sides of the chair. His dad’s voice rose again--he was shouting something about his rights and family first--but then it cut off. Someone else was speaking quietly and his dad--why was his dad listening?
The door of the garage opened and closed. Stiles didn’t want to turn to see who it was.
Kate knelt on the floor in front of him, bringing them to an equal eye level. He’d been crying because he could tell something was wrong but he didn’t know what and she was the first one to look him straight in the eyes all day.
“Baby boy, what do you know about the big bad wolf?” she asked bluntly, but with a candy-sweet lilt to her voice. She put a hand on the back of his head, making him look at her straight in the face. He couldn’t have flinched if he wanted to. Her fingers dug into the skin behind his ear.
He sniffed and shrugged.
“There are monsters in the dark,” she said solemnly but--somehow--still slippery-sweet. It would have sounded stupid coming out of someone else’s mouth, but she made it sound like the sort of thing you tuck away and never forget. She made it sound important.
“And the wolf is the worst one, you need to know that first.”
His fingers had been drumming against the side of the chair, a nervous tap-tap-tap against the silence of the room. She looked him dead in the eye.
“Baby boy, he just killed your mother. He stole her heart away and he ate it.”
The way she kept looking at him-all sharp edges and unflinching cruelty, nothing like the way her voice slid like molasses, like something sweet you could stick in until you died--was like looking into a snake’s eyes. He couldn’t look away and he could barely breathe.
“Doesn’t that make you angry?” she asked. The hand at the back of his head gripped his hair, pulling it painfully.
“Yes,” he whispered. He still didn’t understand.
“When the monsters steal from you,” she said in that voice adults use when they want you to memorize something, “you steal from them. Say it.”
“When the monsters steal from me,” he whispered and she nodded, encouraging and grim, “I steal from them.”
“That’s my baby boy,” she said, releasing her grip of his hair and patting it. “That’s what we do.”
And she walked away, closing the door behind her.
Stiles didn’t cry anymore.
But his fingers weren’t tapping; they were shaking.
* * *
When Kate burned down the Hale house, she left Stiles in the car outside. He crawled into the front seat and could see her haloed in the flames like an angry god. He couldn’t see her face, not really, just the reds and yellows licking up the air around her. The air tasted like ash, even in the closed car. Stiles’s breath came shallow and harsh; a different child would have called it a panic attack.
When she got back to the car-it felt like years later-she pulled him out and made him kneel in the dirt. Only one of the walls was really on fire, but smoke was pouring out of all the edges of the windows and through the keyholes. Kate dropped Stiles in front of the cackling heat of the burning wall. The heat blasted off the house and baked him where he knelt. He could hear the roar of flames devouring, crashing like something alive--like something wild.
And he could hear screams. Not many, not loudly, but screams. There were the sounds of fists pounding on the doors that Kate had barred and feet running up and down the stairs. But Kate had left them nowhere to run to.
“When they steal from us, what do we do?” she asked, shouting herself raw over the roar of the house crashing down in front of them, “what do we do, baby boy?”
“We steal from them,” he answered because he knew that answer, he’d said it a thousand times since that first time, but his voice came out quiet and hoarse. We do this, we take this: that was what he’d been reciting, that was what he’d been promised.
They stole a mother from him, that’s not a hole that gets filled back up. But something was dripping into that vacuum that night and Stiles knew now that this was what the bargain meant. This is what we steal, this is what they steal.
We’re stealing lives, he realized.
Kate grinned.
“We burned the wolf’s house down, baby boy,” she said, pulling his ear right up to her lips so he could hear her clearly and feel the wetness of her breath against his skin. “Don’t you feel proud.”
(It wasn’t really a question.)
(Stiles wouldn’t have been able to answer anyway.)
She drove him home.
* * *
His dad found him throwing up in the bathroom later that night.
Stiles lifted his head from the porcelain lip of the toilet seat and looked at his father. He’d have given anything to have his mother back, just for a second, just for her to stand in front of him like she used to do, bracketing him from the rest of the world with her strong legs like a fortress. He’d have given anything to believe that his parents could save him from the things that go bump in the night.
His father couldn’t help him.
Stiles could see that in his face. And he knew his father could see Stiles looking back at him, wanting something his father couldn’t spare. But it was better that than the alternative; better Stiles do this thing that had to be done than his father. Better that someone didn’t know what a body smelled like while it burned.
There was a difference between that day and the day before. The monsters had stolen from Stiles--from his father, from their family--and Stiles had made them pay in the only currency the system understood. Kate had just been the bill; it was Stiles’s debt.
The Sheriff ran a washcloth under warm water in the sink next to Stiles and handed it to him, folded carefully. Stiles wiped his mouth.
Kate had been his bill, yes, and now she had a claim on him. They both knew that.
* * *
Kate took him with her when she left Beacon Hills. He was twelve.
He heard his dad shouting at Chris Argent about it the day before they left-- “He’s a child, Chris, he’s not ready”--but Kate had the Council on her side and Chris was trying to distract her from Allison anyway and Stiles was too smart to think that anyone else had a say in this.
So he climbed into the passenger side of Kate’s car and she grinned, big and sharp and shiny white.
“Let’s go find some monsters,” she said, patting him on his knee.
If Stiles was honest--and his major selling point as a hunter was that he hardly ever was --he’d have told her that maybe they didn’t have to look far.
Instead, he said, “And we’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow their houses down,” and he made his face grin too.
Her hand stayed on his leg.
* * *
Five years later, Kate told him they were going back to Beacon Hills.
He shrugged. Given fifteen minutes and internet access, he could delete or insert himself into any school system. It wasn’t even hard to make himself show up on the roster for Allison’s class.
It would have been his anyway if--if everything had been different.
He’d like to be near Allison again. He liked the way she could look out her window on a full moon and not be scared. He liked the way she looked at him and didn’t see a killer. Allison did funny things: she grabbed his hand once to pull him towards a stranger’s bassett hound and just assumed she could kneel at the dog’s head, scratching behind its ears and smiling a wonderfully dimpled smile up at the owner.
Stiles wondered whether he could sit next to her in homeroom. He could pretend she really was his sister, that he was just a transfer student like her.
When Kate took a shower, he called his dad. He waited until the water was running loud enough to cover his voice and he spoke in an almost-whisper.
It rang twice before his dad picked up. “Stiles?”
His heart clenched tightly at the voice. He didn’t let himself call all that often. Kate’s mouth hardened into a thin line when he did, like he was failing a test. He probably was.
“Hey, dad,” he said, “we’re coming home.”
His dad made a sound--halfway between sighing and choking back a cough--and then there was a pause.
“You have room for me?” Stiles prompted, his heart pounding in his ears.
“I’ve always--yeah,” his dad said, “I’ve got room.”
Stiles would have said more but the water turned off in the bathroom and he hung up quickly. His dad knew the drill.
* * *
On the way into town, Kate flipped between radio stations and Stiles’s leg tapped nervously. Stiles was always aware of every movement Kate made when they were in a room together, his attention zeroing in on her like she was a magnet, but the rest of him just buzzed with nervous energy all the time.
She laughed when they said something on the radio about so-called animal attacks.
She didn’t tend to laugh a lot, not really, not the kind that came with a smile that reached her eyes. The exception, of course, was when she was going to kill a monster in the near future. She could peel the paint off buildings with her smile then.
“Come on, you know this one,” Kate said, finding a song she liked. Stiles didn’t know it, of course, but he could fake it. This was the sort of thing Stiles was good at faking. It was a skill he’d picked up after about the eighth school Kate had dumped him in, around when it stopped being acceptable that Stiles wasn’t naturally the kind of kid other kids flocked to. Kate hadn’t been pleased.
He’d figured out how to make the show of knowing the sort of thing normal kids know. He could carry on conversations about bands he’d never heard of, movies he would never see, and places he’d only visit if a werewolf started painting the scenery with blood. It was easy, comparatively, to guess where the lyrics would go next.
Kate grinned at him as they sang along--her sharp, snake grin--and reached across the car to put her hand on the back of his head, her fingers still too insistent behind his ear, just like they had been all those years ago. She did it often--possessively--but Stiles had long since stopped questioning the way she chose to handle him.
Then she froze.
Stiles froze too, waiting for her to tell him what to do next. When she pulled up at the stop sign, she almost side-swiped a passing pickup.
And then something landed on the roof. In the split second that Stiles had to hear the thump and to think the word (werewolf), a hairy arm had smashed through the roof of the car and grabbed him by the throat.
Kate’s shotgun was in her hand and she’d shot straight through the roof before Stiles had a chance to grab his own gun, the one he kept under his left arm.
Kate rolled out of the car--one of those unnecessarily dramatic gestures she loved and that Stiles rolled his eyes at when she couldn’t see him--and just fired two rounds into the air, daring the world to come and get her.
“Come on!” she called. “Come on!”
“Is it the Alpha?” Stiles asked, joining her. “Did you hit it?”
She didn’t answer. She watched the rooftops for a second, took her aim, and fired another round. Stiles could just barely make out the figure that fell. It looked...small.
“Not the Alpha,” she said finally.
“Did you get a beta?” Stiles asked, squinting into the darkness to try to catch a hint of movement.
“Handle this,” she ordered. “I’m going to go find Chris.”
“Handle this, she says,” Stiles said as she slammed the door and the tires screeched on her way out. “We have a surprise werewolf, a mystery Alpha, and me with no car to call my own. Handle this.”
The arm that had grabbed his throat had definitely been an Alpha, he knew that much. No beta has that much fur. But the figure that Kate had shot down on the rooftop had been too close to human for an Alpha. Chris had said there was just the one, just the Alpha--so was it building a pack? Would the Alpha even come back for its beta? Was it already there, had it never left? Was Stiles alone with an Alpha and a wounded beta in the middle of the night without backup?
Stiles did the stupid thing and climbed up the fire escape to where the werewolf would have landed. Who needs backup when you’ve got stupid, right?
He probably should have been more scared. Something smelled foul on the roof--an acrid sort of smell, but different from the smell of burning flesh. (He would always know the difference.)
For all that Stiles had helped Kate hunt down werewolves for the past five years, he’d never been this close to one alone before. He’d kept Kate’s car running and invented new kinds of bullets and chased after her with backup ammo and handed her the sword. All those werewolves had lit him up with terror from a distance. From a distance, they all looked like rabid dogs.
This werewolf growled as Stiles approached, its lip curling up to show its fangs. Despite that, its face was undoubtedly a face, a real face.
“You don’t scare me,” Stiles said in lieu of greeting. “Just so you know.”
It growled again, pushing itself backwards and away from Stiles.
Shockingly, it seemed to be afraid of him. Tiny, backup, hold-the-bag Stiles.
There was a smear of blood across the roof; it must have dragged itself out of Kate’s line of sight after it was hit. Clever.
“Was that your Alpha that just tried to kill me?” Stiles asked, keeping his gun steadily pointed at the werewolf’s heart.
It hissed. It sounded like a tea kettle.
Stiles needed to think of a clever interrogation tactic. He’d read the books, he could probably come up with something. He’d build a clever ruse, right, and then he’d slip the important questions in when the werewolf was least expecting it...or...
“How likely is it that you’ll tell me what I need to know?” Stiles asked conversationally. Not the sort of interrogation technique that would win him any awards, no, but probably worth trying for shock value alone. “Like, on a scale of one to ten--one being the super-dramatic ‘death first!’ and ten being ‘I’ll trade you some info for the wolfsbane I know you have, puny human, and also maybe a light’--where do you fall on the scale?”
There was a pause.
“You have wolfsbane?” it asked. “You’d...give it to me?”
“No, see, you missed the important bit,” Stiles said with an exasperated sigh, why was interrogation so hard? “But then again, most people lose the track of my exposition. I have to admit, I did bury the lead there.” He pulled the spare box of ammo out of his back pocket with his free hand, the one not holding the gun level with the werewolf’s heart.
“Here’s the deal: my boss’s spare wolfsbane in exchange for information.” Because Stiles always carried a pack of Kate’s ammo around in his pocket, right next to his own spare.
The werewolf made a small noise--something like a whimper but it reminded Stiles of how his dad’s jaw always clenched when he had to mention his mother and that was a weird thing for it to remind him of, Jesus--and Stiles took a step closer. It was almost irresistible, moving closer to that pain. It smacked of something familiar.
“I don’t know who the Alpha is,” the werewolf spat out. “I have nothing you want.” It spoke proudly, like it wanted to make Stiles kill it. Like it would be proud to be killed here, on this rooftop in the middle of nowhere, with no one to call foul afterward.
“Man, you’re supposed to wait until after we’ve made a tenuous deal before you admit that,” Stiles said, stepping another step closer. “You have no survival instincts.”
“You’re the one alone with an angry wolf,” the werewolf said. “You’re going to lecture me on survival instincts?”
“Maybe I’m a child prodigy,” Stiles said, still edging closer, “Maybe they called me in because I’m the best in the business.”
“You must know that I can tell when you’re lying.” The werewolf sounded incredulous, annoyed, tired--and pained. Still very pained.
“Do you want my help or not?” Stiles asked, waving the box of ammo.
“I could kill you and take that from your corpse,” the werewolf pointed out.
Stiles swallowed. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He was too close to get away before it moved now.
“I have excellent aim,” he said. “And this gun has a different brand of wolfsbane.” That had been his innovation, actually. First he’d come up with the bullets filled with wolfsbane; then he’d realized how one stray bullet cured any wound and he’d fiddled with the wolfsbane until each gun had a unique signature.
The werewolf grunted. It was unclear whether it was a scoff or an agreement.
“My point is that my death would be futile,” Stiles said. “Just to be clear.” This interrogation had gotten...away from him.
“I wouldn’t have killed you anyway,” the werewolf said, resigned or brave, Stiles couldn’t tell. “I just wanted you to know I could.” It hissed with a new pain, still trying to edge away from Stiles even though it had backed itself against the wall of the stairwell. “Just to be clear.”
Stiles had gotten close enough that he could see the werewolf clearly, even in the dim lighting of the streetlamps. He--it--looked--
It wasn’t hard to guess what Kate would have told him to do; he’d been following her orders for years, he knew what he was supposed to do. But she hadn’t said that, not explicitly: she told him to “handle it,” and that meant this time--this time Stiles got to make a call all of his own. He got to follow his instincts, not hers.
And Stiles’s instincts were telling him that you don’t shoot a wounded man.
As much as he knew that this was a failure--that he could barely call himself a hunter anymore, not when he behaved like this--he also knew enough to know he’d already made the decision, for good or bad.
He tossed the box onto the ground between them. The werewolf glanced at the box and then back at Stiles. Obviously, he--it, dammit--hadn’t believed that Stiles would really hand over the ammo. Interesting.
“I’m gonna need to--” Stiles said apologetically, pulling a taser out of his other pocket, “--sorry, nothing personal, I just can’t handle a healthy werewolf alone.”
The werewolf turned his head slightly, definitely resigned now, but the movement looked generous to Stiles. It looked like the werewolf was giving him the moment, the moment when the werewolf would be unconscious for a split second before he’d be up and healing his wolfsbane wound. The gift of a head start, maybe. But the gift of a moment.
Stiles hit him with the taser as quickly as possible and ran away even faster.
Even so, he could hear a howl as he raced down the almost-familiar streets towards his father’s house.
* * *