Chapter Text

I

The whole thing had begun like this: a man had stumbled out of the forest, still sopping wet. Unfortunately for this man, his stumbling had taken him straight into the path of a semi, which had had to swerve off the road to avoid hitting him. Stiles’ dad had then been called to the scene, nodded along to the story of the half frustrated, half shell-shocked, trucker and then gone to check up on the still dripping, but by then blanket-covered, man. His story had been… well…

“He just kept talking about fish,” his dad had said, approximately three hours later, poking at the Bolognese that Stiles was unsuccessfully trying to micromanage from his designated position by the kitchen table. “In the forest. Of all the strange things that have happened lately, that just stuck with me for some reason.”

“Yes, yes, sure, but dad, I swear to God, just a little bit of vinegar-“

“I don’t like vinegar,” his dad had insisted.

“You’re not supposed to taste it!” Stiles had exclaimed, and then abruptly hissed when his slightly too exaggerated gesturing had pulled at the scrape along his arm that he’d been trying to clean.

His father had frowned. “You sure you don’t want Melissa to take a look at that?”

“I’m sure I want you to put vinegar in those tomatoes,” Stiles had persisted, picking the discarded cotton round, wet with alcohol, up again.

“You should have thought of that before you got yourself hurt and left the cooking up to me,” his dad had said. “Think of it as a deterrent – maybe you’ll be a little bit more careful before you throw yourself into danger next time.”

Stiles' shoulders had stiffened at this, but his father was too preoccupied with poking at a piece of ground beef to notice, and so he simply went on: “You’d think that all those superhuman friends you have would be able to spare you some of those scrapes you keep getting,”

Stiles curled in on himself, pretending to examine the wound closely, but his father had now turned his eyes to a jar of dried herbs and did not see. “But then again, I swear you used to manage to give yourself a bruise every time your mother or I blinked – and that was before you could even walk.”

Stiles hadn’t even had the heart to stop his father from throwing more oregano in the pot.

“Anyway, I’m thinking those fish might be more up your alley than mine. Maybe you should give the rest of the guys a call and see what they can come up with?”

Stiles had eaten his over-oreganoed, under vinegared, Bolognese and hadn’t called anyone.

He had, though, paid careful attention to the unusual amount of talk of fish and fishing in town the following week, of beautiful and colorful scales glittering in a pond that no one seemed to be able to agree on whether it had or had not been there before.

So Stiles had- fuck, had gone ahead and assumed.

He’d even – and in retrospect, this is clearly where he’d gone wrong – been grateful that it hadn’t been anything more complicated. Mermaids – he had dealt with those before, could deal with those again, right?

Fucking right.

Stiles had gone into the forest and been smacked down so hard for his hubris that he had felt like he was a part of some Greek mythos.

After that, it had taken him a week and a half, a D on his neglected English essay, and a lot of groveling at Deaton’s feat.

The creature was something called a Berberoka.

And Stiles hadn’t taken any fucking chances this time. He’d gotten two books, one with illustrations – and yeah, those had looked pretty much exactly like what had haunted his nightmares those past nights – and cross-referenced the shit out of everything he found. Which had been a treat, of course, since one book was in Greek and the other in Latin.

But this had made the improbable conclusion that Stiles had come to all the harder to doubt.

“Fucking crabs?”

Because, yes, apparently the creature of the deep – the Lovecraftian bogeyman-looking thing that had towered over Stiles and roared so loud that sometimes he could have sworn he still heard ringing – had a weakness. And it was Sebastian from The Little Mermaid.

Stiles had briefly entertained the notion that “crabs” might be some sort of acronym. Or slang. Or code.

But nope – actual fucking orange crustaceans. And then had come the task of figuring out how to apply this knowledge. He’d entertained the notion of crab-grenades, toyed with the idea of laying out crab-perimeters, pondered how one might build crab-nets, sketched on plans for crab-launchers, speculated how one could go about setting off underwater crab-avalanches, hypothesized around weaponized crab-gas, and – half desperately – deliberated the viability of a giant crab soup.

Then a wet and quivering girl turned up shaking and wide-eyed at the station.

Stiles hadn’t even remembered to turn off the police scanner.

He’d just stood up, grabbed his jacket, and applied the infallible principles of Pokémon to the whole problem.

And it’s not until now, standing here and watching the Berberoka wail as it burns, that he remembers that fire is weak against water, and not the other way around. He frowns at the scene in front of him. At the red flames licking high in the sky, at the black and acrid smoke that billows.

Then he bends down, tugs a few blades of grass loose, and throws it at the burning creature.

They catch in the wind and flutter uselessly to the ground.

Stiles stares at them for a moment. Then he turns around and heads back home.

The time he gets to decompress is…

His dad calls from the kitchen that the girl’s gonna be fine the moment he’s through the door, and Stiles is too focused on the task of getting his sodden trainers to release his feet to give an answer that contains actual words, instead of just vague grunting noises. Inside, though, his heart starts beating normally again for the first time in several hours.

“Hey,” his father says then. “It’s probably nothing, but you wouldn’t know anything that might explain why there’s a man at the station who’s swearing that he saw Audrey Hepburn over by the preserve, do you?”

… Zero. The time he gets to decompress is zero.

Stiles stares at the wall very hard and focuses on all the reasons why it would be a bad idea to bang his head against it.

He clears his throat.

“Not really!” he yells back, resuming the task of extricating his feet. “I’ll ask if the others have seen anything!”

“I’d appreciate it!” his dad replies, and Stiles slinks upstairs to take a shower.

To finish the make-up-essay he’d persuaded Ms. Nichols to give him.

To write the entry in the bestiary for the Berberoka.

To try to learn about Bismarck’s economic principles for his test tomorrow.

To try to figure out what the hell might be running around in the forest with Audrey Hepburn’s face.

Sleep will most likely have to wait until tomorrow. Or the day after that.

Old habits have him dragging his phone out of his pocket without much input from his brain. He’s thumbed open his and Scott’s conversation before he’s really thought about it, and has already written “hey, have yo“ when he actually properly looks down.

Scott's latest text is visible above where he’s typing.

Alison just called. Raincheck?

Stiles stares at it.

The time-stamp is a date. Not the hour, not the name of the day; a full date.

His phone only ever writes out dates if more than a week has passed

He hits the back button.

Derek’s thread is immediately below Scott’s, though there’s a week or so between when they were last active. He can see the entirety of Derek’s last message without even opening the conversation:

No.

Stiles squeezes his eyes shut and lets out a mirthless, self-depreciating, chuckle. Then he locks the phone, throws it at his bed, and snatches his towel from where it’s hanging on the corner of his dresser.

A few days later he goes to confront Audrey Hepburn.

She is, unsurprisingly, a succubus. But, she hasn’t killed anyone and so he isn’t out to kill her.

He tracks her with magic, and perhaps that’s why she doesn’t even attempt to hide what she is.

She notices him coming stomping and her face immediately morphs. Literally. She gets to something somewhere between Lydia and Megan Fox and then stops with a disappointed little oh.

“Yeah,” Stiles says, coming to a stop and rubbing his hands over his face. At least his issues are good for something, even if he doesn’t much fancy the inescapable proof of them. “Listen, could you, like, move on to someplace else?”

She swears up and down that she won’t hurt anyone, that she’s practically a normal girl looking for a bit of sex, and is that so wrong? Stiles points out that he said move on, and not in the afterlife sense, just to a town that’s not within this pack’s borders, please.

She agrees, he points her in the direction of the nearest college, and then he reports back to his dad that there won’t be any more movie-star sightings.

“Shame,” his dad says, smiling at him over his cup of coffee.

He’s got his uniform on; the paper unfolded in his lap. Stiles collapses in the kitchen chair opposite him and gives a hum of agreement. “Makes for a nice change from the ugly mugs usually around.”

His dad raises his cup of coffee in a mock toast. “You’re alright, though? No damage?”

Stiles shakes his head.

“Nope. Completely non-violent. She wanted to get down on all this,” he gestures grandly towards his body, “but I declined and sent her on her way.”

His dad freezes with his mug halfway to his mouth. Raises his eyebrow; looks caught between disturbed and disbelieving.

“Really?” he asks.

And suddenly Stiles remembers that there should have been other people – attractive people – there; that Stiles shouldn’t have been the only option for the succubus. Why the fuck else would she go for him? His dad doesn’t – can’t – know that he goes to these things alone.

He opens his mouth to deflect, but then his dad continues: “You turned Audrey Hepburn down?”

Stiles blinks for a moment. Then the corners of his mouth quirk upwards. Bless his father for always thinking impossibly well of him.

He hides his affection with a joke: “I do tend to prefer my sexual encounters without the side of possible death.”

His father’s eyebrows climb.

“Not that you’ve had any,” he says, pointedly.

“Of course not,” Stiles agrees easily, and it’s not even a lie.

He can’t even manage to get people to stick around for the regular sort of company; how would he ever manage to keep anyone around long enough for actual sex? Where would Stiles find the time to even try?

His father laughs, shakes his head, and takes another sip of his coffee.

They sit in silence for a while. His dad goes back to his paper and Stiles just sits, enjoys the quiet and the rare company. When he breathes in deep, his ribs still ache a bit where the Berberoka got in a hit but, besides that, he’s unusually pain-free.

It’s nice.

After a while, he notices his dad’s eyes resting on him.

“What?” he asks.

“Stiles…” his father says, putting the mug down on the table. “You know I would want you to tell me if there’s anything I can do to help you with your… activities? If it ever gets to be too much, I mean.”

A prickle of fear shoots through him at the mere idea of getting his father any closer to the supernatural than he already is. He’d rather die than face even the possibility.

“Of course,” he lies. Then a bit of truth: “I know I can always count on you.”

His dad smiles, but it is a little bit sad, like he knows that Stiles isn’t exactly sharing all the facts. He puffs out a little sigh, turns his eyes to the floor, and taps his finger against the porcelain of his mug.

When he looks back up, Stiles’ heart sinks, because he looks like he’s going to push the issue.

He doesn’t though.

But what he says instead is almost worse: “They look out for you, though, right? The others?”

Stiles can only pray to whatever creature above that might have any control over these sorts of things that his emotions don’t actually show on his face; that his expression stays patiently neutral even as he feels like he’s being sliced open.

“Of course they do, dad,” he says, a lie so outrageous that he can hardly make sense of the words as they leave his mouth. “They wouldn’t let me get hurt.”

He apparently sounds earnest enough, because his dad holds his gaze for a moment before he nods with a pleased little smile.

“Good,” he says.

There’s something in that simple word – a hint of comfort maybe, or of contentment – that makes Stiles’ skin crawl with shame. That makes his heart pinch and his throat ache.

And suddenly he’s devastated, furious, not for his own sake, but for his dad’s. Why couldn’t they just put up with him, keep a bit of a better eye on their fucking territory, just so that his dad doesn’t end up sitting alone in the kitchen wondering why Stiles isn’t coming home?

It’s too much. His breathing starts to go uneven.

“Hey dad,” he says, standing. The chair scrapes loudly across the floor, and maybe it’s a bit abrupt because his father startles. “I think I’m gonna hit the sack.”

His dad frowns. Twists his arm to look at the watch on his wrist. “It’s not even nine yet.”

Stiles shrugs, backing away in the direction of the stairs. “Early morning tomorrow.”

“It’s Friday today, Stiles.”

“Oh,” Stiles says, stops. “Yeah, right.”

He shifts awkwardly from foot to foot under his dad’s scrutinizing gaze.

“Didn’t you kids use to have your…” his dad gestures vaguely in the air, “Your get-togethers on Fridays?”

Stiles hasn’t actually, for all his other creative and implausible injuries, ever taken a baseball bat to his stomach. He imagines it would feel something like this though; blunt and hard and unyielding, compressing his midsection until it hurts, until it shouldn’t even be possible for it to constrict this much.

Stiles doesn’t know why he does it. Doesn’t know why he insists on torturing himself, on prolonging his pain, but he fishes his phone out from his pocket and taps the screen on.

There are no missed calls.

No missed messages.

And the pack-meeting started almost two hours ago.

He shoves the phone back into his pocket and looks up at his dad and smiles. “It’s not really that kind of date, dad. Don’t you know how uncool it is to have a standing appointment?”

The corners of his father’s mouth twitch upwards, but he doesn’t look entirely convinced. “It’s been a while, though, hasn’t it?”

Stiles swallows. Shrugs. Doesn’t let the easy smile drop. “Eh, maybe. But what can you do? All of us are seniors now, we don’t really have as much time for werewolf-stuff these days.”

His dad’s eyebrows climb. “Except the monster-hunting you were just doing, of course.”

Stiles covers his slip-up by pointing finger-guns at his dad and clicking his tongue. “Precisely. Who wants to hang after that? You get all sweaty and bloody and stuff. They have super-smell, I’m super smell-y.”

“Uh-huh, right,” his dad says, raising an eyebrow and looking pointedly at Stiles’ unusually clean clothing.

And Stiles stares at him, smile still on his face, and is so tired of lying – so fucking exhausted with never actually talking to anyone – that he feels like he’s going to cry.

“For reals, though, dad,” he says, one last push. “That was it for tonight. We went in, we went out, everything went well, and everybody went home. And I really am beat.”

His father looks at him.

“I can see that, son.”

There’s a certain tone to his dad’s voice that sends alarms blaring inside Stiles' head.

“Well, if that’s it, then I think I’m just gonna-“

His father just talks over his rambling, quietly patient. “You sure you don’t have too much on your plate?”

Stiles swallows the lump in his throat.

“I told you I would tell you if I did, dad,” he says, has to avoid his dad’s eyes. “Like, not even a minute ago.”

“Not only with the monsters,” his dad replies, voice even in a way that brings immediate awareness to the fact that he’s the sheriff. “I mean with your life, in general. With school, maybe?”

Fear shoots like lightning through his body, a cold sweat breaking across his skin.

He knows!, something small and terrified shrieks in the back of Stiles’ head. He knows!

Of the things Stiles fears most, this is the only one that makes the list that doesn’t involve actual death: that his father should somehow believe, or think, or find out that Stiles’ “normal” life suffers because of the supernatural shit that he’s up to.

Because Stiles doesn’t really have a normal life anymore, is the thing. Especially not now, with the pack’s little disappearing act.

And school… School’s the damn looming tower of doom when it comes to normal life. There are fucking papers and tests and homework, with grades, telling Stiles – telling his dad – how good he is at pretending, at keeping up appearances. And if his father were to know that Stiles’ unexcused absences have made a major uptick lately, that he keeps getting zeroes on homework, that he has started to sit in the back of his classes because sometimes he just can’t keep his eyes open…

( That there isn’t anyone else who’ll go out and deal with the things that kill people, that there isn’t anyone who will update him on the assignments they’ve gotten while he was away, that there isn’t anyone else that will sit up all night to get the research done.)

But he can’t know, a more rational part of him points out.

Because Stiles has been so fucking careful to keep even the slightest hint of struggle away from his father’s attentive eyes. To keep him from thinking that maybe Stiles can’t deal, that he’s trying to do too much, that the supernatural is taking up too much time, that maybe things are getting too dangerous, that maybe Beacon Hills isn’t the best place to be, that maybe they should move-

Stiles crushes that speeding train of thought brutally before it can take him to places where he can’t deal.

For reasons that he can’t explain to himself, the thought of moving away from Beacon Hills is enough for cold sweat to break out across his body. For his insides to turn to lead and his heart to thrash heavily in his chest.

It’s the one thing that’s keeping – at a time when he’d really rather give the whole American high-school system the finger – his academic career on track.

Because what if he was forced to choose between his dad and Beacon Hills?

“All A’s,” he says, and thank god that that, at least, is still true; makeup work and extra credit be praised. “Report card came in last week, if you want to see?”

His dad smiles and it breaks the weird tension hanging in the air. “We should put it up on the refrigerator.”

“Oh, you know what, suddenly I seem to have trouble remembering where I put it,” Stiles says and sets off towards the stairs. “Night, Dad!”

“Goodnight, son.”

Stiles stomps upstairs and no more words are said between them.

The wards on his room are undisturbed, so he doesn’t even bother turning on the lights. He closes the door behind him, tears his clothes off, and rolls himself into a small ball underneath his blankets.

He closes his eyes.

If he cries himself to sleep, then… Well, then there are at least no werewolves around to smell his tears.