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As Scott’s best friend, Stiles has plenty of reasons to dislike Scott’s father.
After all, he’d been there when Scott’s parents’ marriage had fallen apart, when Scott’s dad had walked out without a word, when Scott had withdrawn into himself, turning from a happy child into a sullen preteen.
However, Stiles also has his own reasons for disliking Agent McCall, chief among them the fact that he is a smarmy douche.
It’s after all of the shit with the Alpha Pack and Jennifer Blake. Derek and Cora have tucked tail and fled town, Scott is apparently now an Alpha due to the power of love or whatever, and, worst of all, Scott’s father appears to be neglecting his duties as an FBI agent to hang around Beacon Hills and annoy everyone.
Stiles would really, really rather Agent McCall go away and Derek come back, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon, so instead he’s stuck having periodic “conversations” with Scott’s father that mainly consist of Stiles glaring while Agent McCall talks.
He’s on his way to Scott’s house about two weeks after all the shit went down on the Nemeton when he’s cornered by Agent McCall yet again. This time though, instead of not-so-subtly trying to get the dirt on Scott, he opens up with “Is your father drinking again?”
Stiles can only blink at him, caught off-guard. “What do you mean, again?’ he asks. “He never had to stop.”
“But he did have to slow down,” Agent McCall says. He looks like he’s attempting to pull off Scott’s trademark puppy dog eyes, and failing miserably. “Is he drinking like he used to?”
Stiles can’t prevent himself from stiffening up. His father’s drinking habits are something that he doesn’t like to talk about, doesn’t even like to think about, and if he were to talk about them with someone, it certainly wouldn’t be Scott’s father.
“He’s fine,” Stiles says harshly, before making a quick escape, leaving Agent McCall staring after him, hand still hovering in the air as though he’s reaching out.
***
John Stilinski’s not exactly proud of the fact that he first met his wife in a bar. He’d always thought that the kinds of people who met in places like that, dark places with loud music and people with blood alcohol levels so high that they shouldn’t be legally allowed to walk, let alone drive, were the kinds of people whose relationships were destined for a swift and messy end.
It may be cliché to say it, but John’s pretty sure that it was love at first sight with Claudia. At the very least, it was definitely something at first sight, although John, an embarrassing lightweight in those days, was so hammered when he first saw her that he doesn’t quite trust his own memory.
It was spring, he remembers, though the exact date eludes him. He and his buddies from the force had gone out to this cheap little dive bar to celebrate…something (a promotion, maybe? Certainly not his). John had been happy, though, that much he’s clear on, ordering beer after beer, though his salary at the time was nothing short of pitiful, and shooting pool with his friends.
He saw her when he went up to the bar to buy another round, having just lost a particularly hard fought round. He remembers grumbling about it, suggesting that they switch to darts, but not really minding, the buzz overshadowing his competitive side. He’d just put in his order when a laugh, loud and uninhibited, came from a few feet to his left, demanding his complete attention.
He’d turned towards the sound, ignoring the bartender entirely, and that’s when he saw her.
She was in the middle of a group of friends, because Claudia had always been outgoing. She wasn’t just the life of the party, she was the party. Though maybe not always the most conventionally pretty girl around, there was something about her that just drew people to her, men and women alike.
For John, it was the bow in her full lips, one side pulled up in a little smirk. It was her eyes, far enough away that he couldn’t see the color, but bright with mirth and fixed completely on the person she was talking to. It was the way her long fingers played absently around the glass of dark liquid in her hand as she brought it up to take another swallow.
Most of all, it was that laugh, which came again as he watched. She didn’t bother to cover her mouth with a hand, not worrying about being too loud or unladylike.
It wasn’t until one of his buddies came over to find out what was taking him so long with the beer that he realized he probably shouldn’t be staring so openly at a woman he had never met.
John (the Sheriff, now – he can count on one hand the people that regularly call him by his first name) is pulled out of his reminiscing by the slamming of the front door.
It’s so loud and sudden that another person would probably jump, but John has experience with loud noises – his job, his wife, and now his son.
Stiles seems to be in a terrible mood, even worse than his usual bouts of teenage angst, and that gets John’s hackles up, especially now that he knows that Stiles has been dealing with a veritable zoo of supernatural creatures in his spare time.
“Is everything alright?” John calls when Stiles makes to go straight upstairs instead of stopping to greet him.
Stiles turns around and forces a smile. “It’s fine,” he says, and John doesn’t know who he thinks he’s kidding – his kid may be a pretty decent liar, a fact which sometimes keeps John up at night, but, though he may be capable of hiding details from his father, he can’t pretend that he’s alright when he’s not.
Still, John’s read enough parenting books in his lifetime (he’d torn through all the baby- and small child-related ones when they found out that Claudia was pregnant, then all the teenager ones when it became clear that he would be raising a teenager by himself) to know that pushing Stiles right now won’t help.
Stiles clatters up the stairs, and John heaves a deep sigh to himself, forcibly pushing the reminiscences out of his head. He’s got a case to work on, not quite as dramatic as the ones he’s been working on the past few months, but important nonetheless.
And if he pours a couple fingers of scotch into a glass, well, he’s always worked better with a little liquid relaxation anyway.
***
Stiles’s mother got sick the year that he turned twelve.
Looking back, he can see that the first signs of her illness started before that, when she would tire just a little more easily than before, beg off of family outings to nap, bruise just that little bit easier.
Then the lines first started to appear around his father’s eyes, then he began to throw himself into work between doctor’s appointments, then the beer that was occasionally in the fridge disappeared, replaced with clear bottles full of dark amber liquid, stored carefully in a cabinet in the living room, far out of Stiles’s reach.
It must have been almost a relief to both of his parents when the diagnosis came, but Stiles, who had been preoccupied with his own little middle school concerns, had felt as though the word shattered his entire life.
Cancer. It was an ugly word, harsh and final-sounding. It had always been something that Stiles was vaguely aware of, but only as far as it affected other people. The idea that his mother, full of life as she was, could be seriously ill was so completely contrary to his conception of the world that he’d refused to believe it at first.
It always makes a wave of embarrassment go through his body, when he thinks of how he’d reacted when they told him.
He remembers coming home after another day of school, coming through the front door and talking a mile a minute about what had happened, about how mean Jackson was and how pretty Lydia was and how he and Scott had gotten in trouble for passing notes during math class. He remembers bounding into the kitchen and flinging his backpack to the ground, then being pulled up short by the sight of both of his parents seated at the kitchen table, serious looks on their faces.
He remembers asking if he was in trouble, because that’s the only reason he could think of for something like this to happen. Remembers backpedaling, trying to explain why it was actually necessary for he and Scott to be passing notes.
Remembers his mother taking a deep breath and interrupting him, telling him plainly and clearly that she was sick and was going to be going to the hospital for a while.
Remembers her saying the C-word.
As he gets up to his room, Stiles tries his best to push the thoughts out of his mind. The thing is, though, that his dad’s drinking habits are connected so completely with his mother’s death that Agent McCall’s words have dredged all the complicated feelings up again.
Sighing to himself, Stiles throws himself onto his bed and seriously considers starting his homework, just to distract himself.
***
Several hours later, John has re-filled his glass of scotch twice more and is no closer to finding a solution to his case. He’s at the stage of tipsy where his eyes won’t track properly, so it’s difficult to focus on his papers for more than a few seconds at a time, but his mind is still sharp, and he takes a second to marvel at the fact that this amount of alcohol would once have been enough to get him solidly drunk.
Take his wedding reception, for example.
He’d been completely sober for the ceremony, of course, standing up by the altar with clammy hands and mentally going over the words of his vows again and again, because he’d been too damn stubborn to even consider reading them off a sheet of paper.
It was a terrible idea, because his mind went totally, blissfully blank as soon as Claudia had appeared at the end of the aisle, her father at her side and her cheeks flushed with a combination of excitement and embarrassment.
Had it been up to them, they would have had a much smaller ceremony, because as social as Claudia was, she didn’t like having a bunch of silent people staring at her. John’s parents were traditional, though, and the second John saw Claudia in her wedding dress for the first time, he was grateful for that fact.
She looked beautiful, stunning, gorgeous, and all other kinds of clichéd words. To this day, John finds it impossible to put into words exactly what he had felt in that moment. He’d never really been good at expressing himself, but right then he had wished that he was a poet, or a painter, or a songwriter, that he had some way to immortalize Claudia as she appeared in that moment, brown eyes bright and cheeks flushed, looking at him as though he was the only man in the world.
Though he wouldn’t be able to tell you what he’d said in his own vows, even though he’d agonized over them for what felt like weeks before the wedding, he remembers every word of what Claudia had said to him, exactly how her lips had looked shaping her promise to love him forever, the exact moment her voice had cracked and she had broken off with a self-deprecating laugh, her eyes filling up with tears.
It’s simultaneously one of the best and most painful memories of John’s life, and he takes another pull of his drink, trying to chase it out of his mind.
He remembers being wildly happy at the reception, but not too much else. True to the circumstances of their first meeting, Claudia had always liked herself a drink, and she’d chosen the wine and champagne to accompany the dinner with care. Both of them, feeling the release of the tension of wedding planning and excited for their upcoming honeymoon, had been generous with the wine, and it had only taken four or five glasses for John to drag his new wife onto the dance floor, trying to spin her around like a suave movie hero, and failing miserably.
After that, his next memory is waking up in the hotel the next morning with a splitting headache, Claudia next to him and a bone-deep sense of satisfaction permeating his mind.
During the several years after Claudia’s death, John hadn’t even been able to think of the good times without overwhelming pain. The years and the liquor have dulled the pain, along with all his other senses, and he manages a slightly bitter and wistful smile to himself before he drains his glass dry and stumbles upstairs to spend yet another night in his lonely bed.
***
When Stiles wakes up the next morning, he feels like he hasn’t slept at all. Much as he hates letting Agent McCall get under his skin, he can’t help but run over his words in his head, and, much as he wracks his brains, he can’t think of a day in the past two weeks when he hasn’t seen his father take a drink.
For the longest time, the entirety of his mother’s illness and several years after her death, Stiles hadn’t really seen his dad’s drinking as a problem. After all, he’s not a violent or mean drunk – has never raised a hand to anyone, let alone Stiles, no matter how intoxicated he was.
But violence isn’t the only hallmark of a problem drinker, and as Stiles had gotten older, he’d increasingly started to see just how much the alcohol was affecting his father, just how little the Sheriff resembled the man that had been his childhood hero.
Stiles drags himself out of bed with a groan. He’s not looking forward to school, because it seems like everything’s fucked. Everyone’s dealing with their own shit in their own way: Scott figuring out what being a true Alpha means for him, Allison and Isaac doing their guilty little flirtation thing in the background, the twins skulking around being murderous, Lydia aggressively trying to deny the fact that she’s some sort of weird Irish screech monster. Stiles has never felt more disconnected from his friends and acquaintances than he does right now.
Basically, Agent McCall’s douchebaggery couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Stiles makes his way downstairs in a foul mood and seeing the glass that his father had left on the table, a surefire sign that he’d been too drunk to really register what was happening, doesn’t help. Stiles’s eyes start to burn, and, unbidden, his memory throws him back to the worst night of his entire life.
They were both in the hospital on the day that it happened, Stiles and his father. It was May, Stiles remembers, though he couldn’t tell you what day of the week it had been or what the weather had been like.
The last few weeks of his mother’s illness are a blur of worry and tiredness. Every day after school, he’d rushed to her bedside, staying as long as the doctors would let him. More often than not, his father was there as well, pale and drawn and tired, sometimes attempting to finish up work on the small table by Stiles’s mother’s bed, but never drunk.
He’d been so careful to hide it in the beginning. Sure, Stiles had noticed, in the sort of numb way he’d noticed most things during that time period, too caught up with his overwhelming grief and fear to care about anything else. But what he’d noticed had always been the before, the bottles of liquor where there had never been any, and the after, those same bottles of liquor drained within a week of entering the house. His father drank in secret, after Stiles retired to his room and slammed the door behind him, spending the nights curled up into a little ball on his bed, trying to keep his mind entirely blank.
On that day in May, nothing had seemed different. For the last month or so of her illness, Stiles’s mother had spent most of her time sleeping, body exhausted from the endless rounds of chemotherapy and radiation it was put through. When she was awake, though, she was still Mom, still smiled and laughed and helped Stiles with his homework.
She was better at math than Stiles’s father was. When she was awake, she’d beckon him near to sit on the end of her bed while she explained equations to him in a way that made sense to his disordered, racing mind.
Stiles remembers his father looking up from his own work and giving a real smile, not the strained one that he gave to anyone who asked him how he was holding up or whether she was in remission yet.
“You have to get x by itself,” she explained, her musical voice patient, despite how many times they’d been over this already. “If there are other numbers over there with it, than x is stuck. It can’t go anywhere.”
“But this doesn’t say x,” Stiles argued, gesturing at the textbook with his pencil. “This says 9x. You said I didn’t have to get rid of the 9.”
“The 9 is part of the x,” she said, then seemed to think for a moment and raised her hands from the blanket.
“Imagine my finger is x,” she said, and Stiles tried to ignore the fact that the finger she extended was shaking. “If my finger is x, then 9x would be…?”
“9 fingers,” Stiles replied, holding up his own.
His mother mirrored him. She had lost so much weight over the course of her illness that even her fingers were thin and bony. Stiles looked back down at his textbook, the numbers still mocking him.
9x+2=20.
“So I ignore the 9x, and subtract the 2 from both sides,” he murmured to himself, marking the numbers down in his notebook.
His mother gave a bright smile, then grabbed his hands, twining their fingers together. Stiles moved his thumb down, just a little, to press against the inside of her wrist. Her pulse was racing, though she looked calm.
9x=18.
“That’s right!” she said. Her voice sounded strange, kind of far away.
“Then divide by 9…” Stiles said, pulling one of his hands away. Suddenly, the numbers seemed to make sense, and he couldn’t believe that it had taken him so long to figure it out.
x=2.
“Stiles,” his father said softly, tone wary, and Stiles looked up, all of the happiness at his accomplishment draining out of him. His mother had fallen back onto her pillows, as though she didn’t have the strength to keep her body upright. The hand that Stiles wasn’t holding had come up to her own chest, and the one he was holding had tightened its grip.
She was so weak that he could barely even feel it.
Dimly, Stiles registered that his father was pressing the button that would call a nurse to the room. He didn’t look; for some reason, he felt that if he took his eyes off his mother for a split second, she would disappear, just fade out of existence by the time he returned his eyes to the bed.
Stiles felt a hand at his shoulder, his father pulling him back. “No,” he said, surprising even himself with the amount of pure panic in his voice.
“Stiles, get back,” his father ordered, voice like steel. “We don’t have to leave the room, but let the nurses have a little space.”
His mother opened her eyes, looked directly at him, and said “It’s alright, sweetheart. Go with your father.”
He let go of her hand, and those were the last words that his mother ever spoke to him.
***
John had never been entirely certain that he wanted to have kids before he met Claudia. He knew that the life of a cop, even in a small, sleepy town like Beacon Hills, California, was a dangerous one, and raising a child in that situation would be difficult.
Claudia was born to be a mother, though, and the longer John stayed with her, the more he looked forward to having a child of their own.
He found out the way that hapless husbands always seem to find out, worrying about Claudia’s persistent stomach bug for about a week and a half before the inevitable realization that she was displaying all the traditional signs of pregnancy.
John remembers coming home one day to see Melissa McCall, her own stomach beginning to swell, sitting with Claudia, looking through baby-related books, Claudia excitedly and Melissa with trepidation.
“What’s the point of baby showers, anyway?” Melissa asked, wrinkling her nose as she flicks aside a page of her magazine.
“Presents!” Claudia replies, spotting John at the door and popping up to greet him.
Even though Claudia was barely two months along at the time, John remembers the twinge of worry he’d gotten every time she’d made sudden movements, already so protective of his child inside of her. During Stiles’s rambunctious time as a child, he’d look back on this and laugh, but now that he knows exactly what his kid is caught up in, he tends to think that his first instinct was correct.
Besides, Stiles is all he has left now.
John is pulled out of his recollections by a sharp knock at the door of his office. The Beacon Hills police station has never been exactly state-of-the-art, but after several werewolf showdowns, they’ve been forced to downgrade a little. John’s office is therefore little more than a glorified closet, but it’s still his, and it’s highly unusual for people to interrupt him on his lunch break.
Ignoring the flash of annoyance that goes through him at the interruption, the annoyance that is made so much worse by the withdrawal headache pounding at his temples, John calls out, “Come in!”
If John was to think hard enough, he’s certain he could come up with people he’d like to see less than Rafael McCall, but when said man pokes his head around the door of John’s office and gives him an entirely fake smile, those other people aren’t at the front of John’s mind.
It would be inaccurate to say that John had never liked Rafael. Back when he and Melissa had first moved to Beacon Hills, they’d actually been quite good friends. It wasn’t until both Melissa and Claudia were pregnant that the cracks began to appear, and John is suddenly reminded of the exact incident he’d been thinking of just a few moments before.
After Claudia had greeted John with a kiss hello, John had gone to greet Melissa, only to catch Melissa looking at he and Claudia with a wistful look on her face.
“What’s wrong?” John asked her.
Melissa shrugged, her face instantly brightening. “Nothing. Just hormones, I guess.”
John didn’t know Melissa as well then as he does now, but he knew her well enough to know that she was lying through her teeth. Claudia, it seems, did as well, because she caught John’s eye and gave him a meaningful look, beckoning him towards the kitchen with the excuse of getting a glass of water.
“It’s Rafael,” she said in an undertone as soon as they were out of Melissa’s earshot, grabbing a glass from the cupboard. “They’re fighting again, and he’s been…distant, ever since he found out she was pregnant.”
John remembers his disbelief at this information, remembers expressing how strange it was that a man, let alone one he was friends with, could treat his pregnant wife so poorly.
As Rafael comes fully into his office, John remembers the day that Raphael finally left, the definitive end of a relationship that had been on the rocks for a long time. He’d still been in the throes of his grief over Claudia’s death at that point, and, not for the first time in the past five years, he wishes he had been there for Melissa during that hard time, the way he knows that Stiles had been there for Scott.
“What can I do for you, Rafael?” John says, doing his best to keep his voice level and professional.
Rafael shrugs. “Just wanted to catch up a little,” he says.
John barely suppresses a snort. Rafael is many things, but he is not subtle. God only knows how he became an FBI agent in the first place. “I think we’ve caught up quite enough,” John says, allowing a little bit of his dislike to creep into his voice. He justifies it to himself by remembering all the times Rafael had questioned his ability to do his job since he’d come back to town.
“Fair enough,” Rafael says. “I was talking to Stiles the other day –”
John sits up straighter in his chair, focusing every bit of his attention on Rafael.
“— and I was asking him about your drinking habits,” Rafael continues, not even appearing to notice John’s tension. “From his answer, I could tell that you haven’t gotten any better. I just wanted to let you know that I’m here if you need to talk.”
John can’t remember the last time he was this angry. Out of all the people in the world who have the right to rag on him for his drinking habits – and that list is, admittedly, long – Rafael McCall is not one of them.
“That’ll be a first,” John says, and watches the jab hit its mark. Rafael’s face falls, and John feels a rushing sense of satisfaction. “Nothing about my life is your business, Rafael. Now get out of my office. I have work to do.”
Rafael looks like he’s going to argue for a second, but John turns his patented ‘Sheriff look’ on him, and after a second he closes his mouth, gives a curt nod, and leaves the room.
As soon as his footsteps fade away, John drops his head into his hands. He’s not stupid, he knows that how he lives his life is neither normal nor productive, but it stings that it has gotten to a level where Rafael McCall, of all people, can see right through him.
There was a time when John could go completely teetotal, if he wanted. For Claudia’s entire pregnancy, in fact, he’d quit drinking in solidarity, a gesture which Rafael didn’t see fit to make for his own wife.
Then, though, there had been a solid end date to his abstinence. Seven months, and then he could drink again if he so chose, though the demands of new parenthood were so great that the bottle of champagne he’d opened just after Stiles’s birth turned out to be the only alcohol he’d tasted for a long time. Now, though, he’s not sure he could do it, because for an alcoholic (a word which, even now, John hates associating with himself), one drink can easily mean falling off the wagon entirely.
It’s not just the physical dependency that would be the problem, though the way he feels right now is certainly no picnic. No, it would be the emotional dependency that would be his biggest obstacle, because his drinking has always come from pain, and he’s not sure he remembers how to cope without it.
Not sure if he even remembers who he is without it.
***
Stiles feels like he’s been to tons of funerals in his short life – Kate Argent’s, of course, tends to stick in his memory, because there’s nothing like crouching uncomfortably behind a gravestone with your best friend and trying to catch a glimpse of the man that will make the next few months of your life a living hell, but Boyd’s, Erica’s, and Matt’s are all painful memories as well – but his mother’s was the first.
He remembers his father standing next to him, silent and buttoned up in an ill-fitting suit, at the calling hours.
They’d opted for a closed casket, probably because Stiles’s father didn’t want to traumatize him by forcing him to be in the room with his mother’s lifeless corpse on display for hours at a time.
Even with that small mercy, the calling hours are one of the most unpleasant memories that Stiles has. He remembers the people coming up to him in an endless line, asking about his well-being and offering the same three platitudes. It was as though the majority of the people who were there only came to feel good about themselves, and he remembers wanting nothing more than to scream and run away, but being too paralyzed by grief and disbelief to do so. Even seeing the people who were genuinely affected by his mother’s death – his father, their extended family, Mrs. McCall – didn’t help him. Looking at their faces only made him sadder, only served as a visceral reminder of what he’d lost.
All told, they were in the funeral home for eight hours that day, greeting an endless stream of well-wishers. Stiles’s mother had been popular, had lots of friends and acquaintances, had gone to PTA meetings and organized bake sales and thrown parties, and Stiles had never thought that would be a bad thing until the calling hours.
And even when they were over, even when Stiles and his father stumbled home hungry and with sore feet, their ordeal wasn’t over.
The Stilinskis had never been a particularly religious family, much to the dismay of Stiles’s grandparents. Nevertheless, the funeral took place in a church, one of the kind with high, sweeping ceilings and stained glass windows depicting scenes from the Gospels.
The result was that the service did nothing to capture the person that Stiles’s mother had been.
As the priest rambled on about God and heaven, Stiles just sat there to the right of his father, completely numb.
At least, until he felt a small hand intertwine with his.
Some of his classmates were scattered throughout the church, those whose parents were particularly close to Stiles’s mother, but Scott sat right next to him, because horrible as dealing with it was, Stiles thought that it would be immeasurably worse without his best friend.
Any other time, the two of them would be goofing off, made restless by the formality and dullness of the ceremony, but Scott, young as he was, seemed instinctively to know exactly what Stiles needed, and they sat through the rest of the ceremony like that, hands intertwined on the pew between them, Scott’s presence anchoring Stiles to reality.
Stiles has thought of that moment countless times in the years since it happened, and he thinks of it now, as Scott slams his locker shut and turns around to face him, eyes full of righteous anger.
“He said what?” Scott yelps. “That son of a bitch.”
That makes Stiles smile a little, because it’s so out of character for Scott to swear that it’s a little bit adorable. “I thought the same thing,” he says. “Why is your dad still here again?”
They turn away from Scott’s locker and begin to walk down the hall towards their next class.
“Who even knows?” Scott says. “I just wish he wasn’t.”
They walk in silence for a little while. Scott’s realized that he’s been distant and is making an effort to fix it, Stiles can tell, but things must still be weighing heavily on his mind. He’s started doing this thing where he goes off into his own little world sometimes, frowning and looking much older than his years.
Stiles gets it, he really does, but he’s also kind of freaking out himself. “What if he was right?” he asks quietly.
Scott seems to snap back into himself. “My dad?” he asks.
Stiles nods. “I’ve been so worried about what he eats, but I didn’t even think about the drinking,” he admits.
Scott stops in the middle of the hallway, uncaring about the fact that he’s blocking the foot traffic and earning dirty looks from his classmates. “He’ll be fine, Stiles,” he says sincerely. “He’s a smart guy, alright? I’m sure he doesn’t have a problem.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Stiles says, forcing a smile. Much as he loves Scott, much as Scott has matured over the course of the last few years, there are some things that Scott just doesn’t seem to be able to understand.
Scott seems to sense his hesitation as they start walking again. “Look, if something’s wrong, then we’ll figure something out, alright? You don’t have to do anything alone.”
That causes a real smile to steal over Stiles’s face. “Thanks, Scott,” he says.
He just hopes that it’ll be enough, if it comes to that.
***
The day that John’s life fell apart was remarkably similar to the day he had discovered Claudia was pregnant.
She had been having symptoms for weeks, little things like bruising more easily than usual and fatigue, and when she told John that morning that she was going to the doctor’s, he hadn’t really thought anything of it.
He came home to a dark house, which was unusual, because both Stiles and Claudia tended to get home before him. As he walked into the kitchen, though, he could see the silhouette of Claudia sitting there in the fading light, her hands folded in her lap, completely still.
That set all the alarm bells in John’s head off instantly. He switched on the light as he walked in, and saw that there were drying tear tracks down Claudia’s face, though her face was now still and composed.
“Claudia? What’s wrong?” he asked, moving to kneel next to her chair. He picked up her prone hands and brought them to his lips, the list of things that could possibly make Claudia, his lovely, vivacious Claudia, into this sad creature running through his mind at warp speed.
“It’s cancer,” was all she said, blunt and to the point, voice still thick with tears.
It had been a possibility that John had run through, of course, but absolutely nothing compared with the shock of hearing it out loud. It was as though someone had socked him straight in the stomach, as though the ground had dropped out beneath him.
“What’s the prognosis?” he asked through his tightening throat. Based on the look on Claudia’s face, he had an idea, but he couldn’t help but hope otherwise.
Claudia didn’t answer verbally, just dropped her eyes from his and shook her head slowly.
John didn’t think he could take much more of this, much more bad news, so instead of asking any more questions, he’d simply gathered Claudia into his arms and held her as she started to cry again, allowing his own tears to slip down his face.
Today, when John comes home to an empty house, it’s not so unusual. Stiles has practices for his various sports, and when he’s not there, he’s usually spending time with his friends.
As John comes into the house and immediately makes a beeline for the cabinet where he keeps the liquor, he feels devastatingly, crushingly lonely. The feeling is infinitely worse than his lingering withdrawal symptoms, but he pulls out a bottle of scotch anyways, thinking that he can drink away some part of his pain.
When he takes a closer look at the bottle, though, he realizes that there’s not very much left, probably less than a shot’s worth.
It’s Friday. He’d bought the bottle on Wednesday.
John barely notices when the bottle drops from his hand and falls to the floor, shattering at his feet. Rafael’s words from earlier run through his mind – I could tell that you haven’t gotten any better.
Rafael was right. He’d gotten worse, and he hasn’t really noticed the extent of it until just now.
Moving almost on autopilot, John sweeps up the shards of glass and wipes up the spilled scotch. His hands are shaking as he deposits the glass and paper towel in the trash, and he suddenly can’t stand being in this house, just a few feet away from the spot where Claudia had told him about her cancer, any longer.
He hasn’t even taken his jacket off yet, so he doesn’t pause as he sweeps out of the house and gets into his patrol car, starting it up and beginning to guide it slowly along a path that he’s taken countless times, but rarely on his own.
As he drives through the streets, he takes a moment to hope that luck will be on his side. If it turns out that no one’s home, he doesn’t know what he’ll do, can’t even fathom making it through the next few hours alone.
The pounding in his temples is relentless as he pulls into the driveway and walks up to the front door. His knock is surprisingly firm and crisp, given his still-shaking hands.
For a few seconds, nothing happens, and John’s breath begins to quicken, begins to get louder.
The door swings open, and a tired-looking Melissa McCall appears.
The sight of her doesn’t take his pain away, not by a long shot, but he can feel the panic receding, just a bit.
Melissa looks like she’s going to say something, ask him why he’s here, but it seems as though a single look at his face has awakened some sort of instinct in her, innate maybe, or cultivated in her years as a nurse and a mother, and she doesn’t say a word.
“I need help, Melissa,” John says.
She studies his face for a moment, and then nods, the ghost of a smile coming over her face as she steps away from the door and says, “Come in, then.”
John does.