Chapter Text
Places Stiles Has Lived in His Short Years on This Temporarily Green Earth:
- Beacon Hills, CA
- Grinnell, Iowa
- Amsterdam
- Sweden
- Beacon Hills, CA
- Cambridge, MA
- Austin, TX
- Boulder, CO
- Chicago, IL
Bags Stiles Took with Him to Chicago:
- A way too cool purple duffle bag
Knife fights he witnessed on the Blue Train on the way to Scotts' Apartment:
- "Hey! Hey! Hey! That's my seat! Back the fuck up off me!"
How Often That Happens According to Scott:
- "Like not all the time"
Scott, predictably, was 110% on board with Stiles coming to visit for an unspecified amount of time with unspecified reasons. Stiles invited himself via text two days ago and Scott replied ten minutes later with two dozen gasping monkey emojis.
That wasn't that weird though, because Scott would have had about the same response if their high school Lacrosse coach asked him for money. Frankly, Stiles was just curious to see how Scott had managed not to die after six years of living in America's Murder City. Like, Stiles was actually surprised when Scott stayed on the other side of the el car instead of throwing himself in the middle of the aforementioned knife fight.
Apparently, they'd both grown up some.
"I live in a different apartment than the last time you were here," Scott said, fiddling with keys outside. They were standing on the sidewalk in front of a shuttered salon, and Scott eventually found the keys to get through two security doors to get to his apartment upstairs. "This place is worse, if I'm telling the truth. But it's further from Easton and that's good. It's quieter."
It was quiet, way quieter than the campus apartments Scott had lived in before. March was still the dead of winter in Chicago and the snow falling through the streetlights made the strip mall across the street look like the middle of the snow globe.
He got them through the gates and lead Stiles into a second-floor apartment. "This is it!"
The apartment looked about how Stiles expected, based on their semiweekly Skype hangouts. The front door lead into a narrow hallway with a framed poster of the 1960 cover of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and way too many pairs of athletic shoes lined up against the wall. The hall led to a small living room with a leather couch and two velour armchairs. Scott still had the same busted up 30 inch TV he bought in high school. The kitchen was almost larger than the living room and was--of course--overcrowded with Stiles' favorite foods that Scott had no doubt been preparing and freezing over the past two weeks.
It wasn't a shithole, but it wasn't suited for more than one person at a time. Stiles mentally noted that his indefinite couch crashing would become super annoying within a few weeks. No big deal.
Of course, there weren't no surprises. Like the girl wearing bluetooth earbuds who was doing yoga in the middle of the living room. She saw them in the reflection of the window and turned around, pulling the earbuds out of her ears and smiling. "Oh, hi. You're Stiles right?"
Jesus, she was unbelievably gorgeous. If Stiles wasn't sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was Allison--the star of Scott's Instagram--he would be stumbling over himself trying to impress her. He hadn’t met Allison yet. She and Scott only started dating a few months ago, but if his rapid-fire snaps and constant coupled Instagram photos were to be believed, they were deeply in love.
"Yes, hi. I'm the guy who's going to steal your boyfriend for a bit. If you don't mind."
"Keep him as long as you like," Allison said easily. "I took the food out of the oven on time, so you can't make any more jokes about me going into a trance. I've gotta shower, but I'll be out in sec." She kissed Scott quickly and moved past him into the bedroom. Stiles resisted the urge to look in after her, just to see if the bedroom looked the same as it did over Skype.
"Sorry, I should have warned you she was here," Scott said. He was looking at Stiles in a measured way, like he was trying to figure out if this was going to cause a meltdown. A casual quick look with lowered eyebrows and just the smallest head tilt. The Scott McCall Cares look. That look was 50% of the reason it had taken him so long to land in Chicago.
But Stiles was three years removed from when that was the only look Scott gave him, so he could handle it.
"Hey, she's your girlfriend. If I cared when she visited you this whole 'me crashing on your couch' thing would be way awkward." Stiles dropped his duffle bag by the couch.
Being around Scott somehow brought back the explosions of good with-my-best-friend feelings that he got all the time around Scott. Even the weird loud way Scott shut kitchen cabinets brought back memories.
"Yeah. Well, actually I should tell you that Allison is actually moving in in a few months? Her roommate wanted her girlfriend to move in to their place, and she and I had been talking about moving in together. So it just kind of happened. But that won't be for months."
The look was back. God, Scott should be going into social work throwing around that look like he was. There was no place for a face like Scott's in law school.
"Yeah, I remember your seven text explanation. Don’t worry. You want to live with your girlfriend. Hell, I'd want to live with her too if she was my girlfriend. I didn't think I was moving in with you."
Over dinner (Hamburger helper casserole and cornbread hell yeah) he explained why he was in Chicago to Allison. It was the same speech he'd given his Dad and psychiatrist so it was getting to be old hat.
"Basically I do contract work. I figured out how to do a lot of coding and database work in college, so when smaller companies or non-profits have problems they can't figure out with their back of house I come in."
"I know what contracting is," Allison said lightly. Stiles looked at Scott to see if he should conclude that Allison hated him, but Scott subtly waved his hand in a way that said "don't worry."
"Right. Well, they hire me because I'm cheap as hell and I'm fine with that because I'm fast. And as a contractor, it doesn't matter where I live because as long as there's a need for my skills somewhere I can live there."
"I understand that, I'm just curious about why you left Colorado. Scott told me that before that you were in Austin and you were in Europe for a while. If I could get away with staying in Europe I would."
"I guess I couldn't get away with it. But anyway, because I can get away with living anywhere why wouldn't I? I'm young. I'm healthy. I'm just wasting my time if I put down my roots somewhere. If I land somewhere and it's amazing I'll know and I'll stay there and I won't be bored. Boulder was cool buy I got bored and didn't have a lease so boom. Visited my dad for a few weeks and now I'm here."
Allison made a "hmmmm" sound and helped herself to another piece of cornbread. Stiles and Scott exchanged looks again.
"Also, Stiles hasn't ever had deep dish pizza," Scott joked.
"Well we'll fix that, won't we?" Allison said. She switched the topic of conversation to the impending teachers strike and Stiles relaxed enough to check his phone. His dad had texted him again.
Was he fine? Did he have enough money? If he wanted a ticket home that could be arranged?
He should tell Dad the pizza thing. That would set his mind at ease no problem.
After a few weeks Stiles got a gig that is unbelievably, unreasonably and just ungodly far from Scott's apartment. He'd originally focused his search on downtown Chicago, aka the Loop—Stiles was getting savvy to the lingo. But shockingly the Chicago economy wasn't friendly to young contractors with Anthropology degrees. Allison introduced him to her boss at the refugee resource agency. That went absolutely nowhere except to make Stiles more sure that Allison didn't hate him.
"What do you do here?" Stiles asked her over coffee afterward. "I mean, I get the whole thing that you're getting these families integrated into American society. But what do you do, specifically."
"I'm the education liaison," Allison said, "I help families get their kids registered in schools. Over the summer almost all I did was find doctors to give the kids their back to school physicals. Right now my big focus is helping families with older children find high schools and middle schools for next year." She said it like it was absolutely nothing. She bought bottles of chocolate milk to give to the family she was going to meet. She was world's biggest badass.
Meanwhile, Scott was crushing it in Easton's law school. He volunteered at Allison's agency and was the president of a student organization dedicated to providing pro-bono services around Chicago.
Allison and Scott were exactly the kind of people Liberal Arts colleges hoped to spit out. Both of them were going straight to heaven.
Besides being unemployed, March was an excellent time to come to Chicago. All anyone could talk about was the record low temperatures and the snowstorms. Whenever Scott introduced him to one of his Law School friends as a friend from California they fixed him with uniform smug looks and asked "You liking this weather?"
As promised he called Dad once a day.
"It's seventy-five degrees here today," Dad said. Stiles could tell he was on speakerphone and Dad was driving in his cruiser. "Just beautiful. I'm thinking of pulling out the short sleeve uniform."
"Alright, just try not to flash too much arm, Dad. You could cause a car crash."
"What kind of coat do you have? Are you warm enough? It's colder there than it was in Boulder."
"Yeah dad, I bought a good coat before I left Colorado. My frontal lobe finally kicked in."
"Miracles happen every day. And boots?"
"My hiking boots are waterproof."
"Hiking boots?"
"Caitlin's doing.
"Ah. Have you had the chance to look up my friend in the Chicago PD? He might have a line on some work for you."
"No, right now I'm pretty much focused on not doing anything except find the perfect cup of coffee."
Which was pretty true. Everywhere he lived, his first order of business was finding a coffee shop to work in. It had to have excellent coffee and excellent bagels and not too many kids after 3:00. While Allison and Scott were at work he trudged through the streets, trying to find a coffee shop he could work in that wasn't terrible or Starbucks. He started his search by getting off random el stops and wandering around until a horrified Allison sat down with a map of the el system and circled stops that weren't "idiotic" to get off on.
Two weeks in he found a cafe called Jeanne's. The coffee was just ok but the bagels were soft and salty and unbelievable. With a mix of chalkboard signs and power outlets, Stiles could tell that it was a mom and pop that had be bought out but the owners wanted to keep the family vibe. Stiles hunkered down in a back corner and had the first not-terrible idea he'd had in weeks: isitcolderinantarcticorchicago.com. It took about twenty minutes to code and with a small ad in the corner Stiles could see it bringing in about 20 cents a year.
But it wasn't terrible.
The answer on the website was almost always Chicago, but Stiles still took the 20 minute train ride south to Jeanne's every day. He was there when Caitlin texted him that she'd given his name to a friend of her Dad's in HR at a company whose name she couldn't remember and they'd be calling him today. Most of Stiles' work had been with young startups with more money than they knew what to do with and not enough sense to figure out how to open a file. The kind of places that definitely do not have HR guys.
The company that Caitlin can't remember the name of turns out to be Slate, the largest kitchen appliance manufacturer in the Midwest. The HR guy tells Stiles that four times in their ten-minute conversation. Stiles launches into his spiel about what programs he can work with and where he's worked before but HR guy doesn't give a shit about that.
"We need someone to take all the onboarding work our employees have done and put it on the computer so we can look it up. Is that something you can do?"
It's something any high school junior should be able to do. After a few questions, Stiles figures out that the guys who were supposed to be doing it fucked it up. It's maybe a couple weeks work. Mind numbing work that a six-year-old could do but
Stiles quotes an hourly rate six dollars above what he usually charges. HR guy doesn't even pause before accepting it. He could have gone higher; corporations are just bigger and stupider startups. He asks about setting up a phone call with IT to get access on his laptop when HR guy cuts in.
"We need you here. You need to be in the office in front of the files. Is that going to be a problem?"
Which is super inideal but Stiles is only doing this crap job until a cooler one comes along so it's fine until he hangs up on HR guy and looks up where the Slate headquarters are.
And, once again, is unbelievably, unreasonably and just ungodly far from Scott's apartment.
"Oh, Allison went to high school near Lake Wind," Scott said, scrolling through Slate's Wikipedia page.
"No I didn't," Allison said from the kitchen, sounding affronted. "I lived in Briarwood. Lake Wind is a corporate village. Briarwood is a small city. We had a Borders."
As far as Stiles can tell there's not much of a difference. Briarwood is a forty-five minute train ride from the commuter train stops two blocks away. And Lake Wind is an hour away and starting Monday Stiles has to be in Lake Wood at 8:30 AM every day.
Which means that come Monday Stiles is standing in the fucking -20 F weather on a train platform at 7:11 AM full on praying that he is standing on the platform that goes away from the Loop instead of towards it. Scott got up early and insisted on coming to the platform with him.
"Remember all-nighters?" Scott yawned, "This feels like an all-nighter."
The sky was grey, lit up the way his bedroom at home got when he opened the door and let the hallway light do it's best to light up the room. They were standing under a heated lamp on the train platform, which seemed to be working exactly not at all. Most of the chill was being blocked by the crowd of commuters who looked annoyingly unexhausted, more resigned to their terrible schedules.
"Yeah, I obviously remember all-nighters." Stiles was too annoyed to be more clever. "I'm kind of the master of them if you remember. If there was an award for all-nighters I would be the king." Scott frowned, but a yawn tore through his "I am Scott McCall and I care about your wellbeing" face. "Dude, go home. You don't have class for another six hours."
"No way, I've got your back like I said. Riding new transit is tricky. During my freshman year I got on the wrong el line and ended up in Rosemont at like two in the morning! But uh, I probably won't do this again. It's awful out here."
It was, in fact, awful out here. At the moment Stiles was quietly freaking out over the fact that hew as going to have to do this every day until he found a better job. He wasn't even hurting for money that bad, but the past few weeks had involved way too much time for Stiles to be alone and let his thoughts spin out. Spinning Stiles led to dangerous places if he didn't find something to wedge in the gears and stop them.
"Any chance I'll end up in Rosemont? That indoor skydiving place has been calling my name." Stiles asked.
Scott shook his head. He reached into his jacket and provided a paper copy of the Metra schedule, which he had already given Stiles two of. "Nah, worse. If you fall asleep on this train you'll end up in Wisconsin, so stay sharp. I haven't been on the Metra too much, but Allison takes it all the time to visit her dad. She said the best thing to do is find a seat on the upper deck because those are single passenger seats. But I don't think it really matters if you need to sit next to someone, most people are pretty cool."
Six years of living in one of the most violent cities in America hadn't lessened Scott's love affair with humanity in any way. It was a miracle Scott hadn't been mugged more than those two times. When Scott decided to go to Easton for college, Stiles' dad had sat him down to talk about city living. "Chicago isn't Beacon Hills," Dad had said, "You'll have to be prepared for a different chance of violence as you go about your day to day life."
Which was pretty hilarious, considering all the shit they went through in high school.
Still, Scott believed everyone was a potential friend, especially random 7:14 AM Metra passengers. He threw a house party a few days ago for his fellow law students and strung up streamers like he was welcoming them back from war. Scott slung his arm around anyone near him and asked about their pets like it wasn't obvious that they were all high-strung fucking assholes who monologued about how they were going to shake up the system with their mediocre LSAT scores and moxie.
Allison parked herself in the kitchen until the party ended. She pretended to text, but Stiles could see she was listening to everyone around them. "Has he always been like this?" she asked, gesturing towards where Scott was showing a girl in a blazer how to dab.
"He used to be worse," Stiles said, even though it wasn't true. It seemed like the more bad people Scott encountered the more blind faith he threw onto the world.
"Yeah, maybe I'll meet my future wife," Stiles said. Scott grinned. "Maybe I'll meet my new best friend, right here today on this train."
"Well don't meet your new best friend, okay?" Scott said. The whistle blew, and the people on the platform started inching towards the yellow line at the edge of the platform. "If you see anyone who looks like they're going to be your new best friend, walk the other way."
The train squealed into the platform and came to a noisy stop. Stiles felt his jacket pockets for his phone and wallet, and felt along the latches of his laptop bag to make sure it was closed.
Scott asked for a hug and Stiles responded by giving him the finger and forcing himself to join the crowd boarding the train. The bodies around him pushed at this shoulders and Stiles followed the crowd into a full train car. Every seat was full; two people to a seat and so were the single seats on the upper deck. How could the train be so full at 7:14 AM in the morning? Allison said he'd have his pick of seats, and could put his backpack down to stop someone from sitting next to him. Did everyone in the world work for Slate? Jesus. He followed a guy with a military haircut through a narrow door that connected to another train car. The next car was just as packed, but Stiles could see a few openings in the rows and rows of seats. The guy in front of him sat down right away next to a woman talking on her phone quietly in Polish—Stiles took a minute to be happy that he still recognized Polish.
Stiles walked through the next car and saw that the only available seat was a window seat next to a guy with curly hair and white headphones. He tried to walk to the next car but the door connecting to two cars was locked For a minute Stiles stood in the entryway of the train car and considered just standing here until the train got to Lake Wood. Or Wisconsin. But that would be weird.
He went back the only available seat next to a curly haired guy. He was about Stiles' age, and while young white men were far more likely to be serial killers than the general population, like all people they were relatively unlikely to engage in random acts of public violence. So Stiles walked up to him and subtly cleared his throat. The guy was sitting in the aisle seat, wearing earbuds, looking at his phone, and his blue backpack was on the seat next to him. The only way it could be more clear that a seatmate was unwelcome was if he physically removed the window seat from the train.
And, judging by the glare he was shooting Stiles, that option hadn't been ruled out entirely. Stiles felt for the latches on his bag and fought the urge around to see if another seat had mysteriously become available.
"Can I sit here?"
The guy pulled out one earbud, "What?" he asked.
"Can I sit here?" Stiles repeated. The guy didn't move, and Stiles mouth ran off without him. "You know, common courtesy, shared space. All that."
He rolled his eyes, but stood up, taking his backpack with him and stepped back. It took Stiles a minute to realize he was waiting for Stiles to get into the window seat. Stiles grinned at him and sat down before he changed his mind. "Whoa, the window seat. People pay extra for this on airplanes and you just gave it up." The guy sat back down in the aisle seat and put his earbuds back in.
Stiles felt for his phone and wallet in his jacket, and then turned his attention out the window. They were still in "Chicago proper", as Allison liked to call it, but the buildings were getting lower and more spaced out. The train stopped a twice before a conductor came to the train car called, “New riders, new riders!” and stopped in front of Stiles, who was, in fact, a new rider.
It took him forever to get his wallet open, and then he didn't give the conductor enough money. The whole thing probably took two seconds but seemed to last forever, especially with the way the guy next to him kept looking at Stiles' hands. Instead of going through the song and dance of buying a ticket at 7:18 AM on a moving train, he showed the conductor a laminated card which he then clipped into the little slot on the back of the seat in front of him. Stiles clipped his paper ticket into the spot next to that.
"Where do I get one of those?"
"At the station," the guy said.
"Like any station? Do they come laminated? Because that looks totally official. The station I was at this morning was closed, like doors locked and I could see that there was a coffee shop inside so it was basically torture."
"Is this your first time on the train?" he asked, sounding exhausted with Stiles in a way that took most people an hour to reach.
"Oh drat, I was trying to seem seasoned"
Sitting next to him the way they were, Stiles couldn't see the guy's face without turning to look at him like a creep, but Stiles could tell he was at least a little amused "The one in Lake Wood will be open. This is a monthly pass. It pays for itself if you ride more than 30 times a month. So if you're taking it every day you should get it."
"Now why didn't Scott tell me about that. That is useful information. You provide useful information."
The guy didn't respond, just turned up the sound in his headphones loud enough that Stiles could hear that it was someone talking, he wasn’t even listening to music.
After another twenty minutes, his seatmate got off at the Briarwood stop. Stiles looked out the window, noting the blocks and blocks of squat yellow brick houses. Ten minutes later Stiles hustled off the train at the Lake Wood stop. The ticket station was open, but Stiles figured he was not going to be around long enough to need a monthly pass. Buying one would be bad luck.
Slate the building turned out not to be a building. It was an entire gated campus two blocks away from the train stop. Stiles followed the crowd of commuters into the building and immediately noticed hat his green button up and slacks was still way underdressed.
The workday was nothing but getting lost and taking a thousand years to find who his supervisor was supposed to be. Between being lost as shit and watching stupid orientation videos Stiles doesn't see the files he was supposed to do data entry for until 3:00 PM.
His supervisor was a dude named Ellison in his 50's who hadn't seemed to notice that he has an entry level position in HR. "No trouble for you, right?" he asked, gesturing to the filing cabinets that are full to the brim with paperwork.
"It's all of these?" Stiles asked He'd gotten into the employee database and there was no record of anyone completed any trainings for the last seven years.
"No problem for you," Ellison said confidently.
"This is going to take months," Stiles said, "You should hire more people."
"No rush," Ellison said, "We rather not have too many cooks to mess it up again."
"Whoever you had doing this before was totally negligent. You can't really screw up data entry unless you don't do it. If you just hire two more people I can supervise it and we'll get it done way faster."
"No rush," Ellison repeated.
So the Slate job is total bullshit but in the two hours Stiles spent setting up the spreadsheets he'll need he doesn't get into a single thinking spiral. His psychiatrist and Dad would be over the moon about it. So after sending Malia a few snaps about his new life as a corporate stooge, he leaves with the satisfaction of a job well fucking done. He buys a monthly pass at the train station on his way home.
At the very least train guy will be impressed by how competent he now is at riding the Metra.