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Days like this are why Stiles became an agent.
It’s 11am on a Monday morning and he’s been awake since eight the day before, strapped into his kevlar for too long, skin itching beneath the his sour second-day shirt. The sunlight hurts his eyes after another sleepless night – the last one until the next one. He rolls his shoulders and squints, walks down an alley lined with crown vics and tinted-window Rovers.
They caught the bad guy. Got the green light two days back and laid out the plan for a multi-state early morning wakeup call, a SWAT raid while this one was still sacked out on the couch after falling asleep in front of the TV, popcorn spilled at his feet. One less pedo – one of many, today – trawling the internet.
He hasn’t taken a vacation in three years, ever since this case dropped right into his lap and he landed his first job as lead agent. Hell, he hasn’t taken a real vacation since just after Quantico, when he and Scott finally did the cross-country roadtrip they’d been threatening since they were eleven – nothing but home for the holidays and work, work, work.
His knee pops now when he gets out of bed in the morning, and he thinks he’s getting carpal tunnel from too many years spent hunched over his laptop because some days he can’t shake the sore out of his wrists. The East Coast winters give his joints something to cry about, never quite healed from old injuries. He thinks about going home, where it never gets below 35, but what is there to go home to? Everyone’s gone on to live their lives elsewhere, and they don’t talk much anymore, anyway. Ever since his dad retired, he’s come out for holidays and visits in the breaks between cases, when they happen.
Stiles weaves his fingers together and tries to stretch the knots out of his back. He sighs, scrubbing a hand through his greasy hair, starting when an arm lands across his shoulders.
“Stilinski,” Johnson grins, broad and smarmy. “Good work in there.”
Stiles nods. “I think we got him, J.”
“No way in hell he’s walking free,” Johnson agrees. “Broward says you oughta go home. Take a break. You earned it.”
“Broward’s full of shit,” Stiles says. He pulls a crumpled pack of Marlboros from his back pocket, lights one – a shitty grad school habit that finds new life every time he gets toward the end of a big case like this one.
“He said you’d say that. Said you should take a vacation too, while you’re at it.”
Stiles snorts. “Like I can trust the DoJ to pull together a case like this all on their own. Did you see who they assigned?”
“Not fucking Greenburg again?” Stiles nods, taking a drag, and Johnson sighs. “Welp, maybe you’re right. We’ve got enough to put this guy away until the second coming, but you can’t trust that fucker to find his dick with two hands and a map.”
“Yeah,” Stiles mumbles around his cigarette. He’s scrubbing a hand through his filthy hair, blinking red, exhausted eyes, facing a mountain of paperwork but fiercely satisfied, because he knows full well what happens to sick fuckers in prison, when his phone buzzes. “Sorry man, gotta get this.”
It’s a text from his dad. Look what the cat dragged in, it says, and there’s a picture. He swipes left, and there’s Derek Hale, that same stupid deer-in-the-headlights expression on his face, his beard grown out and a little gray. He’s sitting on the Sheriff’s front porch - former Sheriff, Stiles reminds himself - from the looks of it, both hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. For all that he looks almost exactly the same, he looks good: healthy, rested, handsome as ever. His eyes are still that same pale green – but of course they are; they wouldn’t have changed.
Stiles stops dead in his tracks – it’s not too difficult; his feet already feel like lead – and calls his boss. He gets the machine.
“Hey Jerry,” he says, starting back toward his car. “Stilinski. We got him. I think I’m going to take you up on that vacation offer once the paperwork’s through. Think it’s my turn to visit the old man. Talk soon.”