Chapter Text
Stiles is one month into his second semester of college when the dreams start.
If he’s going to be honest, he’s sort of amazed he made it that far without any sort of supernatural shenanigans happening. But San Francisco is a very different place from Beacon Hills. Supernatural creatures tend to avoid big cities, everyone had said, but he hadn’t realized that it was actually true until he got there. Until his third week of classes, when he realized that he really hadn’t seen another non-human the entire time.
Beacon Hills is a beacon, most people agree, and he thinks some of the people and creatures that have come there have been drawn by more than his reputation. It’s a prime piece of territory, Derek has always said, something about the way the ley lines intersect. But with his father and Chris Argent there to look after things while he’s gone, he’s not worried.
Of course, things in the larger hunting community are nowhere near as quiet. He’d stirred up one hell of a wasp’s nest when he had informed everyone about what had happened at the prison in Arizona. He didn’t have a front seat to the uproar, but he got information from Chris and followed along with interest. He knew that a bunch of hunters – and not just ones he was already friends with, like Chris and Mikael, but bigshots from other families like the Stoddards and the Nazarios – went to Arizona to demand answers.
He wasn’t surprised to hear that the Gutierrez family had managed to at least partly squirm free. The youngest brother, Hector, had vanished. Francisco had promptly blamed everything on him, saying that Hector had found out what Liliana did and killed her without consulting anyone else, and he had only lied about Rick Santos’ alibi to take suspicion off his brother. It still wasn’t the sort of answer anybody was in love with, but it was a far cry from the entire family conspiring to kill Liliana and frame her husband.
Even so, they had been blacklisted. Nobody wanted to work with them anymore. They were staying on their own territory and keeping their heads down. A smart move.
A lot of people were asking questions about the prisons, too, and Chris and Julien were lobbying hard to get some sort of oversight in place, but so far it wasn’t getting them much of anywhere. They didn’t quite have the firepower they would need to just raid them, even if they knew where they were, and Julien pointed out that it was likely that a number of the inmates truly did deserve to be incarcerated.
There had been a number of small skirmishes, hunters fighting with each other, some assholes who killed a bunch of peaceful werewolves just to make a point, and an enormous argument about whether the alpha pack hunters were even necessary anymore, now that they had it on good authority that the trials being given were fair. Stiles keeps his nose out of it as much as possible. Nobody wants to hear his opinions, and Chris is handling it, with some help. He just gets the details and keeps his app with all the hunter information as up to date as possible. Lines are being drawn – not metaphorically, but territory lines, and supernatural creatures are learning where it’s safe for them to live and where it isn’t, who can be trusted and can’t.
The interesting thing about that – and Stiles’ original intentions – is that as werewolves and other creatures learn which hunters can be trusted, they form more alliances, solidifying the backbone of what’s currently the resistance. Stiles doesn’t think they’re going to stay the resistance very long. Momentum is on their side. A lot of the younger hunters, people who haven’t spent the last fifty years living by these rules, are forming their own splinter groups in places like Oregon or Texas, places where the ‘establishment’ hunters can’t be trusted to be fair. They’re actively seeking out the local werewolves to make an offer of an alliance on good faith.
But as they get bolder and that backbone grows, the older hunters are getting louder and angrier and more violent.
“It’s kind of like the fight for gay rights,” Stiles said to Derek absently while he updated the app.
“Yeah, except we can’t just wait for all the old bigots to die,” Derek grumbled in response.
Stiles is amused, but can’t help but agree. There are times when it feels like everything has been doused in gunpowder and gasoline, and all it’s going to take is one spark, and then there’s going to be a bloodbath.
But he doesn’t dwell on it, mostly because he simply doesn’t have time. He doesn’t have ringside seats, so he gets occasionally emails and stays up to date but doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. He goes home one weekend every month, and one time in early November he has to make an emergency trip home to soothe the temper of some distraught banshees, but other than that, he’s able to devote his attention to his schoolwork. It’s a good thing, too. He purposefully loaded himself up with easy, gen-ed credits for his first semester, aside from his Intro to Criminology class. He has a computer science class, a history course which focuses around things he already knows, Geology 101, and he’s continuing in Spanish.
The quiet persisted over the winter break, and he’s sort of wondering if his father broke some kneecaps and made some threats about what would happen if anyone disturbed Stiles’ holiday at home. He picks up some work at the station to keep himself busy. Scott, Boyd, and Mac are working as well.
Christmas itself is an insane gathering. Derek wants to see Cora, and Justin has absolutely no objection to spending the holiday with someone who knows how to cook, so the entire alpha pack crashes at the den. Jackson is back from his first semester in Denver and bragging about how he killed at lacrosse. There are so many people around that even Stiles can’t keep track of it all, and he has a great vacation.
Since things are going reasonably well, his second semester is looking a little more difficult than the first. More Spanish, and a second semester of geology – “What? Rocks are interesting!” Stiles protested when his father gave him a funny look – plus Intro to Sociology, a Poli-Sci course, and another criminology course called ‘crime and economics’. He wanted to take Psych 101, but Derek growled at him when he pitched the idea of an eighteen-credit semester. He’ll do it next year.
He’s still not sure what the point of any of this is, since he doesn’t know what he’ll do with a degree in criminal justice once he’s back in Beacon Hills, but, well. Everyone thinks he should do it, and he’s enjoying the shit out of higher education.
Scott and Danny both tried out for, and made, the lacrosse teams of their respective schools. Stiles thought about it, but decided to pass on it. He enjoys lacrosse, and he wants to stay physically active, but he just won’t have time. There are other things that are more important to him, and one of them is making sure he’s available to the others. They all have their own adjustments to make.
Lydia is, for once, having to work at her classes. She’s at the library more than she’s at the temporary den. Danny has the longest commute, and it tires him out, though he never complains about it. Scott has trouble controlling his powers when he and Allison are being crowded on public transportation. Boyd meets a cute girl who’s clearly into him, but doesn’t know how to ask her out and work around the ‘werewolf’ issues. Mac is starving half the time because her class schedule lands her on campus at lunch time every day and dinner three times a week, and their vegetarian options suck.
But these are, for Stiles and his pack, mundane issues. Each one is dealt with, in turn, and things settle into patterns and contentment.
He should have known it wasn’t going to last.
The dream starts like most of his dreams, with one key difference: he’s aware that he’s dreaming. Most of the time when that happens, he wakes right up, but this time he doesn’t. He’s standing in front of a large metal gate that’s propped open. Behind it is a grandly built house that he instantly recognizes, even though he’s only seen it in photographs. The Hale house, before it burned down.
He approaches it cautiously, because even when dreaming, he’s careful nowadays. Nobody answers when he knocks on the front door, but he knows that he’s meant to go inside, so he pushes open the door. “Hello? Anybody home?” he calls out, and hears a voice from the interior.
“This way,” the voice says, and it’s Peter Hale’s voice. He would recognize it anywhere. It’s a little funny, he thinks, because really he only exchanged a handful or two of sentences with the man. But everything about the hour or so he spent in Peter’s presence is etched into his memory in indelible ink.
It’s a little unusual, for a dream about Peter. Those usually involve a lot of blood and screaming and being wedged into small places, and they end when Derek shakes him awake. This is different, this is just Peter sitting Indian-style on the floor of the Hale house, polished and unburned but empty. The walls are cream and the floor hardwood, but there’s no furniture, no curtains, nothing to show that it’s being lived in.
Peter himself looks different from the last time Stiles saw him, but that makes sense. That Peter had been at death’s doorstep, burned and bruised and poisoned. This is Peter as he was in life, for those few brief days after he healed himself and before he was captured. His dark brown hair is slicked back, and he’s dressed in a white V-neck and black pants, with bare feet.
“Stiles,” he says, as Stiles comes into the room. “I need a favor.”
Stiles sits down across from him. What the hell, right? It’s just a dream. “That’s a little unusual, coming from you.”
“Yes, well. Since you thoughtfully shuffled me free from this mortal coil, my options are limited.” Peter doesn’t sound angry, though. Just practical. “My daughter is in trouble, Stiles, and I need to do something.”
Stiles chokes a little. He’s aware that Peter had had children – Derek mentioned a son at one point – but he thought they had been killed in the fire. Then again, if Cora had escaped, he supposes it’s possible that someone else had as well. But how would Peter know that? He’s been dead for years at this point. Then he realizes he’s trying to apply logic to a conversation he’s having in a dream with a dead man, and lets it go. “Your daughter?”
Peter nods, unperturbed by Stiles’ reaction. “My daughter,” he says again. “She’s in trouble. And you’re going to help me help her.”
“Okay, hold the phone, back up the truck,” Stiles says, and Peter arches an eyebrow, clearly amused. “Why don’t you start at the beginning. Your daughter. She’s alive? Survived the fire?”
“She wasn’t in the fire,” Peter says. “Let me start at the beginning. I was, shall we say, somewhat imprudent in my relationships when I was younger. When I was twenty-two, a girlfriend of mine became pregnant. She gave birth to a baby girl, and named her Malia. But she and I were not . . . close.”
“You barely knew her, didn’t you,” Stiles says, trying not to laugh, thinking of Peter being a stupid young adult like the rest of them.
“As you say,” Peter says, his lips quirking in a smile. “We met at a party, a wolf gathering of sorts. For her own reasons, she chose to give birth to the child, but did not want to raise her. I agreed to support the child financially, but at that time in my life had no interest in being a father. So she was adopted to a family in Beacon Hills, where I could keep an eye on her. I became casual friends with her adoptive parents and I visited Malia occasionally. Many years after that, I married and had a son of my own. The Tate family moved out of Beacon Hills when Malia was six. I kept in touch, but we weren’t close. I hadn’t seen Malia in over three years at the time of the fire, and she never knew I was her father. Her mother always called me a family friend.”
“Okay,” Stiles says, trying to keep all of this straight. “So how do you know Malia is in trouble? I mean . . . you’re dead. Right?”
“I am indeed,” Peter says. “Six feet under.”
“More like ten. We didn’t want anything digging you up.”
“Well, thank you for that,” Peter says. “I confess that I don’t know very much about what’s happening with Malia. As far as my limited knowledge goes, someone is using her blood to try to summon me. That’s the only reason why I would know anything was happening with her at all.”
“Since you’re dead,” Stiles says. He wants to be very firm on this.
Peter gives him an amused glance. “Yes. But there are types of blood and spirit magic that can reach across the lines between realms. How anyone would have even known I had a daughter is a matter of some debate, but clearly someone has discovered our relationship.”
“Okay. And . . .?”
“And, nothing,” Peter says. “That’s all I know.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to know more about what’s happening with Malia or who’s doing the magic or anything like that,” Stiles says, and then waves a hand to indicate their surroundings. “But why this? Why are you here, talking to me?”
“Ah,” Peter says. “It’s an intriguing question, isn’t it?” He, too, glances at the house they’re sitting in. “Bringing someone back from the dead, even in spirit, is quite difficult and requires a large amount of juice. My guess is that I got halfway and then got stuck. But I have enough of a metaphysical connection to you to speak to you, since you’re the one who took the alpha power from me.”
“That’s . . . actually kind of fascinating,” Stiles says despite himself. “But, uh. I can’t exactly help summon you.”
“No, but you can check on my daughter and see what sort of trouble she’s in, and who’s trying to summon me, et cetera,” Peter says. “I can give you the information that you would need to track her down.”
“Uh, sure, okay,” Stiles says. He pushes a hand through his hair. “Are you – are you actually Peter Hale?”
Peter looks down at his hands, then arches his eyebrows at Stiles.
“No, I mean, this is just some fucked up dream I’m having, right?” Stiles says. “I’ve probably had stranger ones. That’s not the point. I mean, you’re not actually him. Not the Peter who – ” His voice catches. Up until this moment, he hadn’t thought about the things Peter Hale had done.
“There’s nothing I can do to hurt you here, Stiles,” Peter says, and he sounds amused, which frankly pisses Stiles off. “I’m dead, remember?”
“And yet,” Stiles says, gesturing. “I mean, why should I help you?”
“Don’t,” Peter says. “You have no reason to. Help Malia. She’s sixteen and wherever she is, whatever’s happening to her, she’s probably frightened. Don’t make her suffer for my sins, Stiles.” His face is utterly serious. “Please.”
“Jesus, fine,” Stiles says, and then, without warning, he’s awake. Staring up at the dark ceiling of the bedroom in their apartment. Derek’s asleep in his human form, sprawled out next to him. There are other wolves curled up nearby. He blinks and looks around. None of them are awake, so he clearly wasn’t moving a lot or crying out in his sleep.
Stiles shakes his head. Sometimes his dreams seem very clear when he wakes up, but if he goes back to sleep, they’re vague memories in the morning. That’s undoubtedly what’s going to happen this time. He closes his eyes, rolls onto his side, and lets himself relax. In the morning, he probably won’t even remember this.
~ ~ ~ ~
In the morning, everything about the dream with Peter is as clear as the conversation he had with Boyd about his girlfriend that he had the night before. As clear as going over the grocery list with Allison, since it was her turn to go to the store. It doesn’t feel like a dream at all.
Stiles thinks about mentioning it to someone, but changes his mind. He’s had strange and vivid dreams before; the Lunesta can do weird things to his brain while he’s asleep. Besides, there are some basic things he can verify. Like the birth of a girl named Malia in Beacon Hills, when Peter was in his early twenties. There’s no way he could have known that name on his own, so that would be a simple way to confirm it.
So he sets off to school with that in mind. Of course, first he has a political science lecture to attend. Then a free hour which he spends doing the reading for his class after lunch, which is the criminology course. He goes straight from there to geology, and by then it’s four PM and he’s hopping on the bus to go back to the apartment. He puts his earbuds in and does some of his Spanish homework while he rides along.
He makes a salad and cooks hamburgers on the broiler (he misses his grill like crazy sometimes). He makes some frozen French fries and then sits down with the reading he needs to do for his classes the next day and somewhere in there he falls asleep.
Almost immediately, he’s back in the Hale house, and Peter is right where he left him, looking expectant. “Well?” he asks.
“Well, what?” Stiles asks, and Peter just looks at him. “Jesus, Peter. I have a life now. I have school and shit. I can’t just drop everything and – ”
Peter’s on his feet, one hand twisting into the fabric of Stiles’ T-shirt and dragging him close. “I asked you to do one simple thing for me, Stiles, and I expect it to be done.”
Stiles slams his forehead into the bridge of Peter’s nose, and the dead man lets go with a stifled yelp, staggering back a few steps.
“Let’s set some ground rules here,” Stiles says, as Peter rubs a hand against his face. “Rule number one: I still have no idea whether or not you’re really here, or if this is all some really bizarre dream, so it takes a somewhat lower precedence to me than my real life. I’ve fought kind of hard to have that life, and I’m not giving it up, least of all for you.
“Rule number two: I’m not some sixteen-year-old klutz that you can terrify into submission anymore. I’ve faced down alphas and warlocks and a lot of different nasties. You’re still the monster under my bed, but don’t think that I’m going to stand around and let you do whatever the fuck you want.
“Rule number three: I suspect, though I haven’t confirmed yet, that since this is my mind and my dream, I could probably lock you in a closet and force myself to wake up. So you might want to phrase things a little more politely when you deal with me. Is all that fucking clear, you asshole?”
Peter looks at him with a gleam in his eyes. “You do make an excellent alpha, Stiles. It seems I was right about that.”
Peter’s baiting him and Stiles knows it, so as much as he aches to have an answer to that old question of his, if Peter had known he would be the alpha, he ignores it. “When I wake up, I’ll confirm that your daughter even exists,” he says, “and then I’ll see what I can find out about her current situation. Okay?”
“I suppose it will have to be,” Peter says, and Stiles again wakes up with a start.
“You okay?” Derek asks, glancing over at him.
“Yeah.” Stiles pushes a hand through his hair. He’s on the sofa with a book lying on his chest. “Weird dream. How long was I asleep?”
“Not long. Twenty minutes or so.” Derek sits down by his feet and rubs absently at Stiles’ calf. “It’s getting late, though. I’ll probably turn in soon.”
“I have a few things I want to do first,” Stiles says, and Derek nods and heads into the bedroom. Stiles hauls himself off the sofa and sits down in the study with his laptop. Lydia is there, muttering about coefficients, and Isaac is on his own laptop writing an essay for his history class, but they’re the only ones there.
He finds with some unease that he has less research to do than he would have thought. He knows Malia’s last name – Tate – and her date of birth, even though he can’t recall Peter having told him the latter. The answers are just in his head, like something he’s known all along. He opens up the website for the Beacon Hills Tribune and goes back to the birth announcements for that month and year, and there she is. Malia Tate. Since she was adopted out immediately, apparently her birth was listed under the last name of her adoptive parents.
“Huh,” he says, mostly to himself. The others glance at him but assume he’s working on homework, and don’t bother him.
He types her name into a Google search, not really expecting to find anything. He’s certainly not expecting to find out that she’s been missing for the last eight years, after a car accident that killed her mother and sister. He rubs a hand over his head, wondering where she’s been for the last eight years, and how it’s related to what’s going on now.
The last thing he wants is to have to talk to dream!Peter again, so he takes a hot shower, drinks some green tea, and takes one of his Lunesta before he goes to bed. His sleep is blessedly normal.
In the morning, he shoots off an e-mail to his father. A car accident like that is something he thinks his father will remember. He sends out feelers to a number of his other contacts, wanting to know of any magical disturbances or warlocks he should be aware of. Then he leaves for school. He still hasn’t talked to the others about Peter – if it really is Peter – suddenly sharing headspace with him. That’s going to be a difficult conversation, and he doesn’t want to rush into it. Frankly, he might not tell anyone besides Derek. He hates letting the others see him when he’s vulnerable, though he’s gotten used to it over the years.
It’s his short day. Spanish is an hour-long class three times a week, from ten to eleven. After that he has his sociology course from eleven to twelve. Then he usually grabs lunch on campus before heading back to the apartment. He likes having the three short days and two long ones. It works well with what he needs to do for the pack.
This time, instead of going straight home, he finds a quiet place on campus where he won’t bother anyone and steels his nerves to call Dr. Deaton. “Stiles, what can I do for you?” the Druid asks, when he gets on the line.
“Have you got time for some weird questions about magic?” Stiles asks.
“My next patient isn’t for another twenty minutes. What’s on your mind?”
“Is it possible to call back a spirit from the great beyond?”
“A dead person, you mean?” Deaton asks. “It’s . . . possible. It’s also extremely difficult. It requires a very exact set of circumstances.”
“Could one of those circumstances involve using that person’s offspring?”
“Yes, that would be one of the simplest ways to do it,” Deaton says. “To use that person’s blood to do a summoning spell. Such a thing might be able to reach into the hereafter, if the sorcerer was strong enough. I suppose I don’t need to tell you that this would be very, very dark magic. Even most warlocks would frown upon it.”
“Why? I mean, why is it worse than your average black magic?” Stiles asks.
“It’s never a good idea to start poking holes in the boundary between one world and the next,” Deaton says. “You never know what might happen.”
“You’re not wrong there,” Stiles mutters. “Let’s say that whoever did this spell only got about halfway there. Would that produce like . . . a ghost? Sort of a spirit wandering around?”
“It could.” Deaton sounds somewhat dubious. “You know as well as I do that the results of magic can be very unpredictable when done improperly. Stiles, why are you asking me these questions? Who, precisely, are you worried about having been called back from the dead?”
Stiles grimaces. “This is in confidence, okay?” he says, although he knows he really doesn’t need to. Deaton keeps his own counsel, for his own reasons, because he’s sort of a supernatural Switzerland. He doesn’t take sides. “I had a dream about Peter. He said someone was trying to call him back, but they didn’t give it enough juice, so now he’s like a shade, and he can only communicate with me because I took the alpha power from him. It gives us a metaphysical connection.”
“Well, that’s all accurate enough,” Deaton says, “but forgive me for saying so, you are known to have strange dreams.”
“Yeah. But he said some things . . . things I couldn’t have known. That turned out to be true. About someone using his daughter to call him back. I didn’t even know he had a daughter.”
“Neither did I,” Deaton said. “Certainly not one still living herself. Given that, then yes, Stiles, it’s quite possible that the Peter you encountered in your dream was the soul of the actual Peter Hale.”
“Great.” Stiles sighs. “I think I was really hoping that the answer would be ‘nope, you’ve just permanently lost your marbles. It was bound to happen sooner or later . . .’” He rakes a hand through his hair. “So what’s the fix for this, doc?”
“Well, a standard exorcism should do the trick,” Deaton says.
“Awesome,” Stiles says. “I always wanted to be exorcised. I always wake up feeling like something’s missing in my life and thinking ‘you know what would be awesome? If I could be fucking exorcised’.”
Deaton doesn’t respond to Stiles’ melodrama. “I’m not very familiar with the process myself, and it isn’t the kind of thing you want to mess around with. Let me reach out to some people I know. I should be able to get some information for you. Don’t worry, I’ll keep your little . . . problem . . . a secret for now.”
“Thanks,” Stiles says. “In the meantime, I have to figure out who’s calling him back and why, so I’ll be keeping busy, trust me.”
They say their goodbyes and Stiles hangs up. He thinks about his next move and texts Derek. ‘you home or at your gallery?’
‘home,’ Derek replies a few minutes later. That’s good. He doesn’t have to wait for Mac; she has an evening class on Wednesdays and usually just kills time on campus until dinner. He has the Jeep today, so he gets in and drives home. As he had expected, the apartment is empty except for Derek. Most of the others will be at their classes all day. Erica is the lone exception, and she had a photo shoot.
“Hey,” he says, going into the room they’ve designated Derek’s studio, where he’s spattered with paint, and nestles right into a one-armed hug. “I’m going to make some banana bread, since the last of the bunch is pretty black and gross now. Clean up and then come keep me company?”
“Sure,” Derek says, wiping his hands on a cloth.
Stiles goes out to the kitchen and starts taking his mood out on some innocent, overripe bananas. He’s not a huge fan of banana bread, actually, but several members of the pack love it, and it makes a good, portable breakfast. He’s getting the rest of the ingredients together when Derek comes down the hallway from the next apartment, into the kitchen. “How were your classes?” he asks, hauling himself up to sit on the counter next to Stiles.
“Okay. Nothing exciting today.” Stiles starts measuring out butter and brown sugar. He knows that Derek can read his mood, that Derek is trying to give him space, but he feels strangely calm about this. He suspects it hasn’t sunk in yet, that the next time he’s confronted with dream!Peter as actual!Peter, he might have a freak out. But he’ll cross that bridge when he gets to it. “I had a weird dream last night. Or the night before last, actually.”
“Mm hm,” Derek says, leaning over to steal a lump of brown sugar.
“I dreamed about Peter,” Stiles says, and Derek goes still. He knows that Stiles dreams about Peter all the time, so if he’s mentioning it, something must be different. “I dreamed that he was in my head, asking for my help, because someone was using his daughter to try to summon him back from the dead.”
Now Derek frowns. “That is a weird dream. Peter didn’t have a daughter.”
“Actually,” Stiles says, “he does. Did.” He takes a deep breath and relates the details of Malia’s birth and the subsequent research he did to confirm her existence. “Now, I sure as hell didn’t know any of that before yesterday, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard the name Malia Tate before. Which means . . .”
“That the Peter in the dream was really Peter,” Derek says, his tone cautious.
“That’s my theory, yeah.” Stiles is silent for a minute while he runs the mixer. “Because what my life really needed was a homicidal ghost chilling in my cerebral cortex.”
Derek grimaces. “We don’t know that.”
“No, we don’t,” Stiles says, “but I ran it past Deaton and he said that it seemed possible. And it’s the only explanation I have for why I suddenly know about Malia. Deaton said I could probably be exorcised. Doesn’t that sound like a fun weekend?”
“Jesus,” Derek says, pushing both hands through his hair. “Is that what you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” Stiles says. “Well, I mean, yes, because I don’t want the guy I murdered living in my brain, but . . . I want to find Malia first. What Peter said . . . he said not to make her suffer for his sins. It’s possible that she’s the one actually trying to summon him, or that someone is using her, or . . . there are a lot of possibilities. But I want to make sure that she’s okay.”
“All right,” Derek says. “How do we do that?”
“I’m waiting to hear back from a few people,” Stiles says. He finishes measuring out the ingredients and runs the mixer for several more minutes. Finally, he’s done with that, and scooping the mixture into the pans.
“Are you okay?” Derek asks.
“Actually, yes,” Stiles says. “Sadly, I’m at the point in my life where being able to talk to Peter Hale in my dreams actually doesn’t make that big a splash. I want him gone, that’s no lie, but I know he can’t hurt me there. So, you know. I’m handling it. For now. I’ll probably have an enormous freak-out about it later.” He lets out a breath. “Let’s not tell the others yet, okay? I don’t like worrying them.”
Derek frowns at him for a minute, then sighs and nods. “At least for now,” he says.
~ ~ ~ ~