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“What the fuck are these?” Stiles can feel his whole body tense at Lydia’s ice cold tone. There can only be one thing she would be that upset over in his house, and it’s not his porn collection. He turns around in his rolly chair and sees her, how pale she’s gone, how her hand that’s holding a few of the letters is trembling.
On the upper left corner of each envelope is a return address in Peter Hale’s beautiful, compact handwriting. A return address of the secure ward of Eichen House. And he has absolutely nothing to say for himself that will make Lydia okay with this.
Because one of the (many) reasons Peter Hale is in prison is for assaulting Lydia.
“You and your goddamn need to know everything.” And he thinks Lydia might get it; of anyone in the world, she’s the one who would understand that thirst for knowledge. Just because she gets it doesn’t mean that she’ll forgive him. Especially when she realizes that Peter Hale has been sending love letters between letters related to the Hale fire investigation.
Until recently, Stiles never really understood the people who get married to serial killers in prison. Now, it’s a little too close to home.
It all started when Stiles couldn’t let it go. When Kate Argent tried to get a little too handsy with him while subtly fishing for information. When the rantings of a post-coma madman bent on revenge started making sense as pieces of the puzzle slowly fell into place. When tough, cryptic Derek Hale acted like a puppy with a tail between his legs, flinching when the name “Argent” was uttered.
“Is this some sort of fucked up Stockholm Syndrome thing?”
Stiles almost forgets some days that Peter Hale kidnapped him and forced him to give up Scott’s horribly insecure username and password to locate his newly made beta and pack up. This was the part where it all started to go wrong for Peter--Sheriff Stilinski wasn’t going to take his kid getting abducted lightly.
He deflects with humor, like always. “I always thought of it as more of a Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling type thing.”
“Are you fucking--”
“Although I am perhaps more of the Will Graham type--”
“--kidding me with this shit? We have fought and fought for our lives in this terrible town and you’re all I have left, you know?” Lydia doesn’t cry. It’s not a thing that she does--not since Jackson left. Even when Allison took a sword to the chest to save her--Lydia just screamed and screamed like the banshee she is.
There’s a wobble to her chin and Lydia bites down, grinding her teeth, but it doesn’t stop the tears from running down her cheeks. It’s just so horribly shocking--Stiles feels like he’s shaking from the inside out, feels like his blood has turned to ice. He knows, of course, that Lydia is a person with feelings--he’s always been Lydia’s number one fan and the first person to see through that HBiC exterior. He watched her pretend to be a dumb strawberry blonde while single-handedly ruining the grade curve for everyone else and he watched her act like an ice queen when her heart was shattering into a million pieces. But she’s become so accustomed to loss in the last few years that Stiles thinks maybe even he’s started to buy into Lydia’s whole I Am Banshee, Hear Me Roar schtick.
Vulnerability does not come easy to either of them.
He remembers how sick he felt the first time he looked at Peter through the bars and felt affection. Stiles would tell himself that he was only doing this to make sure the right person was in jail for the disgusting slaughter of the whole Hale family. None of this--the fact that he was rotting in a mental institution for the supernatural for someone else’s crimes--erased Peter’s own crimes. Killing insurance investigators and biting unwilling teenagers and turning them and nearly murdering them and abducting them and trying to go out with Scott’s mom. Guilty as charged on all counts.
It’s strange being of two minds--then again, maybe it’s not that strange for Stiles. There was that time that a crazy chaos fox demon possessed him and made him commit murder and do generally horrible things. Junior year was so fucked and only made worse by missing the SAT and having to delay his college applications by a semester.
It was when he had his dad commit him that he even knew where Peter had been all of these years. Stiles likes to think all of this insanity can be blamed on the nogitsune and his constant quest for information and his general fuckupery. Truth, justice, and the American way all the way, and justice wasn’t being done while Kate Argent got to go free to continue to burn little werewolf babies alive.
But he was lost the moment he locked eyes with Peter. Being led one place while Peter, heavily chained (with added wolfsbane), was being taken to another. Peter, informed by his nose, had whipped his head up, something Stiles saw out of the corner of his eyes. He turned his head and as they passed each other, made eye contact for maybe two seconds. The ghost of fangs shivered across his wrist, right in the spot he had grazed over a year ago in an attempt to sway him to the Dark Side.
In typical fashion, Peter’s eyes went soft as he smirked and Stiles was done for.
Stiles is quiet for long enough that Lydia will leave soon and probably never talk to him again. So, he just blurts it out. “Kate Argent killed Derek’s whole family.”
Lydia’s lips tighten. “Oh my god, you really do have Stockholm Syndrome. What has he done to you?” Scott and Stiles may not be overly fond of Kate (they manage to reign in their blatant contempt), but Lydia has gone on shopping sprees and spa days with her and Allison. And after Allison died, they had kept in touch. Like distant cousins, but where one of the distant cousins is a banshee and the other is a serial killer.
Stiles moves to stand in front of Lydia and brings up his hands to put one on each of her pale, creamy cheeks. He stares into her eyes and he can see that while she’s scared for him, she’s not scared of him. “I need you to take me seriously and pretend you don’t think I’m crazy for a second and hear me out.” She nods, moving his arms up and down with the motion, and this has gotta look really weird.
“I have a PowerPoint that I created for exactly this situation. With graphs and cross-references and footnotes and evidence.”
He’s spent the last two years compiling everything. Before Lydia found out, his dad was the only person in on this whole conspiracy and that’s only because Stiles got caught using his dad’s database passwords. So, he brought him in on it and some good, old-fashioned detective work was so close to taking Kate down. Covertly gathering evidence and conducting interviews is not easy when the person being investigated has more resources than the Beacon Hills Police Department.
He and his Dad are closer than ever because of all this honesty. But, now, of course, he feels a distance between himself and Scott and Lydia that he hadn’t known was there for the past few years.
“So, do you believe me?”
“Yes, of course. This is very thoroughly researched and well put together.” Stiles preens a bit under the praise, happy that Lydia’s voice is back to normal. She even comes to sit next to him like she usually does. She still looks concerned (and puffy around the eyes) as she places a petite, well-manicured hand on his knee. “Stiles. Is this--is this why you stayed here and went to Beacon Hills Community College instead of Berkeley?”
Stiles shrugs and looks down at his feet. Everyone just assumed it was to hang back with his bro while Scott tried to make up for some of his shitty grades. And he let them make those assumptions. Lydia, though, once she has all of the facts? She can figure out a lot more than is natural--then again, her supernatural abilities help her out in this area.
“Are you--” Lydia cuts herself off like she can’t even say it. “Is this why you haven’t dated anyone?”
She deserves an answer, so he lets out a soft “yes” on a breath.
When there’s a lull in the Hale Fire case, Stiles researches werewolf lore, law, ethics, psychology, and sociology. This research goes into a file in Stiles’s mind along with the hope he tries so hard not to have.
But his research already paid off when he convinced Dr. Fenris to let Stiles leave t-shirts with Peter--he wrote a treatise on the power of scent and pack as it pertains to mental health. He wears the shirts to bed for a week, sleeps in them, sweats in them, jerks off in them. And then Peter wears them until Stiles can return with a freshly dirtied shirt. He imagines Peter rolls around in his scent, overwhelmed by it if the look of pure bliss on his face at the visits means anything.
Peter doesn’t know that Stiles puts his face deep in the shirts when they come back to him so he can start the routine all over again. Oh, how he savors the strong smell of Peter’s musk mingled in with the familiar smell of him and his laundry detergent.
He thinks that one day, when he proves that Peter didn’t kill his entire family and when Kate Argent is finally behind bars, he’ll also be able to argue that Peter was well within his werewolf rights to kill everyone involved in the Hale Fire and its subsequent cover up. And even if that doesn’t work, all of the research he’s done on wolves who lose their entire packs point to pain, overwhelming, non-stop pain that would cause temporary insanity in anyone.
Lydia doesn’t forgive and she certainly doesn’t forget. She pretends, she bides her time, and she exacts revenge. Or, in the case of being lied to about Very Important Things, she completely cuts you out of her life.
Stiles doesn’t know how special he is to her, how much she loves him, until she takes his hand and says, “Well, let’s get started. What’s your plan to break your crazy murder boyfriend out?”