Chapter Text
There’s a body on their front porch.
It looks dead, but Stiles knows better by now, so he takes his baseball bat with him when he goes out to check on it.
Jack is at work--he’s been putting in fifteen hour days for the last couple weeks--and Lydia is out doing genius shit, so it’s been just Stiles doing his homework and staring vaguely at the fridge debating how interested he is in actually cooking food. If Lydia were here he would be cooking, because Lydia’s a shit cook and having someone to mother-hen bypasses the ADHD enough to get him to do shit, but she’s not, so.
Either way, there’s nobody to talk him out of going out to poke the dead guy with a stick, so he goes out there and levers the bat under the man’s shoulder to nudge him over. He flops over onto his back, but it’s the bonelessness of the deeply unconscious, not the deeply dead.
The guy’s face is smeared with blood, and at the very least his nose is broken, but under all that mess he’s the absolute spitting image of a much younger Jack.
Stiles has seen weirder shit, but, well, he’s seen weird shit, and it’s made him cautious. So with one hand on the bat pressed down on the unconscious guy’s chest, he pulls out his phone and calls Jack.
It’s the number that goes straight through to Jack’s line, bypassing his secretary; it’s a number they’re only supposed to use if it’s urgent, but, well, Stiles figures this is urgent.
It takes Jack a couple rings to pick up, and he sounds stressed when he says, “O’Neill.”
“Hey,” Stiles says. “Sorry to call you while you’re at work, but, well, is there any chance that you have a kid running around out there?”
The silence is very loud, and then Jack says, “No.”
“Huh.” Stiles looks back down at the bleeding guy on their porch. “That’s weird. Unless you have a twenty-year-old clone--”
Jack’s voice goes very sharp. “What are you talking about?”
Right. Stiles buried the lede there, a bit. “There’s a bleeding unconscious guy on the porch who looks remarkably like you, which is an odd coincidence, but I’ll just call 911. Sorry about bothering you.”
“No,” Jack says, and there’s the sound of a lot of movement in the background. “No, I need you to get inside the house. If you can move him, get him inside, too. Then lock the door and don’t open it until I call again. Don’t call 911.”
“What’s going on?”
“In the house. Now.” And then Jack hangs up.
Well, Stiles knows a shitshow when he hears it, so he sticks the phone back in his pocket, puts the baseball bat down, and half-carries, half-drags the guy into the house. If he has a back injury Stiles already fucked it up by turning him over, and fast right now is at least as important as careful.
He goes back out to get the bat, then closes and locks the door. The guy is still unconscious, so Stiles leans the bat up against the wall near the door and heads upstairs to grab a couple jars of mountain ash.
The windows in his room and Lydia’s are already ashed, but he goes around ashing the windows in the rest of the house, then ashes the door. He doesn’t know what’s coming, but hell if he’s going to let it in without a fight.
Jack has a few first aid kits that he showed them, so Stiles gets the one from the kitchen and then sits down next to the unconscious guy with his bat next to him and opens it up. He can’t do anything fancy like set the guy’s nose, but he should be able to clean him up and see if there’s anything that needs emergency attention.
There’s blood all over his shirt, though Stiles can’t tell if that’s from his head or something else. Some smeared on his pants, too, but it doesn’t look like it’s pooled anywhere there. Nothing pooling out underneath him, but that doesn’t happen as obviously as it does in the movies, that shiny puddle of blood.
Stiles starts with the face and some alcohol wipes; they’re thinner than towels or even wet paper towels, and he wants to be able to feel if there’s anything stuck in there. Easier to be careful that way.
He’s gotten past his issues with blood and gore, but he still finds himself hissing under his breath when he finds something in the guy’s matted hair that looks like he was hit by a rock. Probing makes the guy twitch but not wake up, which isn’t a great sign, but Stiles has seen worse.
He keeps working.
Major head wound noted but not bleeding enough to need him to put pressure on it right this fucking second, Stiles shoves his shirt up enough to try to see what’s here. It sticks, blood somewhere between wet and tacky, but he manages to get it high enough to see what looks like a stab wound, and that, that needs him to put pressure on it right this fucking second.
He brought a towel with him for just this purpose, a clean one that doesn’t leave lint all over everything, and he wads it up and presses down, searching for the guy’s pulse with his other hand.
If it stops, he’s calling 911, instructions be damned. He’s not letting someone bleed out on the floor.
It’s weak, when he finds it, and fast, but it’s definitely there, and Stiles presses down with the towel and waits.
His phone goes off in his pocket some time later--three minutes, five, fifteen--and he takes his hand off of the guy’s pulse to fish it out and answer it.
“There’s a man named Lieutenant Colonel Davis who just arrived,” Jack says. “You can let him in.”
“That might be hard,” Stiles says, shifting the phone to sit between his face and his shoulder so he can feel for the guy’s pulse again. “Seeing as I’m currently attempting to hold this guy’s blood inside his body.”
There’s a half a beat, and then Jack says, “Okay. He has a key and he’s going to let himself in. You can trust him. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“You want to tell me what’s going on?”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Jack repeats, and then he hangs up.
Stiles swears at him, and at the guy bleeding out beneath Stiles’s hands, and at Peter Hale and Kate Argent and the whole fucking lot of them.
There’s a knock at the door before he’s satisfied with all the people he’s sworn at, and a man’s voice says, “My name is Lieutenant Colonel Paul Davis. General O’Neill sent me. I’m going to open the door now.”
There’s the click of the door unlocking, and then it swings open to reveal a white guy in his late forties or early fifties standing there in an Air Force uniform, with silver oak leaves on his uniform epaulets. He looks down at them and then hurries in, and a medical team rushes in around him, and as soon as they’re in place to take over Stiles stands up and away from the guy, holding his bloody hands away from him.
“He has sharp force trauma to his abdomen,” Stiles tells them, “as well as blunt force trauma to his head and a broken nose. I stopped checking after I found the stab wound, so he could have other injuries that I didn’t find. I moved him, so if he has spinal damage I probably made it worse. He hasn’t woken up since I found him.”
“Thank you,” Davis says. Stiles looks at him, and past him Stiles can see a whole passel of military people carrying what are either M4s or M16s spreading out across the property. “Why don’t you go wash the blood off.”
“No,” Stiles, a little too sharply. He swallows. “I’ll stay here.”
Someone else in an Air Force uniform--combat uniforms, like everyone but Davis is wearing--comes in with a stretcher, and they get him into it and then back out the door. The whole thing takes maybe five minutes, and then they’re driving away in an ambulance with its lights on, a black SUV in a convoy with it.
Everyone else stays, so it’s just Stiles with his hands covered in blood standing there with Lieutenant Colonel Davis and half the fucking Pentagon on Jack’s yard.
“Now that there’s not somebody bleeding out on the floor, can somebody tell me what’s going on?”
“You kept your head well in the situation,” Davis says, which isn’t an answer.
Stiles starts to rub his face, then remembers his hands are coated in blood and stops. He’s actually a little pissed now. “Okay, look, just give me enough respect to say that it’s classified, if that’s what it is.”
“It’s classified.”
“Great.” Stiles looks down at the mess of blood on the wood floor. “Does classified get someone else to clean the floor?”
“Yes.”
“Great,” Stiles says again. “I’m going to go throw up now.”
And then he walks to the bathroom and throws up everything in his stomach.
He’s done dry-heaving and is sitting on the edge of the bathtub when Jack shows up. He got most of the blood off of his hands, but there’s a spot near one of his wrists that he missed, and he’s staring at it, trying to resist the very real intrusive thought-urge to lick it off.
He is not prepared for this bullshit to start again. He is wholly fucking unprepared, and that means he needs to get himself prepared.
They got complacent, and that might get them killed.
Jack sits down next to him on the edge of the bathtub, stretching his legs out in front of him with a wince, and puts his hand on Stiles’s shoulder. Stiles presses the bloody part of his hand against his leg.
“You good?” Jack asks.
“Not the first person I’ve had to hold together.” Stiles says.
There’s a piece of diamond inside of him, of jagged crystal, and it’s like he had forgotten it was there until just now, today. It’s the piece that grew out of his mom getting sick, that grew out of Peter Hale and Matt Daehler and Gerard Argent.
He doesn’t know what’s going on, but he’s going to find out, one way or another.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
Stiles leans forward, digging his fingers into his leg. “You want to tell me why the entire Air Force descended on your house because there was some injured guy on your porch?”
“The work that I do is classified.”
Stiles grits his teeth. “That’s wearing really thin.”
Jack looks like he’s going to say something, but before he can, Stiles’s phone goes off in his pocket. He fumbles it out, arms awkward as he tries not to elbow Jack, and answers it when he sees that it’s Lydia.
“You have any idea why an Air Force Major Jennifer Hailey is picking me up from class?” Lydia asks, before Stiles can say anything.
Stiles has a pretty damn good idea, but what he says is, “I’ll let Jack answer that one.” And then he hands the phone over to Jack, who gives him a look like he knows exactly what Stiles is doing.
Which, fine. It’s not like he was aiming for subtle.
“Major Hailey is there for your safety,” Jack says, and at least he’s not beating around the bush about it. Lydia must ask about her car, because Jack says, “I’ll have someone pick it up after you get back. Go with her, please.” He glances over at Stiles. “I’ll explain what’s going on when you’re home.”
“Oh,” Stiles says, only half-sarcastically, “nobody will tell me what’s going on, but as soon as Lydia gets home…”
“What I can tell you, I only want to say once.” Jack’s own phone goes off, and he makes a face, then says, “Okay, Lydia, I need to give the phone back to Stiles.”
He hands it over, then takes out his own phone and barks, “O’Neill.” With one last pat on Stiles’s shoulder, he stands and heads out of the bathroom.
As soon as Jack is out of the room, Stiles says, “I’ll talk, you listen.”
“Only because I have company,” Lydia says.
Stiles huffs out a laugh. “I’d never think to dictate to you otherwise.” He drags his hand through his hair, then realizes it’s the one with the blood on it. Oh well. He’s gotten more blood in worse places.
The story doesn’t take long--the stabbed guy who looks too much like Jack to be a coincidence, the fucking hoard of Air Force people that descended on the house--and Stiles manages to do most of it without shaking.
“Any sign?” is all Lydia asks when Stiles stops for air.
“All natural,” Stiles tells her.
Try to interpret that, whoever might be listening to their calls.
“Yeah, okay,” Lydia says. “I have an Air Force Major to interrogate now. See you soon.”
“Be careful,” Stiles says, and hangs up.
Colonel Davis is still in the house when Stiles walks out of the bathroom, and the front door closed but through the windows he can see the honor guard of a whole battalion of scary motherfuckers on the property.
He doesn’t miss dealing with people with weapons.
The blood is still there on the floor, but hell if Stiles is going to deal with it right now, so instead he walks over to the coffee machine and starts a new pot.
“Want any?” he asks the room at large, which at the moment consists of Colonel Davis and a couple Air Force people with very large guns and Jack, who is standing in the corner of the room with his cell phone up to his ear, not saying anything.
“No thank you,” Colonel Davis says. Nobody else says anything.
Stiles shrugs. “Well, if you change your mind, it tastes like sludge, but it has enough caffeine to keep you up until your eyes fall out.”
Jack puts his phone to his shoulder to look at Stiles and say, “It’s too late for you to be drinking coffee.”
“It’s too late for me to have kept a guy’s insides inside of him,” Stiles counters.
Jack stares at him for a second, then puts his phone back to his ear, angling himself away from the room as a whole.
Check, Mr. Caffeine Police.
Once there’s enough in the pot for one cup, Stiles pours himself one in a faded USAF mug. The drips hiss and spit as they hit the bottom of the coffee maker, and he grits his teeth and doesn’t react.
There are things in these woods, here, things with teeth.
The coffee is truly godawful, because he put in too much coffee and not enough water, but it’ll keep him awake and that’s his first priority, so he leans against the counter and drinks it.
There’s a sense that today should feel surreal, but it doesn’t, and that’s maybe the most surreal part about it. There is none of that dissociation, none of that fuzzy feeling of floating half an inch above his body that he used to get when things got bad, or after they were over.
This is him holding Derek’s body up in that pool. He’s going to keep swimming until he doesn’t have to anymore, and then he’s going to kill a motherfucker.
That second part is new, maybe, but it’s been a long year.
He’s almost done with his cup of coffee when the door opens and Lydia walks in, and he puts it down on the counter behind him a little blindly and then walks over and wraps his arms around her. It’s partly because he needs to give someone a hug, and partly so he can press his lips to her ear and whisper, “We’re secure.”
She’ll know what he means.
Lydia takes the hug with the ill grace of a half-tamed housecat, then pulls away and looks him in the eye. It takes a moment of examination, and then she says, “You look like shit.”
“Appreciate it.”
“My pleasure.” Lydia steps to the side to let in the woman who’s been standing behind her, a tall blond woman in her thirties in an Air Force uniform like the one Colonel Davis is wearing. “Stiles, Major Jennifer Hailey. She’s almost as smart as I am.”
That’s high praise, from Lydia.
Major Hailey of the two first names looks amused when she steps forward and offers Stiles a hand to shake, saying, “It’s nice to meet you, sir.”
She’s moving gingerly, like she’s almost healed but not quite, and Stiles has seen that before, so he asks, “Ribs or collarbone?”
“Both,” she says, after a hesitation just long enough to be surprise. She has a nice firm handshake and very good posture. “You have a good eye.”
“Two of them, in fact,” Stiles says. Major Hailey smiles slightly, and Stiles smiles back. Next to him, Lydia grabs his wrist and turns it so she can see the spot of blood there, over his wrist. “Sorry,” he says, nonsensically.
All Lydia does is scrape her thumbnail over the blood.
“An hour,” Jack says, the first thing Stiles has heard him say since he scolded Stiles about the coffee, and when Stiles and Lydia turn to look at him he’s putting his phone away. He looks at the two of them, then says, “We should talk.”
The rest of the Air Force people file out of the house, though it doesn’t look like they go far, and that’s a lot of people with a lot of guns standing around the house. A bit noticeable for a suburban Virginia neighborhood.
Jack sits down at the kitchen table, gesturing for Lydia and Stiles to sit too, and they all take their normal seats, or what functions for their normal seats when the three of them eat maybe two meals out of fifteen together.
“Did Stiles tell you what happened?” Jack asks.
Lydia nods. “As much as he knows.”
“Good.” Jack nods. “I’m sorry to say that I won’t be able to tell you much more than that. The man you found on the porch, his identity is classified, but the fact that he was here at all, much less that he was here while injured, is concerning. I’m needed back at the Pentagon, but for the time being there’s going to be a couple of guards stationed outside of the house for the time being. They’re with the Air Force Security Forces, and they’re very good at their jobs.”
“Are they going to stop us from leaving?” Lydia asks.
Jack shakes his head. “You can still go to school and do what you would normally do, and they won’t follow you or stop you, but I will ask that you not go anywhere that you don’t need to go, and that you keep your phones with you and on at all times.”
Stiles does that anyway, at least the phone part, and as far as he knows Lydia does too, so he just nods.
“Because I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get back, I’m going to have someone stay here with you.”
“Don’t trust us here alone?” Stiles asks, and he can’t help but smile at the thought, because he’s gotten into far fewer messes here than he did in Beacon Hills. Bleeding guy notwithstanding.
But seriously, gravely, Jack says, “I took you in so you wouldn’t be alone, and I’m going to keep that promise.”
Stiles swallows, the smile dropping off of his face. He knows Jack only took him in because of Lydia, and even though he knows Jack cares enough about them, this feels…
More.
“Major Hailey will stay with you tonight,” Jack continues, before Stiles has to think of a response. “You don’t need to entertain her or do anything for her other than treat her with respect; she’s just here to make sure you’re not alone all night. I’m probably going to be in meetings most of the night, but if you need to get in touch with me, you can call my office. If there’s a more immediate issue, that’s what Major Hailey is for.”
“Isn’t a Major a little high ranking to be babysitting two teenagers?” Lydia asks, and Stiles recognizes this as her ‘looking to fuck someone up’ tone just before she continues, “Or is this just the sort of duty you give your female subordinates?”
Jack stares at her for a second, an entirely flat expression on his face, and then he says, “There are very few people I trust implicitly to look after the children that I am raising, and she is one of them.”
Well, Stiles thinks as Lydia leans back with her arms crossed across her chest, that told them.
“Now,” Jack says, clapping his hands together. He stands, walking around the table to put a hand on Stiles’s shoulder. “I’m proud of you.They told me you probably saved his life.”
Stiles swallows, then asks, “Can you tell me if he makes it? I know you said his whole identity is classified, but I just--”
“I’ll let you know.” Jack pats Stiles’s shoulder once, then heads over to Lydia. To Stiles’s surprise, Jack leans down and presses his lips to Lydia’s forehead. “I promise that you’re safe here, both of you.”
That had never been in doubt, not really, or at least not the way that Jack means it. There are things Jack can’t protect against--things Jack doesn’t know about--but for the normal human stuff, Stiles has always known they’re safe.
“Hopefully this will be resolved soon,” Jack says.
If only, Stiles thinks.
--
Major Hailey looks as comfortable at their kitchen table as a kid waiting to be called into the principal’s office. She takes a cup of coffee when Stiles offers it, but she isn’t drinking it. Not that Stiles can particularly blame her.
He has another cup of his own, because fuck if he’s sleeping tonight, and he leans against the counter sipping it and watching her. The small army has left, and it’s just her and the guards who are somewhere outside,.
Finally, he asks, “So you work with Jack, then?”
“To some degree. Normally I’m stationed elsewhere, but they have me on a desk at the Pentagon while I heal, and I work under General O’Neill while I’m there.”
“And what do you do normally?”
Major Hailey smiles tightly and lies, “Deep space radar telemetry.” In what is likely less of a lie, she adds, “I have a PhD in astrophysics.”
“Do you know Sam, then? Sam Carter?”
“General Carter was my CO for a time.”
That’s interesting, that she’s one of the few people Jack trusts to watch them despite there not being a lot of evidence that he knows her.
“Right,” Stiles says, for lack of anything else to say, and drains the rest of his truly awful coffee. Past Major Hailey, he sees Lydia standing in the doorway. He meets her eye, then turns and washes the cup out and puts it on the drying rack. “Well, I’m off. And by off I mean going to another room. Are you staying all night?”
“Unless General O’Neill is able to return before then.”
Yeah, Stiles isn’t counting on that. “Well, there’s blankets and stuff in the closet over there, and the coffee grounds are in the freezer.”
Major Hailey just nods, so Stiles heads out of the kitchen and up the stairs to Lydia’s room. She has her door open an inch, so he doesn’t bother to knock, just walks in and shuts the door behind him.
Inside, Lydia is pacing, tight circles around and around the rug on her floor. She looks up when he walks in, then demands, “How secure are we?”
“Ash on every window, and I ashed the front door, but I haven’t been able to re-ash it since the military descended on us.”
Her shoulders relax a little, and she asks, “Any indication that that’s what it might be?”
Stiles shakes his head, dropping down on her bed. Before, he would have died to spend time on Lydia Martin ’s bed, but living with her has killed a lot of the illusions. “No, but hell if I know what there are indications of . He was hit over the back of the head and stabbed in the stomach and appeared out of fucking nowhere to, what, die on Jack’s porch? And when I said he looked like Jack, I wasn’t kidding. If they’re not related, I’ve lost my mind.”
“Maybe he has a son he just hasn’t told us about?”
“Only if he straight up lied to me. Which is not out of the realm of possibility.” Stiles flops back on her bed to stare up at her ceiling. “We’ve gotten complacent.”
Lydia makes an irritated noise, dropping down on the bed next to him. “We moved here to get away from that shit. It’s not complacency if you’re safe.” He curls up against her, and she lets him. She smells good, like flowers or fruit or something. “I don’t want to go back to that.”
Stiles rolls away again to stare up at the ceiling. “It’s not like I do, either, but I’m not willing to lose you or--or any of this because I’m unprepared. You know me: measure fifteen times, cut twice.”
“That’s not the saying.”
“Libel.”
“It would be slander, actually.” Lydia reaches over to shove his hair out of his face. “You going to sleep tonight?”
Stiles laughs. “No.”
“Feel free to keep watch on my door, then, because I’m planning on getting at least six hours.” She shoves at his shoulder, and he rolls with it, flailing dramatically. “Now get out. I need to change.”
“I could stay and keep watch,” Stiles offers.
“Out.” She shoves his shoulder again, and he lets himself be shoved off the bed and onto the floor, flopping around and groaning. He knows how to fall right, so it didn’t really hurt, but it’s making her smile, so he goes with it. Finally, she nudges him with a pointed toe, saying, “Get out of my bedroom, asshole.”
Stiles goes.