Chapter Text
It starts when Stiles pulls on a pair of jeans and they barely stay on. He gives the jeans a look, and then puts a belt on, and goes to school. Maybe they expanded in the washer? That can happen, right?
Scott gives him a confused face in English, and says “You smell weird,” before turning to talk to Allison. Stiles rolls his eyes and flips to the opening act of Hamlet.
It continues when Stiles gets a fever and a nasty cough that won’t go away, and Scott comes by with homework and freaks out, and Derek shows up in his room in the middle of the night and pets his head gently, and then disappears.
It reveals itself when, after three days of sickness, his dad takes Stiles to the hospital, and Doctor. Morgan runs tests, and then further tests, and then gives something to Stiles that knocks him out. When he wakes up, mouth tasting like a cesspool and stomach aching, his dad is sitting in a chair next to the hospital bed, looking utterly wrecked.
“Dad,” he says, or tries to say, but then he starts coughing and his dad wakes up and in between trying to breathe and trying to swallow ice chips he notices an IV line in his arm.
It’s another ten or twenty minutes before anyone will tell him anything.
“Cancer. That’s…wow. It’s lung cancer, isn’t it? That’s, uh, that’s awesome.”
Stiles isn’t really surprised, because this is his life, and his Mom died at 31 of lung cancer, so it’s statistically probable that he or his hypothetical kids would get it. Which, yeah, Stiles probably should’ve expected this.
If there’s one thing he should get credit for, though, it’s how he reacted. No panic attacks, no shouting, he didn’t even swear.
That’s pretty impressive by his standards.
When he gets back home, with a hell of a lot of medicine and the number for a specialist in his dad’s pocket, he writes a possible epitaph down in a notebook.
”Stiles Stilinski (they are not gonna put his birth name on there, no way)
He handled bad news pretty awesomely, considering how bad it usually was”