Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They were in the middle of another awkward dinner – awkward was the only way Stilinski dinners had been for the past month or so, but that didn’t make it any easier for Stiles to take – when the doorbell rang. His dad shot Stiles a look, but all Stiles could do was shrug. It wasn’t like anyone he knew actually used doors these days, much less would stoop to knocking instead of just barging in. His dad sighed, and went to answer the door. Stiles followed him but hung back at the entryway to the kitchen.

Stiles was pretty sure that if he had awesome werewolf superpowers, he’d be able to hear his father’s heart skip more than a few beats. Sure, he couldn’t see his dad’s face, but he was an expert at reading body language, and his dad hadn’t been that level of tense and shocked since the whole thing with Matt at the police station.

“Hey Barney,” the person on the other side of the door said, which was weird, because Stiles could have sworn his dad’s name was actually Charles (not that he could remember the last time anyone had called him that – it might have even been his mother; even Mrs. McCall called him Sheriff).

“Clint,” his dad said, sounding broken in a way that made Stiles flinch a little, because he’d sounded like that far too often lately.

“Not going to invite me in?” The voice on the other side of the door – this ‘Clint’, or whatever – was sharp, and carried a little dark humor. Wordlessly, the Sheriff stepped to one side, door open as a silent invitation.

The man who came in was stocky and fairly buff (he’d say extremely buff, but he’d spent the last semester surrounded by werewolves, his judgment of fitness levels was off), and was dressed like Chris Argent going on a hunt. Stiles counted at least four not very well hidden weapons, and he wasn’t even trying. “Uh, Dad, I’m not really one to question life choices here, but is there a reason we’re letting a heavily armed commando into the house?”

The newcomer froze in place and stared at Stiles in shock, which was a little unfair, because his injuries weren’t really that bad, Gerard liked to rely on mental torment a lot more than evidence that the Sheriff could trace.

His dad shook his head, smiling a little – Stiles was awesome at distractions. “And who was the one harboring a fugitive in his room?” he asked dryly.

“In my defense, he was both innocent and only a fugitive because I mistakenly accused him of murder, which I would still like to say was Scott’s fault.” Yeah, that excuse hadn’t exactly flown the first time he had used it (in the midst of all his mental anguish the last few days, he may have accidentally let it slip about Derek hiding out in his bedroom that once; it wasn’t the reason for the latest awkwardness at the dinner table, but it didn’t precisely help).

The father-son banter seemed to snap scary guy out of his fugue state, because he turned to the Sheriff with a completely unreadable look on his face. He said something quietly, but Stiles missed it because his phone chose that moment to buzz in that specific annoying pattern he had picked out for Scott.

wtf dude thrs a frky asasin chik thretin dr deat

In the few seconds it took Stiles to decode Scott’s message – he was pretty sure Scott had been dropped on his head as a baby at least a few times, it would explain Mrs. McCall’s vaguely guilty look every time they tried to play Scrabble – his phone buzzed with a second message.

DO U THNK DR DEAT IS N DA MAFFIA????

Seriously, Scott. He may have come up with a plan to take down Grandpa Evil (although Stiles is, like, 99% sure Scott just ran to his boss and the good doctor had in fact set up the whole plan; Scott was sweet and loyal and basically a golden retriever, but cunning plans weren’t his forte), but he still jumped to the most ridiculous of conclusions. He fired off a quick response before Scott could confront the ‘freaky assassin chick’ with quotes from the Godfather.

dont think so. theres a scary assassin guy at my house too

WTF?!?! ru ok????

im fine. my dad knows him

???????????

While their little exchange took place, a separate, furiously whispered exchange was taking place with the two adults in the room. Stiles shoved his phone back in his pocket to address the situation at hand, because compartmentalizing and prioritizing were pretty much the only ways he had made it through the past few weeks, and that was apparently a trend that would be continuing for the foreseeable future.

“This is great and all, but uh, who are you?” And because Stiles was Stiles, he added on, “And why are you carrying enough weapons to take down a small Central American government?” When the man just blinked at him, Stiles revised that to, “Possibly medium-sized?”

“Stiles…” his dad said, pausing before giving a small sigh. “Stiles, this is my brother, Clint.”

He definitely didn’t squeak, no matter what anyone else would say. “Brother? As in, uncle? He would be? To me?” Wait, that wasn’t how words were supposed to work. “…I swear I’m usually more fluent in English.”

That got him a quick flash of teeth from his uncle (P.S. ohmygod what) that was only marginally less terrifying than the few occasions he’d seen Derek grin. “Yeah, that would make me your uncle, kid.”

Were he slightly more stereotypical, there would have bristling and remarks about not being named ‘kid’, but honestly even putting on that act right now was a little exhausting to think about. “Right, because everyone needs a little more soap opera in their life. On a similar note, you wouldn’t happen to have a similarly clad compatriot who’s at the vet’s office right now, would you?”

Having just met the guy, Stiles couldn’t tell you much, but he’d bet almost anything that Clint wasn’t someone who usually allowed emotions such as surprise to flit across his face even momentarily. He just gave off the broody brick-face vibes that really, really weren’t helping him stop comparing his brand-new uncle to Derek Hale.

His dad was frowning. “Stiles, what are you talking about?”

“Scott texted, said someone was threatening Dr. Deaton,” Stiles told his father, gesturing vaguely at the phone in his pocket while keeping his eyes pinned on Uncle Clint, who stiffened up just the tiniest bit. “I figured it could just be Scott being Scott, but you know coincidences.”

The implication of a threat to someone in Beacon Hills was enough to send his dad into full-on Sheriffing mode, like Stiles knew it would. Nothing against his uncle, and it was nice to have surprise relatives, but Stiles could really do without him and his gang of hunters showing up just when things were reaching the calm before the storm (Stiles didn’t let himself think it was anything more permanent than that; life seemed to be settling in to a nice pattern of letting him just barely get a gasp of air before punching him in the stomach again).

“Clint, what are you doing in my town?” his father demanded, all of the twinges of guilt and the remnants of sheer shock fleeing his face.

***

So, here’s how it happened.

After the whole thing with Loki and half of Manhattan going up in alien-scented smoke, SHIELD had cobbled together (okay, mostly Tony Stark and Bruce Banner and, after some bitching about no one keeping her in the loop when things were actually happening, Jane Foster) an efficient little radar system to pick up any further blips of Tesseract energy or Loki energy. Despite allowing Thor to take the ‘war criminal’ back to their home planet, no one at SHIELD who knew the slightest bit of Norse mythology expected Loki to stay on Asgard for long, and everyone agreed it would be better all-around if they knew what was happening from the start.

The radar system went up and went on its way, scanning harmlessly and finding all of nothing, until all of a sudden, it did find something. A tiny blip, barely noticeable, coming out of some equally tiny Californian town called Beacon Hills.

There happened to be a mostly retired SHIELD agent who lived in that exact town, so orders were sent down for him to investigate and report. He’d sent back a few reports, but they were all vague enough to be infuriating, so Fury tasked his two top agents with going in and finding the truth, either from the retired agent or from their own investigations.

Agents Barton and Romanoff had just checked into their hotel room – this mission was entirely above-board, they had legitimate SHIELD badges with their actual names on them for a change – when Clint Barton caught something out of the corner of his eye. One of many ghosts from his past, this one from further back than most of them, and combined with traces of Loki’s magic it couldn’t mean anything good.

He mumbled some excuses to Natasha that she didn’t believe for a second, but gave a sharp look that proclaimed she would find out about everything eventually (and Clint didn’t mind, he really didn’t, but he’d like time to deal with this himself first) and let him go.

Clint tracked the ghost first to the grocery store, then into a quiet suburban neighborhood where the ghost went into a house and came out in some kind of uniform – Clint was too far away for even his eyes to tell what kind, because caution was his catchphrase for this particular surveillance. At that point, he’d had to leave off his stalking to reconvene with Natasha and finalize the details, but he marked the house in his mental map.

It wasn’t every day someone saw their supposedly dead brother walking happily down the street, after all.

***

“Following up on reports,” Clint said, back to being nonchalant. And vague, couldn’t forget vague.

Sheriff Stilinski just raised an eyebrow, the same exact eyebrow-raise he had used against “I didn’t do it!” and “It came that way, I swear!” whenever Stiles tried those excuses.

Either it wasn’t as effective on brothers, or Clint had figured out its Kryptonite, because he didn’t cave shame-facedly like Stiles tended to. “It’s classified.”

The Sheriff’s disbelieving snort was met with bristling, and then a quick pulling out of a badge. “I’m an official agent of SHIELD,” he said, and that was just classic younger sibling attitude in his voice right there, but wait a minute-

“SHIELD?! As in, Avengers and aliens and destroying New York City, that SHIELD?” So sue him, before he’d gotten the brilliant idea to drag his best friend into the woods looking for a half a dead body the whole ‘alien invasion with real superheroes’ thing had kind of been his biggest interest.

Clint looked decidedly shifty, but that didn’t matter because Stiles had come to another conclusion. “Dude, wait a minute, that’s why you look familiar! You were totally the guy with the bow and arrows in the battle, right? ‘Hawkeye’?” Again, there was that just-barely-there flash of something that told Stiles he was completely right (as usual, but no one listened to Stiles, did they?) “Oh man, I have a friend who’d lo-” Except Allison wasn’t really his friend any more, was she? Or maybe she was. It was all very headache inducing, and if they couldn’t go back to a time before werewolves, Stiles wished they could at least go back to a time before killer lizard people and murderous grandfathers.

Apparently Clint decided to seize the opportunity provided by Stiles’s awkward momentary lapse into angst, because he was edging to the door and making very insincere-sounding apologies to the Sheriff, along with promises to talk later. And then he was out the door, hopefully to collect his wayward Mafioso accomplice before Scott broke out in anxiety hives.

“So, uncle, huh?” Stiles said into the air between him and his father that was, for once, not awkward because of him.

His dad sighed, running his hand through his hair tiredly as he led them back to the kitchen. “You know how I took your mother’s last name when we married?” Stiles nodded, it had been a favorite family story when he was younger, usually as part of a lesson on how ‘different’ didn’t always mean ‘bad’. “I wasn’t proud of who I was before I met your mother, and I’m still not. Barney Barton wasn’t a nice guy, and I didn’t want to be him anymore.”

Stiles stared at his father. He had a good, too good many would say, imagination, but there was no way for him to imagine his father as anything less than amazing. It just didn’t compute. His dad had always been the picture of a perfect father, the perfect husband, the kind of guy everyone hopes their sons turn out to be. It just- Stiles couldn’t understand.

While he tried (and failed) to digest that idea, his father poured himself a glass of bourbon before sitting back down at the table.

“Part of who Barney Barton was, was a horrible older brother.” His dad took a sip of his drink, staring down at it like it held some kind of mystical truth. “I betrayed Clint pretty badly, so when I came to my senses I figured it’d be better for both of us he thought I was dead.” His dad looked up and pinned Stiles with a slightly desperate look. “That’s why I’ve been so worried about you,” he said quietly, “Because I’m worried you’re going to turn out like I was.”

“Dad,” Stiles said, voice uncharacteristically quiet and serious, “I can’t tell you everything,” Or even anything, he thought cynically, “But I can tell you that everything I’ve done, everything I’ve been doing, I’m doing for good reasons, and to help people. At least ninety percent of the time,” he had to tack on, because damn it, if he was going to be honest with his dad for once, he was going to be completely honest, as much as he could. And hitting Jackson with the Jeep had little to do with saving him, and a lot to do with needing to let out a little frustration.

His dad searched his face for a moment, before giving another all-too common sigh. “I’m glad, Stiles. But I wish you would tell me what’s going on.”

“I know,” Stiles said miserably, looking down at where his fingers were tracing meaningless patterns on the table.

The Sheriff finished his bourbon before standing and clearing his plate. “Goodnight, son. Don’t stay up too late, it’s a school night.”

“Night, Dad,” Stiles said, still quiet and not looking up from the table.

Chapter Text

As he finished cleaning the kitchen, Stiles’s phone buzzed again.  It was, of course, from Scott, since Scott and his dad were pretty much the only people who ever texted him (well, Allison had a few times, and Danny a few times to collaborate for school projects, but that wasn’t nearly as dramatic sounding). Scott had apparently moved on from the invasion of the veterinarian’s territory, because the text was about something completely different.

drk fnd erka n boyd. pck me up??

be there in 5, he shot back quickly as he pulled on his shoes and hoodie and dug up his keys. The last time he had seen Boyd and Erica, it had been in Gerald’s friendly family torture dungeon. Argent – the sane, but still creepy Argent – had let them go, but no one had seen them since. (Isaac had told Scott, who had eventually mentioned it to Stiles like he already knew, that Erica and Boyd were in the middle of running away when the Argents caught them, so it was entirely possible they had just continued running away, but that wasn’t the impression Stiles was getting from Scott’s badly-spelled text message. Unless he was implying that Derek had found them and was torturing them for trying to get away, but that didn’t seem super likely anymore. Or, technically, ever, since Derek’s character hadn’t exactly changed, Stiles was just more aware of it now, but whatever.)

The drive to the vet’s was thankfully short, because Stiles’s ideas were chasing themselves in dizzying circles that he couldn’t do anything about right then. Scott was waiting right next to the street, looking every last bit the anxious puppy waiting for his owner to come home. He jumped in the second Stiles stopped the Jeep, and Stiles turned in the direction of the warehouse without asking.

“So how’d you find out?” he asked, just to break the nervous tension in the vehicle.

“Isaac. He texted me right after that lady left.” Scott looked uncertain for a second. “Dr. Deaton said it was fine, that she was only warning him, not threatening him.”

“Pretty sure Deaton is the last person in this town I’d worry about taking care of himself,” Stiles muttered.

Scott, of course, heard him (stupid werewolf ears). “But Stiles! She smelled dangerous, like- like death,” he said, apparently coming to that conclusion right then. His eyes were impossibly wide, staring at Stiles with sudden pleading – Stiles saw all that out of the corner of his eye, and out of far too many memories. What was he supposed to do about it? Even if she was the Grim Reaper itself, Stiles would still place good money on Deaton coming up even, at the very least.

But hey, they were at the warehouse, and despite all the personal growth and development Scott had been forced through, he still had problems keeping his mind on more than one thing at a time. Score one for Stiles, he thought as he turned off the Jeep and followed his wolfy friend into the dilapidated building.

“What are you two doing here?” Derek growled, Mildly Constipated Face #37 on display. Isaac shuffled a little guiltily off to the side, and Derek rolled his eyes. “Never mind. You still shouldn’t be here.”

“Calm down already,” Stiles said, rolling his eyes as he brushed by the guard dogs. “Don’t make me go all High School Musical on you.” Oh, awesome, now he had gotten ‘We’re All in This Together’ stuck in his head. That karma sure was an A-class bitch.

Erica and Boyd were laying in the middle of the warehouse floor, because apparently god forbid Derek drag them to the mattress in the subway car (yeah, he’d been in the subway car before, mostly just that once when Boyd had been shot with wolfsbane bullets at the rave, because Derek had been too busy with saving Scott to care for the rest of his pups, so Stiles got the unenviable job of cramming wolfsbane ash into Boyd’s wounds).

They looked bad. Really bad. In fact, Stiles was pretty sure he was never going to be able to look at raw hamburger meat the same way ever again. “What happened to them?” Scott asked, sounding just as shocked by the sight as Stiles felt.

“Oh, didn’t my dear nephew tell you?” And hey, this day was just getting better, because lurking in the shadows was Peter Hale. Derek had to get his creeping from somewhere, Stiles supposed. Made sense that it was genetic.

“Nice to see you again, Creepy Uncle Peter,” Stiles said, not able to stop himself. Stress-induced snarking, it was a legitimate medical condition, look it up. He was pretty sure it’d be on WebMD at least.

“Mr. Stilinski,” Peter responded politely, with a disturbing little smile on his face (possibly just his normal smile, since Stiles hadn’t seen any other kind from him), before turning back to the group at large (well, mostly Scott). “The alpha pack left them as a warning,” he explained.

“The alphas did this?” Scott asked, sounding very distressed from where he was kneeling next to the two bodies, seeing what he could do with his vet assistant skills. Bodies, not corpses, because even Stiles could hear the wet, hissing breaths escaping the prone forms. And wait.

“Alpha pack?” He put aside his annoyance (and yeah, okay, hurt too) at Isaac apparently sharing information with Scott that Scott didn’t feel necessary to pass on to him. “As in, a pack made up of alphas, or a pack that is in charge of all the other packs?” Oh English, you wacky language you.

“Mostly the first,” Peter said with a shrug. “A little of the second, according to them at least.”

What a world, where he could rely on the slightly pedo zombie wolf over his best friend when it came to telling him things.

Scott froze in the middle of his examination before throwing his head up, eyes glowing. Out of the corner of his eye, Stiles saw Isaac and Derek do the same thing (Peter was still just leaning against the wall, smirk firmly in place, like he was too cool to be alert or something; some part of Stiles’s mind imagined him in a polo shirt with popped collar and snickered to itself). Stiles barely resisted from going into baby-talk tones and demanding, “Who is it boy? Is it Timmy? Is Timmy down the well?”

“Someone’s here,” Scott hissed, completely unnecessarily. No, really? Stiles totally thought they heard a tornado coming down the street instead (although, hey, he’d read something about animals noticing earthquakes before the shaking actually started, he wondered if werewolves could do the same…). As Scott spoke, Derek launched himself into the shadows, moving almost too fast for the human eye to track.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” a voice Stiles had never heard before spoke up from the shadows, completely calm. Derek had frozen mid-leap (okay, not exactly, as he then would’ve crashed to the floor like a Bugs Bunny cartoon), and stayed still as the owner of the voice sauntered into view, a gun pointed directly at Derek, and another pointed at the rest of the group (it was probably the second one that made Derek pause, since he never seemed to blink at getting shot before, but there was a squishy human and two mostly dead wolves at the end of the other gun).

Stiles saw Scott stiffen out of the corner of his eye, and glanced over at him with a quick eyebrow raise meaning, “Is this the scary lady from Deaton’s?” Scott, for all his slight shittiness as a friend lately, could still read Stiles’s expressions as well as he ever could, and he dipped his head in a quick, tense nod.

Their little exchange caught the look of the dangerous redhead (which was possibly repetitive; every redhead Stiles had come across was at least dangerous, if not outright deadly), and she shifted her focus. The implied threat to his already wounded pack (plus Scott and Stiles, but again, Stiles was pretty sure that didn’t really come into his calculations) made Derek start to lunge forward again, protectively.

He was brought up short by a low whistling sound that Stiles only figured out was an arrow when it buried itself, quivering, in the support column next to Derek. It had come close enough to cut a narrow slice into Derek’s jacket, but there wasn’t any blood.

Isaac whirled around with his own snarl, because the angle of the shot meant the archer was behind them and they had been too caught up with the other threat to notice.

Stiles, meanwhile, was having a miniature epiphany – a miniphany, he liked to call them. Surprise!uncle who happened to be Hawkeye + arrow + suspiciously familiar redhead dressed like a superspy… “What the hell, why are the Avengers trying to kill us?!”

“What are you talking about?” Scott tried to ask, but he was interrupted by a snort from the direction of the archer.

So, Clint had stumbled, slightly shell-shocked, into the hotel room he was sharing with Natasha who had already returned from her own errand. The Black Widow quirked an eyebrow in a questioning manner, and rather than anything he’d thought he’d say, Clint blurted out, “I have a nephew.” Both of her eyebrows rose at that, and Clint was glad he wasn’t the only one being surprised (raising both her eyebrows was as close as Natasha Romanoff usually got to shock). But she didn’t say anything, because she was the best friend-slash-partner-slash-fellow master assassin a man could ask for.

“I saw my brother earlier,” he added by way of explanation as to where he’d been, and why he’d just blurted that out. “Anyway, how did it go with the good doctor?”

She let the extremely abrupt subject change go, probably because she was already figuring out horrible ways to make him spill without meaning to. “Alan Deaton is uncooperative.” Natasha looked distinctly annoyed (her nostrils were very very minutely flared; Clint and Coulson were probably the only ones who would have been able to tell that her expression had, in fact, changed at all, let alone been able to figure out what it meant). “He has a teenager working for him, so I had to stay subtle.” She sounded displeased, which just cemented Clint’s suspicion that ever since getting to shoot down hundreds of aliens, she’d been a little bored with run-of-the-mill spying. “I’ll get him alone later, when the child’s gone home.”

“So, step two?” Clint asked, deciding not to mention that the child in question was apparently friends with his apparent nephew. Beacon Hills was a relatively small town; coincidences did occasionally happen, after all.

Step two was to do their own nice, in-depth reconnaissance. A quick overview of some crime maps had pointed to something strange definitely happening in the warehouse district. Whether it was their kind of strange or not was yet to be seen.

It didn’t take long for the two master assassins to find the warehouse they were looking for – blood trails were always rather helpful in that regard. A few quick hand gestures, and they took up opposite corners of the building, finding entrances easily (the warehouse wasn’t in that great of shape). Clint entered through the fire escape for the second floor, easily finding a place to survey the main floor of the building, where it appeared everyone was gathered.

There were two dead or dying teenagers on the floor, with three other teenagers nearby – one kneeling next to the bodies, apparently inspecting them, and two others with their backs to Clint. There was a slightly older guy a few feet away from the main group, watching them with a glare and furrowed eyebrows, and against the wall was an older man, watching everyone else with a smirk. Clint carefully shifted his position, because if the older man bothered glancing up and to the left just a little, Clint would be directly in his eye line.

“–the first. A little of the second, according to them at least,” the older guy was saying as Clint took up position and carefully kept Tall, Dark, and Broody in his sights. Not that he was underestimating teenagers (he vaguely remembered being one, after all), but the twenty-something in the room was giving off the biggest threatening vibes.

At that moment, Broody, the teen leaning over the bodies, and one of the others seemed to freeze, heads whipping to the position Clint knew Natasha had taken up. How they knew someone was there was an entirely separate question – Clint would not have been shocked to find out that Natasha was the Norse Goddess of Stealth, except in that she was Russian and not Scandinavian. No one ever caught Natasha when she didn’t want to be found.

Broody charged the shadows, only to be brought up short by Natasha. The tableau froze for a moment, before she glanced at the teenagers and the other one she was holding at gunpoint thought that was a good sign to attack.

So giving up his element of surprise probably wasn’t an amazing idea, but he could see everyone in the building (unless they had even better skills than Natasha at staying undetected, anyway), and he’d be able to put an arrow through any of them before they got close enough to do damage to him. Plus, he’d rather not aerate teenagers, so a show of intimidation was the best shot at that working out.

One of the teenagers turned around to face him, and – well, glowing eyes had never been a sign of anything good before, although Clint calmed down a little when he noticed the tone was gold, not blue.

The other standing teenager didn’t turn all the way around, trying to keep at the least the corner of his eye on both of them… and then he shouted. “What the hell, why are the Avengers trying to kill us?!”

Well, there went Clint’s vague hopes that his brother had actually reformed. He snorted over the question by the kid still by the bodies. “How about, what the hell, why is my nephew standing next to two dead bodies in an abandoned warehouse?” he couldn’t stop himself from retorting.

If the situation hadn’t been what it was, the gobsmacked expressions and body language on pretty much everyone would’ve been hysterical.

“You have an uncle?” the kid next to the bodies demanded at the exact same time Dark and Broody scoffed, “He’s your uncle?”

“Oh my god,” his nephew yelled, throwing his hands in the air dramatically. “First,” he rounded vaguely on Clint’s position, squinting in an attempt to see him – the lighting of abandoned warehouses, surprisingly not great. “They’re not dead. Second,” he turned to the boy next to him, “As of about an hour ago, apparently. And finally,” now his finger was out and pointing at the vaguely surprised, vaguely constipated-looking guy still at the end of Natasha’s gun, “You don’t get to talk about uncles.” He paused. “No offense, Creepy Uncle Peter.”

The man still leaning against the wall, looking for all the world like the only thing that could improve his life was a bucket of popcorn and possibly a recliner, waved his hand dismissively. “None taken.”

“So now we’re back to: why are the Avengers – including my uncle – trying to kill us?”

“And we’re also back to: why are you standing next to dead-” (“They’re not dead!” half-shouted his nephew, who he just realized he’d never actually gotten introduced to) “-fine, dying teenagers?” Clint snarked back, holding tightly to his bow. “Last time I saw my brother, he faked his death to escape the mafia and the FBI, so I’m not full of confidence about this situation.”

“Wait,” the curly haired boy asked, sounding a little lost. “The Sheriff was on the run from the FBI?”

Most of the room seemed equally unbelieving. Damn, his brother was good at burying the past – anyone from the circus wouldn’t have blinked at the idea of Barney Barton being on the wrong side of the FBI or the mafia.

“Also, the glowing eyes. Explanation for that would be nice,” Clint said, over the silence of disbelief.

“You’re not hunters?” the non-curly haired and non-his nephew boy asked, confused.

“Hunters of what?”

Okay, well, that definitely counted as a slight relief. His uncle was just crazy and liked to shoot at teenagers with arrows, not actually a hunter. (What was his life, seriously?!?!) “Hunters? Oh, you know, deer and stuff. Isn’t it bow hunting season?” Stiles shot a shutupshutupshutup look at Isaac (who looked a little insulted, and he should be, because Scott was pretty much the only person who’d ever received that look before; feel the shame, Isaac, feel it).

From the looks of, oh, everyone, that excuse was being bought by approximately zero percent of the room. What the hell, at least he was trying! “And who doesn’t like those nifty new contacts?” he tried, quarter-heartedly (that’s about half of the half-hearted he had sported the previous sentence, for those keeping track at home).

“Bow hunting and contacts, huh? Sticking with that story?” And okay, wow, that was disturbing on so very many levels. Hawkeye had the exact same expression as his dad would’ve in any situation vaguely similar. It was his copyrighted Buuuuuullshit look.

“Werewolves,” was the contribution of Black Widow, whose arm hadn’t twitched from their position of pointing at his face (and one at Derek, but whatever, Derek would heal).

“Werewolves?” Hawkeye asked in disbelief, before pausing, considering (remembering all the insanity that went hand-in-hand with Loki, not that Stiles knew that). “Well, okay. But are you sure?”

“I’ve met a few,” Black Widow said vaguely, holstering the gun she had pointed at Derek. But not the one pointed at Stiles, which was just a pure jerk move, really. “Shooting him won’t do anything,” she added, probably to a look Hawkeye gave her. There still wasn’t the slightest bit of fear in posture (or her scent, but again, Stiles had no way of knowing that).

Stiles was getting fed up. “Can we maybe talk without both of the guns? I’m getting seriously tired of being held at gun point! This is the kind of thing that makes people turn into psychotic spree killers, okay?” He paused. “Again, no offense, Creepy Uncle Peter.”

Peter rolled his eyes at that one. “Technically not a spree killer. That definition foregoes pauses between kills,” he said nonchalantly, inspecting his nails. The sassy sonuvabitch was apparently going along with Stiles’s vague plan to shift attention of the death kind away from himself – Stiles gave him some points grudgingly, bringing Peter’s total up to -10982. Even after the recent everything, the dead-nurse-in-a-box (well, trunk) still popped up in Stiles’s nightmares sometimes.

The gun stayed trained on Stiles, but Black Widow’s attention did shift to Peter. “I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure of being introduced,” he said silkily. “Peter Hale. That’s my nephew, Derek,” he said, nodding his head at said nephew, whose eyes had gone all nice and alpha-red since the werewolf revelation, and who looked a second from going completely furry. “Whose pack you might want to stop threatening,” Peter added as an afterthought.

“There’s still the problem of the dead-“ (“OH MY GOD, THEY’RE NOT DEAD, WILL YOU STOP THAT?!”) “-dying teenagers in the middle of your floor,” Clint had to redirect everyone’s attention.

“I didn’t think superheroes were supposed to be assholes,” came a voice very welcome to Stiles’s ears. Erica had apparently come around enough to figure out what was going on, although there was still bloody foam around her mouth. He dropped down to help her sit up – Boyd was still out, but even in the short time they’d been having this bizarre stand-off, he looked a little better. Probably something weird and mystical to do with being near their alpha, Stiles figured. Or hoped. Because he knew that wounds made by an alpha didn’t heal nearly as fast, and he’d really rather they not be in agonizing pain for a few weeks.

“You can put the bow down, Katniss, we didn’t do this to them,” Stiles added, supporting most of Erica’s weight. “We’re not this rough on our allies.” Sometimes it was a close thing, and he probably shouldn’t mention Derek’s ‘Let’s all kill Lydia!’ crusade, but they didn’t legitimately want each other dead anymore.

“Good to see you, Batman,” Erica muttered, lifting her hand and running a finger over the vestiges of Stiles’s Psycho Grandpa-induced injuries.

“You should see the other guy,” he joked, getting a little smirk out of her.

Black Widow made a considering sound, and then glanced up at Hawkeye. They did some eye-contact-telepathy or something, and just like that, they disappeared. Actually disappeared, Stiles was pretty sure, because even the werewolves looked startled and confused by the sudden exit.

“Freakin’ superhero ninjas,” Stiles muttered.

Chapter Text

Stiles stared blankly at the stall wall next to him, thoughts bouncing around in a way that told him very clearly that he’d forgotten his second dose of Adderall that day (there was also a vague memory of licking the dust out of the bottle that morning – he wasn’t sure if that meant he needed a refill, or if he’d forgotten which was the sugar container again). He’d accidentally picked the stall where some stereotypically angst-ridden teenager had carved ‘KILL ME’ in large letters on the wall, cleverly hidden next to the toilet paper dispenser where the janitorial staff wouldn’t notice it. Stiles idly considered, as he had every time he’d sat there since the first week of freshman year, carving back ‘okay’, but his pocket knife was inconveniently in his locker.

Probably for the best. There was enough going on right then without taking up graffiti as a fun pastime.

As for why he was hiding in the boy’s restroom, that reason had a name. Or, more accurately, two names, although these days they might as well be called ScottandIsaac, so maybe his first thought worked too. They had spent all day bugging him about the whole surprise-uncle-who-is-a-superhero reveal, because he knew so much more than they did on this topic. He’d finally lost them with the cunning combination of having a class without either of them and dodging into the least used boy’s room immediately after. Sure, they could track him down with their wolfy powers of super-smelling, but Scott had confided in Stiles a while ago that he turned off his sense of smell near the bathrooms. It didn’t matter how obsessive the cleaning staff was (and they were, god they were), smells lingered. Stiles wasn’t above using his confession against him if it meant he could actually think for five seconds.

Seriously, Scott had been pissed about the dog bowl that one time? Just wait. That would be nothing compared to the upcoming wrath of Annoyed Stiles!

Annoyed Stiles should also start packing emergency Adderall, he mused to himself, realizing he had been staring at the sloppy ‘KILL ME’ for a good five minutes while his fingers tapped out the rhythm to “Shock the Monkey” on his knee.

At least there was no lacrosse practice today. Finstock either had the flu or a psychotic break, depending on who you asked, so there was a sub in economics and no lacrosse practice for the remaining few weeks of school. Stiles loved lacrosse and all, but even with his new found skills (or luck, probably luck), it was a headache he didn’t need on top of all the everything else going on.

SUPERHERO UNCLE. Superhero uncle who shot arrows at (well, near) Derek and now knew about werewolves. Paradigms had been shifted, and Stiles was still a little annoyed he hadn’t managed to catch the man and figure out a way to keep him from letting the Sheriff know about the whole supernatural underside to Beacon Hills.

(Stiles had given a lot of thought – like, at least an hour a day, a lot – to letting his dad in on the secret or keeping him in the dark. On the one hand, there was a lot out there in the night that could take him unawares; on the other, by staying in the dark, hunters would leave him alone, and at this point Stiles had had a lot more trouble with hunters than creatures, lizard boy included. Telling would heal the rift between father and son, but telling would also cause his dad to worry, and have far more fuel for that worry – because even right after the police station when he’d had to talk to the counselor, even right after the Gerard thing when he had been wallowing in his room, Stiles hadn’t seriously considered leaving his friends by themselves. Sue him, but he’d always thought he would be a hatstall between Hufflepuff and Slytherin. No matter how many times Scott left him out and left him behind, Scott was his brother; he wasn’t leaving him to his own devices. And the others had started growing on him, too, like a furry fungus.)

Well, enough hanging out in the bathroom for one day, he decided. There was only one class left in the day (even if it was with Harris), and then they were reconvening in the warehouse to check on Erica and Boyd and work out a way to find the two superheroes-slash-spy-assassins, if Peter hadn’t found them already.

…wait, sorry, he meant Creepy Uncle Peter. Proper titles were important.

Scott whined at him – a legitimate whine, if he started scooting his ass across the carpet, Stiles was done, whatever he’d been thinking half a second earlier – when he slid down next to him in chemistry. Isaac stared at the back of his head – Stiles could feel his eyes digging into his scalp, it was highly uncomfortable – and started kicking the back of his stool. He put up with it for about three seconds, at which point he stood up and stomped a table over before sitting down again. “Hey Danny, nice day isn’t it,” he said, with less of the carefree tone he’d been trying for and more of a stabbing-spree-imminent tone.

“Uh,” Danny said, giving him a weird look even by the standards of looks Danny gave him. Why couldn’t Danny have been a werewolf, anyway? He’d be more competent than any of the others except maybe Boyd (whose competence was in question with the whole ‘running away’ bit). He wouldn’t have gotten a hard-on for leather and slamming people into lockers. Danny would be the best werewolf ever.  “Not that I care,” and when Danny said that, it sounded polite; Stiles would ask why Jackson had never picked up that trait from his best friend, but he couldn’t really speak, since Scott was currently trying what looked like a cross between Morse code, sign language, and a seizure to communicate across the room to Stiles, “But did you and Scott have a falling out?”

Stiles sighed. “Nothing that drastic, he’s just… being Scott.” Annoying was the word he wanted to go for, but it seemed a little disloyal to just say that, especially when he knew Scott could hear him. That seemed to satisfy Danny, though (or he just decided he really didn’t care), and he turned back to his textbook with a small nod.

“Stiles,” Scott tried to hiss, thwarted by the half a classroom between them.

“Seriously, we can talk after school, Scott!” Stiles hissed back at him, not so thwarted by the distance because the recipient of his words happened to have super-hearing. Scott pouted, but managed to sit down.

“Aw, tough breakup?” Jackson sneered as he walked by to sit behind Danny. Lizard boy had bounced back pretty quickly from the you’re-a-killer-lizard-controlled-by-a-series-of-psychopaths-who-was-brought-back-by-true-love-and-is-now-a-werewolf-yay surprise – and everyone else not in the know had bounced back from his little bit of dead just as quickly. Stiles was kind of annoyed with everyone.

“Shut it, Godzilla,” Stiles gave a pretty good rendition of Derek’s growl. It was probably a bad choice of words, though, given the extremely pissy and slightly glowy-eyed look on Jackson’s face. Whatever, Stiles was in no mood to indulge Jackson’s Ugly Duckling tendencies right now. And he’d started keeping a packet of mountain ash in his back pocket since he realized (Creepy Uncle) Peter was going to be sticking around, so he’d just love for Jackson to come after him. Probably not what Deaton had meant it for, but a boy had a right to defend himself against PMSing former lizard people.

He didn’t realize he’d been staring the larger boy down until Jackson broke the eye contact with a huff. His victory was short-lived, though, since a minute later Lydia came in and greeted Jackson with a peck on the lips before sitting down next to him and getting out her books. Right, that.

Somehow he made it through the class without giving into the urge to poison either Jackson or Harris, although it was a pretty close thing. Stiles had to entertain himself with the thought that Harris was actually secretly saving his life, a la Snape, in order for the man to have any redeeming feature – and to keep Stiles from hoping Peter would come back to finish the job he’d started as a batshit crazy Alpha. Because murder is bad, Stiles, very bad.

He was actually a little impressed with the puppies he reluctantly called his friends; Scott and Isaac both managed to leave him alone while he visited his locker and walked to the parking lot. Mostly because they were bouncing on their heels next to his Jeep, but hey – small mercies.

“I hear one word about Hawkeye or anything I’ve told you I don’t know anything else about right now, and I’ll start planting wolfsbane in every patch of dirt in this town,” was the first thing he said as he unlocked the doors to his vehicle. They managed to look slightly abashed, and Stiles debated the merits of rubbing their noses in things more often – he had a rolled up newspaper all ready to go, too. The only thing keeping him from using it so far was that everyone except Scott would probably pull out his endocrine system for it.

Instead, the air on the way to the warehouse was filled with worrying about Erica and Boyd, and the alpha pack, and whether they could get the Avengers to take out the alpha pack. Which was a possibility, actually, if there was any trust at all between the ones they had met and any of them. Blood relations didn’t mean a whole hell of a lot, as Scott and Isaac should both know.

Still. It was worth a shot. (Stiles resolutely ignored the part of his brain comparing it to Sam and Dean going to the Trickster for help, pre-archangel reveal. He doubted any of the Avengers could put him in a Japanese game show, at the very least – although he wouldn’t put it past what he knew about Stark. The man had the money and the insanity.)

The warehouse wasn’t on fire when they pulled up – bad choice of words, Stiles, considering who was in the warehouse – or surrounded by police tape, so Stiles was feeling cautiously optimistic as he got out of the Jeep. And little things like this reminded him of why Scott was his best friend – as worried as the other boy was about Erica and Boyd, he waited for Stiles before going into the building. Isaac had taken off without a thought to the pathetic, slow human – which Stiles couldn’t fault him for, what with their main interaction in the recent past being Stiles scolding him like a worried mother when they were at the club (and why did the time when they were chasing down a paralytic lizard person seem like the good ol’ days, anyway?).

Boyd and Erica still resembled raw hamburger a bit too much for anyone’s stomach, but they were moving around and not actively leaving blood on anything, at least. At this rate, they may actually get all the way up to looking like car crash victims by the end of the week.

“Anything new on the home front?” Stiles asked as Isaac did a really invasive sniffing over the two injured wolves (Scott, he noticed, was doing the same thing but from a slightly more discrete distance).

“I found the hotel they’re staying at,” Peter said, somehow managing to lounge in a folding chair.

“And by ‘they’, I’m guessing you mean the one-third of the Avengers, not the alpha pack, Mr. Allergic-to-proper-nouns?” Stiles snarked back at him. There were all of three hotels in Beacon Hills, so he refused to be impressed. It would’ve taken him about an hour to figure that out, and he didn’t have super-senses.

Peter grinned at him, because apparently he was trying to get Stiles to associate snarkiness with creepiness, and continued, “They’re under the names Clint Barton and Natasha Romanov.”

“Well, that’s his real name, anyway,” Stiles offered up.

“Not Stilinski?” Poor, eternally confused Scott. Stiles could’ve sworn that was one of the things mentioned the previous night – or, for that matter, at some point over their childhoods – but a lot had been going on the previous night. And Scott had never shown any great ability to remember things from their shared bits of childhood before.

“No, my dad took my mom’s last name when they got married. Apparently to help hide from the mafia, which is not something I knew before yesterday. He was born Charles Barton,” Stiles said, because whatever. He had resigned himself to letting the pack know every last bit of information about him.

(On a similar note: Scott was such a liar with his ‘you’re not my alpha!’ crap. Sometimes Stiles thought the entire group should open a club together and just name it ‘Daddy Issues’, they were being just about as obvious. Well, except for Derek, whose part of the club should be more accurately titled ‘Entire Family Burned by Psycho Girlfriend – Except Sister, Who Was Murdered by Psycho Uncle – Issues’. A little wordy, but accurate.)

“So we can guess that’s probably the Black Widow’s real name, too,” Peter concluded.

“Aren’t they supposed to be spies or something? Why are they using real names?” Scott had a point. From what he remembered (which was most things, honestly), they were ‘spies or something’. Maybe if their names had been released after the Manhattan Invasion, this would make sense, but their identities were still technically secret – even if there were tumblrs dedicated to pictures of them getting coffee, no one had a name for them yet.

And he would be ignoring the back of his mind that was pessimistically saying that the reason they were using their real names was because they didn’t expect anyone in town to be left alive to identify them after whatever they were in town for happened. They were terrifying, but also technically the good guys.

Actually, good question, thanks attention deficit brain. “So wait, they didn’t know about werewolves – or at least that you guys are wolves – so what are they doing here in the first place?” Scott looked at him questioningly, and Stiles shook his head in response to the unasked question. “No, he seemed surprised to find my dad at all, let alone in town. That’s not what brought them here either.”

“If we answer that, they might leave,” Isaac piped up. “We could help them with what they’re doing, and they could help us with the alphas, and we can go our separate ways.” It was a good thought, although Derek had his brood face on. The meaning of this specific face was probably somewhere along the lines of ‘we don’t need their help!’, but Derek was smart enough not to actually say such blatant lies in a room full of people who could hear the lie. Well, people who could hear the lie and Stiles, who could use common sense and figure that out on his own. (Another pet theory of his was that the part of the brain that got reassigned to deal with super wolfy senses had previous been in charge of things like logic, but he figured that testing the theory would get him eaten in a very un-fun way.)

“Speaking of, anything on the alpha front?” Stiles turned expectantly to Derek and the two injured wolves curled around each other on the couch. Derek flashed red eyes at him, but Stiles – while in a better mood than earlier – was still not in the mood to indulge the puppies he was surrounded by. “It’s kind of hard to have strategy meeting when no one shares information,” he pointed out.

“You’re not pack, why should we share anything with you?” Stiles would’ve felt hurt by that, except the statement was pretty clearly directed at him and Scott, who shifted guiltily at the reminder that he had wanted to have his own pack.

“Because we have nothing better to do until Romeo gets back with Juliet?” Stiles offered, wondering if this counted as a point for his logic-replacement theory. “This isn’t your bildungsroman, Derek; no one’s going to accuse you of lacking agency if you accept help from someone.” That got a lot of weird looks that Stiles rolled his eyes at. “Look, the Adderall wore off in the middle of English class, okay? Anyway, there’s also the fact that every time we split up we get our asses handed to us on nice platters that tase and shoot us? That’s a big point if you ask me.”

“I really should’ve bit you instead of Scott,” Peter sighed to himself from his chair.

“No means no, Creepy Uncle Peter,” Stiles shot back, not even thinking about it. “Although why you thought asking me while standing next to the corpse of a nurse was a thing that would work, I’m sure I can never guess.”

“Wait, Peter offered to bite you?” Why did everyone look so surprised by that? God, he really was the Xander of this group – the thought of describing himself as a nummy snack had just crossed his mind, and now it wasn’t leaving.

“Can we find the topic and stay with it?” He poked his right pointer finger into his left palm repeatedly and emphatically. “Stick. To. The. Point.” Hey, it had worked for his kindergarten teacher. With all the kids except Stiles, but that was the general standard of ‘worked’ he usually went with. “I’m the one who forgot to take Adderall, not all of you.”

Scott seemed to agree, and faced Derek with a serious look on his face, one which surprisingly did not make him look like a potato. He was getting better at that. “Let’s just agree to work together for this, okay? Stiles is right. It took us too long to do everything with Jackson, I don’t think we have that time this time.” Of course, he managed to confuse himself on those last few words, if the look on his face was anything to go by, but still – Stiles was impressed with Scott, and gave him a mental gold star on the Chart of Maturity that Scott always thought he was joking about keeping track of. He’d been getting more and more stars in the last few weeks.

“So. Alpha information?” Stiles asked again, more hopefully this time.

“Not much,” Erica said from the couch, where she had been unusually quiet. But hey, capture and torture could take the words right out of you – it had with Stiles, and he hadn’t faced a fraction as much as the two on the couch had. “They moved us around constantly and kept injecting us with some form of wolfsbane – it wasn’t poisonous,” she quickly added, seeing the alarm on Stiles, Scott, and Isaac’s faces. “It just kept us sleepy and dulled our senses. There were six of them, and that’s all we really got.” She buried her face in Boyd’s shoulder, and Stiles added two more things they knew: the alphas were strong, and smart.

Peter was next, and just shook his head. “I don’t have many contacts left,” what with the being in a coma for six years and then being a crazed killer and then being actually dead went unsaid, and probably unthought-of by everyone except Stiles, who felt the need to remind himself of these things because otherwise he was going to wind up BFFs with Peter, which was wrong on pretty much every level. “But the word on the grapevine,” here he nodded in the direction of his laptop, “Is that they’ve decided that everything in Beacon Hills is getting too much attention, so they intend to raze the supernatural part of it to the ground before more hunters get involved.”

“Wait, the werewolf grapevine is IRC?” Stiles asked, having squinted to see a familiar-looking box on the laptop screen.

“You’re surprised?” Peter asked drolly.

“…I guess not.”

“Who was telling us to stick to the point?” Derek asked dryly.

“It’s different when I do it, I have a legitimate excuse!” Stiles defended himself. No one seemed to be buying it. Which was just mean, he had a medical condition, there were papers and medical records to prove it. “Anyway, no time like the present, I guess,” he said, clapping his hands together and moving towards to the door.

“Where are you going?” Derek growled in his general direction. ‘Where do you think you’re going’ was generally the more accepted term for dramatic situations like this, but Stiles would go with it.

“Someone wasn’t paying attention,” Stiles sing-songed, shutting up when Derek snapped at him. Seriously, they were regressing further every second, one of these days he was just going to give up (on his life) and sign them all up for puppy kindergarten. “Remember the whole idea we just decided on, with the mutual scratching of backs?”

Derek rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but where are you going?”

“Speciest,” Stiles retorted quickly. It always came back to the fact that Stiles was a fragile breakable human, always. “He’s my uncle; I’m pretty much the only one who has to go.” That got a skeptical look from a number of people in the room, but hey, it wasn’t exactly hypocritical. He hadn’t said any of his musings about blood ties not necessarily having ties – at least he didn’t think he had – and everyone knew it’s only hypocritical if you say it out loud. “Plus, they’re technically human, if scarily competent human. I’m sure they’d appreciate not having to face a wall of unemotive wolfishness.” Because really, the only one of them that could communicate at all well was Peter, and that was just… so much of a bad idea, all over the place.

Derek stared him down for a few seconds before grunting an assent.

With a little more arguing, they decided Scott and Derek would be coming, too. Derek was the alpha, of course; and Scott was sort of an alpha, depending on whether he remembered his dramatic refusals to join the dark side or not. Plus, someone had to protect Boyd and Erica, and Derek apparently didn’t completely trust Peter, so Isaac got that job, not that he particularly minded. Really, despite the initial… mess, Derek had chosen well when he turned Isaac.

The showdown at the warehouse had definitely been… entirely nothing Clint had been expecting. The dead – or dying, whichever – teenagers on the floor, his nephew, werewolves… Ever since Loki, everything in his reality had gone upside down. Sometimes, in the back of his mind, he suspected that Natasha had never broken the spear’s spell, and this was all some hallucination brought on by Loki’s insanity.

The second they secured the hotel room, Natasha started dialing Coulson, bringing him up on a video screen (despite the almost guarantee that either Stark or JARVIS would be eavesdropping – he took the view that if it was his technology, eh was allowed to remotely access it whenever he felt like it).

Coulson leaned back in the desk chair that was miles and miles more comfortable than the one he’d used prior to being stabbed (Clint should know, he was the one who’d tested it out before Tony bought it), still looking like shit despite the months since his momentarily-fatal stabbing. “Werewolves,” was all Clint was able to manage.

Coulson didn’t even blink, but despite that and the shitty wireless connection, Clint could read the surprise in the set of his shoulders. They’d only worked together for a decade, after all.

“Werewolves, and Clint’s nephew,” Natasha added dryly.

Now the surprise was plain to read for anyone, not just Clint and Natasha. “I was unaware you had a nephew,” Coulson offered calmly after a moment.

“Funny thing, so was I,” Clint said, eye roll obvious enough in his tone that he didn’t bother moving his eyes at all.

“I’m sending you all the information we have,” Natasha said as her fingers flew nimbly across the tablet she was holding. Clint was momentarily jealous; he always wound up selecting fifteen things he didn’t mean to when he tried to move quickly like that.

“So, Vadivitnis Stilinski – that’s a hell of a mouthful, I can see why the kid goes by Stiles!” Tony Stark’s face – of course – popped up in the corner, grinning demonically. Clint had told Fury not to accept anything from Stark Industries (okay, Maria had told him, and Clint had nodded emphatically from the corner, because at the time he’d still been under orders not to speak to Fury – something to do with the Nerf assault the previous week). “Sixteen years old, only child of Sheriff Charles Barton Stilinski and Sabina Stilinski, deceased. 4.0 GPA, clean record until a few weeks ago,” Stark rattled off, not bothering with the pesky things mortals called ‘breathing’.

Coulson looked like he was regretting not inventing a way to taser someone through the internet, as Stark paused for extreme dramatic effect. “Share everything or leave, Stark.”

Stark pouted. “You’re no fun, Agent. Fine. A couple of weeks ago, a restraining order was issued against Mr. Stilinski and his BFF Scott McCall, on behalf of a Jackson Whittemore. Apparently they decided kidnapping was a cool hobby for cool people,” he added. There was some off-screen shuffling, and he continued brightly. “Oh! And a little while ago Jackson Whittemore was declared dead, and was back at school two days later. That’s not suspicious at all.”

“Probably a werewolf thing. Do werewolves come back from the dead?” Clint asked, turning to Natasha, the only one who had any knowledge of the existence of werewolves.

She shrugged, flicking through files on her tablet. “Don’t know. I didn’t spend long talking to the one I met.” In a perfect world, she’d be sharpening a knife threateningly while saying that, but the world of espionage had upgraded to software. Menacingly writing code didn’t really have the same amount of sheer threat.

Clint had finally, reluctantly, turned on his own tablet, and carefully opened the files everyone was going through (for once not opening up Angry Birds in the process). Pretty much everything on his screen wouldn’t be at all legal for Stark to access, but there wasn’t much of a reason to point that out – Stark was less a private citizen, more a force of nature.

He opened the file Stark had thrown together on his nephew. It included his police record (like he’d said, nothing until the restraining order), school records (something Stark hadn’t mentioned – Stiles had what was probably a local record for number of detentions gained in less than two years, mostly from an ‘Adrian Harris’, and a lot of notes about his… odd choices of essay topics), medical record (pretty normal amount of broken bones for a kid who seemed to be as much trouble as Clint could guess from their two brief meetings – he hadn’t really thought that his brother would be anything like their father, but it was a relief to know for sure), and a Facebook profile (which apparently, for the amount of use it got, only existed for the purpose of playing Zombie Lane, really?).

“So he’s a teenager,” Coulson said, not rolling his eyes out of sheer force of will.

“Who hangs out with werewolves,” Stark didn’t want that part to be forgotten.

“Werewolves or not, he’s not why SHIELD decided to send agents to Beacon Hills.”

“Deaton wouldn’t say anything,” Natasha reported, focus still on her tablet. She looked very industrious, but Clint could almost guarantee she was playing Fruit Ninja – something about the splattered fruit juice on the back wall being viscerally satisfying, she had said once. Clint hadn’t pressed for further explanations. “There was a civilian in the office, so I had to be… subtle.”

“Subtle like a needle to the neck,” Stark muttered. Natasha gave him the ‘oh my god, grow up’ look that she usually reserved for Clint when he was harassing junior agents. Of course, anyone else would read it as a death glare, but Clint knew she was a big old softie.

He would never say that, though, because he liked his liver where it was.

“In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that the civilian also turned out to be a werewolf,” Clint added helpfully.

“Scott McCall,” was Natasha’s addition – she’d apparently paused Fruit Ninja long enough to pull the records back up. “The friend mentioned in the restraining order.”

Stark seemed way too delighted by the way everything was lining up so perfectly, if his little hand-clap of glee was anything to by. “I can’t wait for the next episode!” he said, hopefully to himself because Clint was blatantly refusing to acknowledge it.

“I’m going to go talk to Deaton again,” Natasha said, closing the tablet. The word ‘talk’ only lacked verbal quotation marks because Natasha disdained them; the air of menace was still there, and at least half manufactured for Stark’s sake. Despite the saving-the-world heroics, she still delighted in freaking him out as much as possible.

Teaming up to save the world had forced them to learn to act as a team, sure (and they were a pretty damn good team when it came to that kind of apocalypse-y stuff), but it didn’t smooth over personality conflicts. Natasha liked to terrify Stark, Stark liked to pull Roger’s (thankfully metaphorical) pigtails, Banner hid in his lab and Clint hid in the air ducts, Thor was almost definitely trolling everyone because Clint had had spied on him with Jane and Thor knew how to operate the TV perfectly well, and no one had really forgiven Fury for faking Coulson’s death, however temporarily. Stark was making noises about moving everyone into his eyesore of a tower, too – Banner had already been dragged in, but the rest of them lived in various SHIELD lodgings (except Thor, who generally stayed at Jane’s when he was on planet because no one was going to argue with a demigod).

“Bring me back something pretty!” Stark shouted after her as she left the room. Clint’s eye muscles were really getting a workout with all the rolling they’d been doing lately.

“Agent Barton?” Coulson asked.

“I’m gonna try Morell. She’s not technically SHIELD, but she’s worked with us before,” Clint explained off of his handler’s questioning expression (one eyebrow had ticked up a quarter of a millimeter). “Tomorrow we’re doing more canvassing of the town, see if anyone has seen something out of the usual.”

“Like werewolves?” Stark piped up. Clint and Coulson both ignored him.

“Report back tomorrow,” Coulson instructed him before cutting the connection – thankfully taking the little corner video of Stark with him.

Chapter Text

“So, let’s cut down on the menacing a bit, whaddya say? We’re here to be helpful, not threaten to rip out their throats.” Derek looked like he was seriously considering getting a head start on that second bit, so Stiles hurried on. “Let me do the talking, okay?”

Derek snorted. “We don’t want to still be there at midnight.” Stiles gave him a few points, because that was about as much snark as Derek was able to handle - (Creepy Uncle) Peter had obvious gotten most of the sass genes in the family.

“More importantly, we don’t want them shooting us, hence,” he waved a hand around in front of his body to indicate himself. “Because you and Scott don’t have such a good track record with that. No offense, Scott.”

Scott shrugged a little, not looking offended. They’d established this kind of pecking order early on in their friendship - Stiles would do all the talking, blathering on until whoever they were attempting to bullshit was ready to agree just to shut him up, and then Scott would swoop in with the puppy dog eyes and the sheer earnestness that made them feel bad if they didn’t agree. It was a lethal combination that people still fell for after knowing they’d been tricked. Except for their parents, of course - Melissa McCall was able to stare Stiles down until he shut up, and the Sheriff had years of practice tuning him out. (They still got away with a lot, because the Sheriff seemed to think Scott was incapable of lying, and Melissa had pretty much given up years ago on trying to reign in the amazing Scott-and-Stiles duo.)

Derek was more of an unknown in this situation, but Stiles was pretty confident that he could predict his actions. Loom menacingly like the creepy stalker he was, growl and flash his eyes a few times, and threaten Stiles with severe (and occasionally creative) bodily harm if he happened to reveal more about the pack than he thought was necessary. He wondered if Derek knew how predictable he was getting.

Stiles was first out of the Camero - he had called shotgun before Scott could open his mouth, which meant Scott had spent the first half of the trip sulking in the backseat - and he didn’t bother waiting before bounding over to the hotel. It went by the ever-so-imaginative name of ‘Beacon Hills Hotel and Spa’, and Stiles spent a moment working the mental image of an alpha’d out Derek taking a mud bath out of his head before he could continue. Technically speaking, of the three hotels in Beacon Hills only this one was actually a hotel - the others were roadside motels, although with a generally better reputation than most (Beacon Hills, somehow not the number one stop for prostitutes, who knew?). The Hotel and Spa tended to get more use out of the spa half of the building, although the fancy rooms did occasionally get rented out for various business meetings - there was a surprisingly important technology sector in the area, despite the relative sleepiness of the town. And they had some fairly popular lawyers, too, like Mr. Whittemore - he got clients from all over their half of the state, which is why it was such an incredibly bad idea to kidnap Jackson, lizard person or not. So despite its fairly small size, Beacon Hills was a beacon (heh, see what he did there?) for business in the surrounding areas, which all meant that the Hotel and Spa was big and expensive looking, with fairly good security. Thankfully, Stiles had spent most of his childhood ingratiating himself with everyone in town (okay, so he mostly annoyed the crap out of them; they still knew him and were pretty sure he was harmless), so he just waved to Mr. Ian Woon, who was working the front desk (technically) and texting furiously (actually). “Hey Ian! How are you this fine, fine almost-summer day?”

Ian glared up at him, fingers not pausing as they flew over his phone. “Sheriff’s son and friend. Why are you here?” (Derek had hung back with a particularly disbelieving look on his face when Stiles had claimed that he ‘had this’, upon seeing who was working reception. Stiles had pointed out that Ian was both straight and married, so Derek’s technique wouldn’t work, so he could just shut up with his facial expressions already.). Ian was viciously against pleasantries and beatings of or around any bush.

"I may have some perfectly delicious gossip for you, if you happen to have an elevator key I could borrow for an hour or so," Stiles wheedled, leaning forward in a what he had planned to be a smooth way, but failed when he misjudged the distance between him and the edge of the desk, and just barely kept from falling over.

Ian tapped the fingers not still typing up a storm on the counter. “Hm. How juicy?”

There were two avenues he could go with. One might piss off his dad, one might bring tons of press coverage and piss off the people they were here to beg the help of. He so very much wanted to go with the option that didn’t further wreck his relationship with his dad, but that would be all kinds of counter-productive right now.

And anyway, he could always say he had told Scott. That was a really good excuse for why everyone in town would know.

“Yesterday-ish you got two new arrivals, right?” Stiles asked, seemingly off-handedly. “A scary redheaded woman and a guy who looks like a boxer from the special forces?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny,” Ian said. By which he meant ‘yes’.

“The guy is my dad’s brother,” Stiles said bluntly. Surprise family reveals should always be done like ripping off a band-aid, he always thought. Well, not always, because he hadn’t given it any thought at all until less than twenty-four hours ago, but that didn’t sound nearly as catchy.

Ian blinked a few times; hand on his phone completely still for once. “What, really?”

“Yep. They haven’t seen each other in over twenty years, it was all very dramatic,” Stiles said, because the estrangement part of the story both made it juicier and explained why no one in the gossipy little town knew the Sheriff had a brother.

“…huh.” Ian reached into one of the drawers and pulled out a key card. “372,” he said as he slid it across the counter. “And I never saw you.”

“Got it, my good man!” Stiles said, saluting as he wheeled around. The elevators were out of sight of the front desk, although you technically had to walk by it to get to them, so Derek was able to join them. The key card only let them access the elevator - rooms had separate key cards, because the staff of the hotel thought that paranoia was the same thing as security - but hopefully they’d answer a friendly knock on the door.

Stiles refused to personally acknowledge the whirlwind of gossip that he had just set off that would probably lead to his dad being asked about his brother five times before he made it home. There was a time and a place for worrying about that, and hey, his dad had never said it was really a secret or anything.

(He was getting a little too good at pushing down and ignoring feelings of guilt, but he wasn’t going to be worried until he stopped feeling it to begin with.)

“372, here we are,” he said unnecessarily, since everyone could see the shiny brass numbers. He took a deep breath and knocked.

***

Deaton had refused to give a single straight answer - a lot of mystic ‘you’ll know soon enough’ crap, apparently. And he was good enough - and they were supposed to stay on a friendly level, unless given the go-ahead - that Natasha couldn’t use any real force. Normally she would just crawl inside the mark’s head and make them her play-thing, but they knew very little about Alan Deaton. Most of his file was blacked out even at Coulson’s level of clearance, and Fury had been extremely vague about any details. Natasha was beginning to get very, very annoyed; she hated flying blind when she didn’t need to be, especially when up against someone who apparently loved keeping his mystique.

Clint hadn’t gotten much more from Jeanette Morell. She’d told him that she didn’t know the specifics of anything that was going on, and that he should talk to Derek Hale if he wanted to know any details. Considering the way they had left things with that exact person the previous night, Clint figured that was probably a lost cause. So they were, essentially, right back at the beginning of their investigation.

Asking careful questions around town - like most small towns, they weren’t particularly talkative with people from out of town asking weird questions, but the official badges helped quite a bit with that, even if most people hadn’t heard of SHIELD - had netted a whole series of stories of weirdness in the small town. A number of people mentioned Jackson Whittemore’s miraculous return from the dead, there had been an incident a few weeks earlier with a drug causing mass hallucinations and paralysis at a local club, and, of course, there were the murders.

The murders covered the last three months or so, and seemed to be in a few sets. The first set were originally thought of as mountain lion attacks, but eventually turned out to be the work of a Kate Argent, who was covering up her tracks from a house fire she had set six years ago that had killed a number of people. She was found dead, presumably killed by the missing-and-formerly-comatose Peter Hale - oh, did Clint mention that the house Kate Argent had set on fire was the Hale house, and the only survivors were Peter, Derek, and Laura Hale? Or that Laura Hale was the first death in the more recent deaths?

Yeah. Not suspicious at all with what they had run into the previous night.

Then there had been another series, all seemingly connected - originally to the high school chemistry teacher (who had also been a suspect in the previous deaths; seriously, what did it take to get fired in this town?), until something had broken the pattern. That situation had resolved itself at the Sheriff’s station, where all the deputies had been killed and the Sheriff, Sheriff’s son, the son’s best friend and the best friend’s mother had all been held captive by the high school student who had committed the murders. After escaping (and leaving behind his captives), the boy had apparently drowned himself.

Nothing about this place was normal; Clint wasn’t sure how they were supposed to find a tiny bit of Loki’s insanity in between the sheer insanity that the werewolves apparently brought with them.

They’d managed to get one piece of good, useful information: the day that the radar system had blipped, there had been a rave in town that nearly all of the teenagers and young adults had attended (and a number of actual adults, according to one girl who had apparently been ‘skeeved out’ by seeing a teacher there). Someone had died at the rave, too; part of the second series of deaths.

They had reported back to Coulson - thankfully without any Stark interference for once, Pepper had probably yelled at him for eavesdropping - and all three of them tried to make sense of the separate threads of weirdness.

“Loki couldn’t have been doing anything with the Daehler kid,” Clint pointed out, “Or there wouldn’t have been just that one notice. He’d already killed a number of people before that point, too.”

“Maybe he was using the rave as a cover for something else,” was Natasha’s suggestion. “It distracted at least half the population, including the local werewolves.” It wasn’t hard to read between the lines and figure out that they had had something to with Daehler, just by the reports from the showdown at the sheriff’s station.

“So you think he might’ve set something up to happen later?”

“We don’t know,” Coulson said. “Thor has gone back to Asgard to check that Loki is still restrained, and to see if he can get any information about the situation. He’ll come to you as soon as he gets back.”

That was something, at least. Maybe Thor would know why his brother was apparently interested in werewolves – and it had to be the werewolves, everything even slightly interesting in Beacon Hills came back to them.

There was a brisk knock at the door, three quick raps. Definitely not the guy who’d brought them room service the last few times they ordered - his knock was more tentative, and muffled a bit by the white gloves he wore (Clint had always thought that those white gloves were just a funny thing they added into movies; he had no idea employees actually wore them at classy hotels and places pretending to be classy hotels).

They also hadn’t ordered anything.

Natasha shared a quick look with Clint, and she blacked out the laptop screen and muted it - Coulson would be able to see and hear everything, but it would look like the computer was in sleep mode - before pulling one of her many handguns and resting it out of sight, but with a quick line to the door.

Clint opened the door quickly, so as to hopefully surprise whoever was on the other side. That didn’t turn out to be strictly necessary, because grinning at him from the other side of the door was his nephew, flanked by Scott McCall and Derek Hale.

Chapter Text

“We come in peace?” Stiles tried, attempting to break the tension that had quickly fallen across the door jamb and spilled into the hallway like some overblown metaphor. Or simile. Which one was ‘like or as’, again? Also, his brain immediately added ‘shoot to kill, shoot to kill, shoot to kill’ (because “Star Trekkin’” was a great song, okay?) so how helpful his comment actually was to that endeavor…

“Seriously, we just want to talk. Talking is good, right? Talking is a perfectly normal activity between members of super-secret government agencies and members of the supernatural, it means there’s less shooting, ripping of throats, general wailing, and rending of garments.” He wondered if he should’ve mentioned pearl-clutching in there as well, but figured he’d gotten the vast majority of his point across. Assuming he had a point. He really should've gotten Derek to swing by his house before the hotel so he could grab his Adderall – or maybe duct tape.

Hawkeye shifted to one side so that he could share a glance with Black Widow without having to actually turn his back on anyone. A moment of nonverbal communication, or maybe telepathy, Stiles didn’t know their lives, and Hawkeye moved further to the side of the door and waved them in wordlessly.

Their room was in fact a nice little suite with a sitting area and couch and small kitchenette, and doors branching off to two bedrooms and a bathroom (well, most likely; the doors were closed so Stiles couldn’t say for sure, so they could be three torture chambers for all he knew, but that didn’t seem like it would come standard at a hotel). The Black Widow had the lone desk chair turned around so it was facing the door, not the desk, and Hawkeye went to loom next to her. Which would be even more threatening if Stiles wasn’t pretty sure that of Derek, Scott, and himself, all three of them were taller than his uncle. Plus, there was the fact that Derek almost definitely had a closet full of medals from the Looming Olympics (not a real thing, but Stiles would pay good money to make it a real thing).

“…so, this is awkward and all,” Stiles said after a few minutes of silence. Without waiting for an invitation (that would never come), he and Scott had sat down on the couch that was conveniently facing the chair Black Widow had chosen to sit in (and where she was managing to exude far more threat while sitting than Hawkeye did while standing; Stiles felt for the guy, he really did, he knew all about being the least-threatening person in the room, like right now). Derek, no prizes for guessing, was doing his own looming from behind the couch. At least that meant there was a whole couch for him to have to go through first if he decided he needed to escalate the violence.Not that it would slow him down, but whatever. Stiles was willing to ignore that for his own peace of mind.

Also, he was so proud of himself for not saying ‘hawkward’. So proud.

“I dunno, I’d consider ‘awkward’ to be the fact that all of your names keep popping up in connection with murders,” Hawkeye said, apparently equally tired of sitting (standing) around in tense silence. His arms were crossed, and the expression on his face was disturbingly similar to the Sheriff’s bullshit-detected face. It was a little weird that Stiles had to keep reminding himself that yes, they were brothers, but hey. He'd spent sixteen years thinking his dad was an only child, adjustments took a while to make.

“That was because of werewolves - not us-werewolves,” he added quickly, gesturing to Scott and Derek, before the trained assassins got the wrong idea, “And hunters. And a kamina, but seriously, that’s all dealt with. So not an issue anymore.” Derek shot him a look for the skip his heart took for that lie, but whatever. The whole thing where they never had found Gerard Argent’s body was a crisis for another time. “All the killers have been caught and taken care of, pinky-promise.” For emphasis, he stuck out the pinky finger of his right hand and held it out with a hopeful pout.

Now that he thought about it, ‘taken care of’ probably wasn’t the best choice of words if he was looking to convince them that there wasn’t anything they needed to look at too deeply in the recent past.

“What about Peter Hale? He’s listed as missing from the long term care unit, but I’m pretty sure ‘Creepy Uncle Peter’ was just fine last night.” Clint ignored the outstretched finger, and Stiles pulled his hand back with a bigger pout.

“Peter is… a different, insanely complicated story, that totally isn’t the topic of tonight’s discussion,” Stiles said after a long moment of trying to figure out how to answer. He was oddly reluctant to mention the fact that Peter had risen from the dead not that long ago, and it was only partially because of what Derek might do to him for mentioning it. Evil or not (and the guy had killed his own niece, Stiles was leaning in the direction of evil), Peter was the only one in the area who knew anything about werewolves and was willing to share - being legitimately forthcoming and helpful would probably give Deaton hives, and Derek was allergic to any form of communication that didn’t involve broken bones. Plus, there was only so much Derek had learned by the time he was sixteen. The part of him that was the son of a sheriff itched at letting Peter run around like he hadn’t done anything, but pragmatism wasn’t a bad impulse, per se.

“So what is the topic of this discussion?” Black Widow asked, and oh god if they were sticking around he was going to have to stop following a couple of tumblrs ASAP, before she found out and murdered him in his sleep.

Actually, he should probably unfollow all the Avengers-related tumblrs on his dash. Although his followers might be disappointed if he shut down the fyeahmysterioussuitguy blog. Eh, he could give it to someone else to run if it kept his organs from being exposed to the breeze.

“We’ll help you with whatever you’re in town for if you help us deal with the people who came close to killing those teenagers you saw last night,” Stiles said bluntly.

There was some more non-verbal communication between the superheroes, and Scott started shifting awkwardly next to Stiles on the couch, hopefully because of the tension and not because he needed to use the bathroom.

Finally, Black Widow nodded, and when Hawkeye turned back to them it was with considerably less tension in his frame, making the wolves subconsciously relax (well, making Scott relax at least; Stiles was about ninety percent sure Derek didn’t actually know how to relax, subconsciously or otherwise). Apparently they had come to the pretty obvious realization that the whole ‘werewolf’ thing made good enough blackmail that they didn’t need to be worried about them running off with whatever information was handed out. “Loki’s up to something in Beacon Hills, we don’t know what yet,” was all he said, but really, that was all he needed to say.

When he was a kid, Stiles had read a lot of Norse mythology - originally he’d read a lot of Greek mythology, but he got tired of pages and pages of people just banging their relatives, and had looked for something different. Back in those days, when myths were myths and not letting alien hordes loose on Manhattan, Stiles had always kind of felt that Loki got a bad rap. Okay, the Baldur thing was probably going a bit far (and especially the tricking a blind guy to do it; own up to your murders, man!), but it was also very clever. And Stiles had an appreciation for evil-but-clever - just look at how long he’d been in love with Lydia Martin, for one thing. And just everything to do with Vali and Narvi was horrifying overkill in every sense. Also, after reading the myth with the dwarves and Sif’s hair, he’d had nightmares for a week about getting his lips sown shut just for tricking someone. That had gone a long way to make him sympathize with the mythological figure.

Then, of course, Manhattan and everything had happened, and Stiles had actually spent a decent chunk of (pre-werewolf, post-alien) time surfing the internet and trying to see if anyone knew how close the myths were to the real thing. The general consensus was that no one knew, although apparently Thor and Loki were brothers in the real world? (That just added a whole new level of fucked-up to the dwarf story, if it was true, because brothers don’t let brothers sew their lips shut. Or something.)

Either way, even at his most innocent in any of the stories, Loki caused a shit-ton of trouble. Which was not something they needed more of in Beacon Hills, now or at any time in the near future.

“So, we help you with whatever Loki’s doing, and you help us?” Stiles asked after a second of sharing a ‘what the fuck are we supposed to do against a Norse god?’ glance with Scott. Derek hadn’t shifted from his glower - there was a good chance his face had, in fact, stuck that way.

“You never said what it was you needed help with,” Hawkeye pointed out.

“There’s a pack of alphas that want to wipe out everything supernatural in Beacon Hills. Apparently we’ve been ‘attracting too much attention’, but that is so not our fault,” Stiles defended. Because it wasn’t their fault, not really, except for Peter, but even that was pre-death, crazy Peter. Resurrected Peter was mostly just creepy as hell, not outright crazy and evil. Well, less evil and maybe not crazy. Time would tell on that particular point.

“A pack of alphas?” Sheer confusion from the other side. Sheer implied confusion, anyway, since there was approximately zero percent change on either of their faces.

“It’s a pack of werewolves made entirely of alpha werewolves.” Derek finally decided to join the conversation. “Alphas are bigger and stronger, more vicious, than beta werewolves.”

Stiles nodded emphatically. “It took five of us to take out one alpha the last time,” he added. “We don’t exactly have thirty people to help this time, as much as Derek tried to fix that.” That did get a glare from Mr. Cranky Pants Alpha. “…but that’s yet another irrelevant story,” he hurried on before Derek could move on to growling. (He didn’t actually growl as much as Stiles liked to over-dramatically claim in his own mind or when talking to Scott, but when he did it was pretty intensely terrifying for fragile young humans such as himself.)

“If they want to get rid of all the supernatural beings in town, why didn’t they just kill those two from the warehouse? I’m assuming they’re also werewolves,” Black Widow said suddenly.

Stiles’s brain actually stopped for a second, gears squealing exactly like a cartoon. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Oh god, was Scott’s derp catching? Or was he sucking out all of Stiles’s logic like a bizarre IQ point Dorian Gray? (Or, probably more accurately, maybe Stiles had just had a lot on his mind lately, and wasn’t rolling with the punches as well as he thought he was?) “Freaking Peter and werewolf IRC,” he muttered, smacking himself in the forehead. He wasn’t comforted by the way that no one else in the pack seemed to have realized it, either - Derek thought the solution to poison spreading up his arm was to get the kid who accused him of murder just the week before to chop off his arm, Erica and Boyd were still unconscious more often than not, and Isaac had at one point decided to murder someone because he wasn’t very good at writing.

And yes, Stiles knew that had just been a snarky comment, but whatever.

See, this is why they needed Lydia in the pack. Jackson could come too, but only because he’d probably bring Danny, and then there’d be two logical, smart, good-looking people in the pack! That’d balance out Jackson’s doucheyness for sure. But Lydia was very firm on the ‘you can all fuck off for a while’ front when she and Jackson had left the OK Corral that night - apparently she didn’t want to join a pack that included a member who had hijacked her brain to resurrect himself, four members who had wanted to kill her, and all the members left had been keeping her in the dark about things that involved her probably more than anyone else.

Really, it was a mystery why anyone wouldn’t want to join such a lovely pack, Stiles thought, heavy on the sarcasm directed at himself.

“So they’re here for some as-of-yet-undefined reason that includes torturing people and then letting them go,” Stiles summarized. "Either way, the torture puts them pretty firmly on the side of not good."

“They left their mark on the door to my house,” Derek added after a moment - and Stiles was never going to get past how light his voice was, especially compared to his looks and overall demeanor. He kept expecting to see a guy who looked like Jackson, not a Neanderthal pin-up model. “As a warning. Otherwise they wouldn’t bother putting it up until after we were all dead.”

“Cheerful,” Stiles muttered to himself. But then, so was everything about Derek.

“We can figure out what they want,” Black Widow said after another eye-conversation with Hawkeye. “You’ll need to tell us what werewolves are capable of if we’re going to be much help, however.”

Derek looked like he wanted to object rather strongly, which Stiles got. Handing out laminated placards of your biggest weaknesses, not a very charming idea. But they were superheroes! Maybe he’d spent too much of his childhood with his Batman and Superman and Captain America comics, but he refused to give up his belief that superheroes were good, and could overcome any evil. That thing with the mountain ash had proved the power of belief, hadn’t it?

Black Widow seemed to have something very specific on her mind, though. “For example: how did you detect me at the warehouse?”

“You were upwind,” Scott said, having (hopefully) worked through his somewhat awe-struck silence. “We could smell you.”

She looked minutely taken aback. Stiles could understand that - she was a superspy, probably knew very well not to wear perfume or anything like that, but sadly nothing was a match for the super-sniffers. (Although Stiles had been playing around with an idea to fix that, but it was going to take a lot more research and wheedling information out of Deaton before he could get anywhere with it.)

“What does she smell like?” Hawkeye, on the other hand, seemed to be holding back snickers. Stiles could tell because of the very familiar traces of his dad’s ‘I’m not laughing at you’ face. And man, he needed to come up with a better way of categorizing expressions, this was getting wordy.

“Kinda… like death,” Scott said hesitantly, because who wanted to tell a chick they smelled like death? Especially one that could kill you. “I think it was mostly on your outfit, though, because you don’t smell like that now,” he hastened to reassure her, looking a little anxious. “But you did at the warehouse, and at Deaton’s.”

“Speaking of, has he said anything about the alphas? Because that would be super useful right about now,” Stiles asked.

“Wait, the reason Deaton’s giving us the run-around is werewolves?” Hawkeye said suddenly, looking equal parts surprised and annoyed by this information. “He couldn’t just tell us about werewolves?”

“I have a theory that when he was younger Deaton was cursed by an evil witch to never be able to just say something,” Stiles said. Granted, it was one of many, many equally bizarre theories, and the more realistic one was that he just loved the ‘mysterious mentor’ trope, but hey. It was a possibility. “Either that, or he’s actually a sphinx. I haven’t figured it out yet.”

Hawkeye snorted, and Stiles liked to think that Black Widow looked amused too.

“Wait, how do you know Dr. Deaton? Is… is he part of SHIELD?” Scott sounded incredulous.

"Retired," Hawkeye said.

"What?!" Interrobangs were a form of punctuation invented with people like Scott in mind, Stiles was pretty sure. Not that he wasn't having the exact same reaction, or anything, because what the hell, Dr. Deaton was part of SHIELD?! Actually, he didn't know why he was so shocked. It was Deaton, after all.

"So..." Stiles said offhandedly, "Was he ever cursed by an evil witch?"

The Black Widow seemed seriously unimpressed with him, so Stiles quickly shut his mouth. He'd long ago learned to obey the silent commands and wishes of dangerous redheads who could turn him into a fancy hat to wear at dinner parties quicker than he could blink.

He wouldn’t make a very good hat.

Hawkeye, on the other hand, shot a quick grin at him. Oh hey, his uncle could look something other than completely terrifying! That was more of a shock than anything else.

"All right," Stiles said, clapping his hands together as he went for the five-hundredth summary of the night. "The breakdown of events: we have Loki, or at least Loki's magic, floating around town doing something that we don't know. Second, we have a group of alphas, probably six of them, but there could be more, who knows, who are in town, and we don't know why. I'm thinking the lack of intel is probably bad," he summed up for the group.

"Feel free to go ask them what they're doing," Derek muttered. Which, hey, was a lot more roundabout and subtle than most of his death threats. So kudos to him, maybe.

"Someone has their grumpy pants on today," was what Stiles said out loud, cheerfully and without regard to his own life. That was another problem with not having Adderall - he hadn't managed to magic any up from nothing in the hours since school, so he had passed through the bitchy period of being off his meds and was well into the super goofy point of his day. The main problem with this? His inner monologues pretty rapidly became outer monologues, and most of the things inside his head were things that would (and should) get him stabbed by people around him. He didn't think that was a problem most people had with Adderall or other legal versions of meth (accurate description, shut up), but it had always been a problem of Stiles'. Probably also had something to do with the way he hardly ever actually slept, and usually relied on his medication to keep him awake for five out of seven days of the week.

Scott, ever the quick puppy, managed to yank Stiles out of the way before Derek could slam him into the wall, though. "Thanks Scott, you're my BFF," Stiles told him, still just as cheerful. Because really, a Stiles-sized imprint in the wall wasn't a good first step to their partnership with the Avengers, as great an attraction as it would be. They could sell tickets!

Scott actually patted him on the head like he was the puppy in the room, because Scott had picked up a lot of condescending behaviors from Stiles over the years (Stiles would feel worse about that, except even Scott agreed that he deserved most of that attitude for his utter derpitude). "Still haven't taken your Adderall?"

"Nyet, nein, nope," Stiles said, bobbing his head in agreement with his friend's statement. Or to the beat in his head, which was an ever evolving list of random pop songs he had maybe heard on the radio and maybe had just made up - it was hard to tell at the best of times, the worst of times, A Tale of Two Cities, wait what?

"I'll take him home. You guys can hammer out the details between yourselves, right?" Hawkeye said, putting his own hand on Stiles's shoulder and starting to steer him towards the door. Which Stiles felt a tad bit insulted by. Sure, he was getting goofy, but that didn’t mean his brain didn’t work at all. He could definitely be part of this discussion if everyone else kept their murderous impulses under control, okay?

Scott glanced between Derek and the Black Widow. The former was still glowering impotently at Stiles, and the latter's expression hadn't changed other than the moue of shock a few moments earlier at the grand Deaton reveal. "Um, yes?" he said after a long moment, without a single ounce of conviction. Oh Scott. Poor puppy. Stiles would make sure he had Milkbones at his house, yes he would.

Ugh, his brain. Maybe going home was for the best right now, if his grey matter wasn’t going to be helpful.

"Good call, uncle person," Stiles said sagely as he was half-pushed out the door. "Although I'll have you know that I'm a great source of unification. Many disparate groups have joined forces together in their grand attempts to get me to shut the hell up already, goddamn it Stiles." And yes, he may have been quoting that last bit.

"I'm shocked," Hawkeye said dryly, angling him to the elevator they had come up in not very long ago, still keeping a firm hand on his shoulder.

"Oh, and Mr. Ian Woon knows about you being my long lost uncle," Stiles said. Probably good to mention that now, while he still remembered that he hadn’t mentioned it already. Stiles didn’t forget information, but there was a good possibility that he forgot who he’d told it to. Just ask Scott, who got to hear about the veracity of Calvin Coolidge quotes five times one week. "I traded fresh and delicious gossip for the elevator key."

Oddly, Hawkeye didn't seem at all perturbed. "You're not mad?" Stiles asked, just to be sure.

"I'm not the one who lives here," his uncle pointed out, pressing the button for the basement-level garage. "I don't know anyone in this town, and I won't have to see them after this op. As long as you kept your mouth shut about my secret identity, I couldn't give less of a shit. How your dad's going to feel about it, I couldn't begin to tell ya."

"You could tell me. I mean, he's your brother. Brothers have, like, a bond or something, I read it in a book," Stiles said, trying for sage again but probably hitting 'vaguely stoned' instead.

"What, my brother who I haven't seen since a couple of years before you were born? That brother? The one who, last time I thought I knew him, left me in an alleyway with both my legs broken?" Oh yeah, that had a definite bitter taste to it. Which made Stiles think of miracle berry tablets, but that probably didn't work for socio-emotional bitterness like it did for tastebuds. Also, trying out that theory would wind up with more mandatory counseling, he could just feel it. And it’d be with Ms. Morrell, too, because all of the private counselors in town had gently requested his father no longer bring him to them – which probably should have been the bigger concern.

The part of his brain that was following the conversation (which, sadly, was not nearly as big as the part of his brain dedicated to other things like listing the reasons he had gotten put in mandatory therapy sessions in the past) decided to speak up. "My dad broke your legs?" (Had he been listening to his voice rather than his brain, Stiles would've hated the childish voice that came out of his mouth. One day he'd learn emotional detachment, he promised himself. Except that day he'd probably turn into a scrawny version of Derek Hale, and... no, just no. So much not a good idea. You needed muscles to pull off that level of brood.)

"No, that was our mentor. Barney just left with him after he snapped my legs," said Hawkeye - well, he could probably call him Clint at this point, couldn't he? What with all the tender sharing of family secrets that was going on. The conversation went on pause while Clint opened the passenger side door to what looked like a boring government-issue sedan for Stiles before circling around to the driver's side. By the time he climbed in, Stiles was buckled up and ready to go. One plus side to his bizarre edition of withdrawal symptoms was that his coordination actually tended to improve - more than once while taking his normal, doctor mandated dose of medication, Stiles had managed to give himself a black eye in the process of buckling his seat belt. People had watched him do it, and swore up and down that they still couldn't figure out how he'd managed such a feat. Spazziness was like his super power.

"He's not like that anymore," Stiles informed his uncle after a quiet moment of fidgeting. Dark family secrets were apparently enough to knock him out of the giddy stage of his medication (and sleep, don't forget the sleep, except that he had and that was why he was like this right now, stupid sleep deprivation). Good to know, except that he'd take being overly goofy any day over what he was learning about his dad now. Sure, it meant that he could feel better about how he was no longer the biggest fuck-up in their household, but he'd prefer keeping the title right now. "I mean, I can't even imagine him doing that to people he dislikes, not now. Well, maybe Ger- the guy who beat me up," he said, cutting himself off before he could utter an incriminating name (because it sucked enough that the pack of puppies knew he'd gotten his ass handed to him by a geriatric, he didn't want to let his superhero of an uncle know exactly how weak he was from the very start) and waving a hand to indicate the mostly-healed damage that was visible on his face. "Right now he thinks it was high schoolers from a rival team, and he was still ready to put the fear of God into them in a fairly violent way. If he knew it was an adult, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to get his gun away from him in time to keep him out of federal penitentiary."

Clint narrowed his eyes at that. "So your dad's in the dark about all this werewolf stuff, then?" He sounded disapproving, which... what?

Stiles gave him a weird look. "Uh, yeah. Even if he'd believe me and not find me a shiny new self-hugging jacket, why would I want to put him in more danger?"

"Because he's the adult who can handle it and you're the sixteen year old kid who's going to end up as puppy chow if you're not careful?" Clint paused. "And probably even if you are careful?"

"Well, that's hurtful," Stiles muttered, drooping a little in his seatbelt and pouting. The pouting was mostly for show, but he wouldn't admit such a thing. "Look, he'd try to keep me out of danger, because he's a good dad. And I'm not letting those idiots - I mean, my friends - go through all this by themselves, so that would just make him more worried and upset than he already is."

Clint was quiet for a while as he drove. "I still think you should tell him, but hey. Your funeral, probably literally." Stiles made a face at him as Clint pulled up in front of the Stilinski house. The lights were all off and his dad's cruiser was gone - another long night, like most of them since the entire department had been slaughtered, Stiles thought with a grimace.

"Here's your stop, kid," Clint said, taking off his own seatbelt and opening the driver's door.

"What, I need a personal escort to the front door?" Stiles snarked as he got out (well, okay, fell out) of the car.

"Pretty sure you need an escort to go more than a foot without hurting yourself," was Clint's calm response as he watched the boy nearly land on the ground before righting himself.

Stiles grumbled to himself. "Oh shut up, Robin Hood."

Before they could get anymore banter going, however, something shot out of the darkness. It landed on Clint, knocking him to the ground, and started to tear into him - Stiles froze for a split second, recognizing the glowing red eyes of an alpha (and not his alpha, because he knew what Derek looked like and this was not it), before he yanked the packet of mountain ash out of his back pocket.

His uncle was attempting to struggle with the beast, but there was only so much you could do against a creature that was more than twice as strong and twice as fast as you - which made the way Clint managed to execute a kind of twist-and-roll to get the thing off of him even more impressive, some part of Stiles's brain thought as he tore open the packet and poured some of the ash into his hand.

Believe believe believe, he chanted silently to himself, before throwing the palmful of ash at the alpha who was getting ready to launch itself at Clint again.

It worked like he had hoped, but hadn't had the chance to practice yet (Scott was becoming more and more reluctant about being Stiles's guinea pig for werewolf experiments after the time Scott wound up sneezing non-stop for three days). The wolf flew backward, and shook its head like it had been clocked in the face by something much stronger than even it.

Clint rolled to his feet, bleeding profusely but - from what Stiles could figure in a half-second glance - not from anything too deep. And all the wounds were from claws, not fangs, thank god. A werewolf secret agent superhero was not something Stiles wanted to think about too deeply.

"I'm guessing this is one of those fabled alphas?" Clint asked as he started pulling out a few of the myriad of weapons Stiles had noticed him carrying the previous day - apparently they were a usual thing, good to know.

Stiles opened his mouth to respond, but was cut off by a small pricking in the back of his neck. Knowing what he was going to find, but not being able to stop himself, his left hand flew to the back of his neck and pulled out, yep, a poison dart. And here he thought that was something you only saw in movies.

"Pluralization is a bitch..." was all he managed to get out before dropping to his knees. His vision was still fine, and he wasn't passing out - oh shit, this was exactly the same as every time he had been hit with the kanima venom, how the fuck did the alphas get that? Had they been in town before Jackson had his coming-of-age arc? Well shit. He collapsed to the ground fully, yelling at his unmoving limbs mentally because he had landed face first in the dirt. This was going to be a fun few hours.

Clint immediately flipped his prone body over, cursing as he found the little dart still held in Stiles's hand. "Don't worry," Stiles started to mutter (and he'd never been able to figure out why the venom didn't paralyze vocal cords), "This has happened before-" but then Clint got tackled again by the same wolf as before - he'd apparently managed to recover from his face full of mountain ash.

His uncle was back in his life-and-death struggle, helped out by the fact that he'd managed to get his knives out before the second attack but still outmatched. (Given a longer distance, or more experience with over-powered wolf people, or any kind of warning, Stiles would bet on Hawkeye coming out ahead. Right now, though...)

Stiles missed the rest of the fight, because someone seized him and threw him over their shoulder before dashing away from the scene at, yes, alpha-speed. Oh crap. He was putting a new rule of the universe into effect, ASAP - two weeks between kidnappings, at the very least.

Clint managed to push away from his attacker for a second, but when he went to dive back in - this time with an angle he picked - the thing's head whipped up. And then he was off, faster than Clint could hope to run. "Shit," he muttered to himself. He'd noticed Stiles being dragged off by one of the things (situational awareness was one of his better skills), but he was also pretty freakin' sure he wouldn't be able to track them.

His cell phone rang suddenly, breaking the silence with an insistent beeping. The display informed him that it was Natasha, so he accepted the call quickly. "Coulson called-" Natasha started to say, but Clint cut her off. Something he was probably going to pay for later, but more important things were happening right now.

"The alphas took Stiles," he said sharply.

"Where?" Natasha's tone was pure business.

"In front of his house," Clint supplied, digging through the trunk of the car for the industrial-sized first aid kit that came standard with the unmarked cars SHIELD provided.

There was a pause from the other side of the line. "I'm getting the other car," she said, "McCall and Hale will get there first."

"I'll be waiting," he said, and hung up.