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It’s nearly eleven and John’s getting up to head to bed at last when someone pounds heavily on the back door. He stares for a moment, startled. He turns his head, eyeing his gun, still in the holster, the strap hanging from the back of his chair. The pounding comes again, startling John from his contemplations about potential idiot criminals. He crosses the room to the door and swings it open and then stands there, blinking.
Isaac Lahey stands on the back step, wide-eyed and pale, holding up a shaky and sweating Derek Hale.
John’s first inane thought is, Oh, so that’s where the kid ran off to. His thoughts come to a stuttering halt a moment later when he looks down and sees the three holes (bullet holes, his brain supplies helpfully) in Hale’s shirt, new and ragged and still leaking blood into his shirt.
“What the—”
Isaac shoves past him and into the kitchen, half-dragging Hale behind him. “We need Stiles,” he says, surveying the kitchen before slowly lowering Hale to lean against the refrigerator.
John gapes at him. “What the hell do you mean, you need Stiles? He needs an ambulance!” He’s reaching for the phone on the wall when Isaac’s hand darts forward, fingers closing around his wrist in a surprisingly firm grip.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and he looks it. “We don’t have time to explain, but he can’t go to a hospital.”
John’s opening his mouth to demand an explanation anyway when he hears footsteps in the hall.
“Dad? What’s going—oh holy shit.”
John turns. Stiles is frozen in the doorway, staring at Isaac and Hale. “Shit,” he says again, and rushes forward, hurrying to kneel next to Hale. Stiles hands are shaking slightly when he reaches carefully for Hale’s shirt. “Oh Jesus, dude, this is so bad.”
He grimaces as he lifts Hale’s shirt enough to expose the wounds. John stares, wide-eyed. The wounds are bleeding sluggishly, but there’s something wrong with them. Instead of red blood, they’re oozing something black and almost sticky-looking, and there are spidery black lines like veins spreading out around them. It looks like nothing he’s ever seen, and as sheriff he’s seen a lot.
Stiles doesn’t seem the least bit surprised as he inspects the wounds, but he does bite his lip concernedly. “What happened?”
“Gerard’s hunters,” Hale gasps out, coughing; black ooze speckles across his lips and trickles down from one corner of his mouth. “Cornered us at the depot. Didn’t know Isaac was there or they’d have shot him, too.”
“Hunters? What—who the hell shot you?” John glares around the room, silently demanding answers, but he’s ignored, Isaac and Stiles both focused on Hale.
“You should really be dead right now, dude.” Stiles’ voice shakes slightly, but he doesn’t look away, fingers hovering over Hale’s chest as he inspects the twisting black lines. “Seriously, how the hell are you not dead?”
“Alpha,” Hale forces out, his jaw clenching. “Remember?”
John stares at him, blinking vaguely. He has no idea what that’s supposed to mean, but Stiles snorts quietly and shakes his head like it means something to him.
“Fantastic,” Stiles mutters, pushing Hale’s shirt higher, towards his shoulders. Isaac crouches next to him, holding it out of the way. “How long do you have?”
Hale moves his head slightly, a weak approximation of a shake. “No idea. Not long though.”
Next to him, Isaac digs in his pocket and pulls out a clip from a handgun, still half-loaded with bullets. “We pulled this off the guy who shot him,” he says, holding it out towards Stiles.
“And what happened to him?” John asks, feeling his eyebrows creeping upwards. He crosses his arms as Hale shifts slightly to glare at him. It’s impressive, really, the amount of expression the guy can put into that look while he’s apparently in the middle of dying on John’s kitchen floor.
“His friends took him,” Hale grits out before turning away, apparently unwilling to say anything more.
“I managed to get the bullets out of him,” Isaac is telling Stiles. “But Derek said you’d need the others, too.”
Stiles turns the clip over in his hands and then stares at Hale. “Awww, you gotta be kidding,” he mutters, sounding put-upon. But he takes the clip, popping the bullets out one by one with his thumb. “Why didn’t you go to Deaton?”
John feels his eyebrows jump upwards at the name. Dr. Deaton’s responses to his questions about the supposed animal attacks had always seemed oddly vague. They make a whole lot more sense now, John thinks absently, if the vet is involved in...whatever this is.
Hale shakes his head. “Wasn’t there. Needed someone else who knew what to do.”
“And Scott wants nothing to do with you, of course.” Stiles says with a sigh.
John nearly groans at the mention of Scott, but he can’t say he’s surprised. The two boys have been friends since they were ten, and they’ve been nearly inseparable ever since; where one led, the other inevitably followed.
“So that leaves me,” Stiles is saying. He groans, then pushes himself up to standing with a grimace. “Fuck.”
He cuts a look at John, like he’s waiting to be told off for swearing. John blinks for a moment, but looking at the scene unfolding on his kitchen floor, the swearing certainly seems warranted, even if he has no idea what’s going on. Stiles seems to understand, because he turns away again, carefully stepping over Hale’s legs and over to the cabinets on the other side of the kitchen.
“I’m gonna need you to pop those open,” he tells Isaac, dropping the bullets into the other boy’s hand as he pulls out a cookie sheet. “But be careful,” Stiles warns, now digging in a drawer and coming up with a lighter just as Isaac pulls apart the bullet with his teeth. John stares at him, wincing at the scrape of metal, and figures it’s best not to ask.
“There should be some powdered stuff in there,” Stiles goes on, setting the cookie sheet and the lighter on the table. “Dump it out on the sheet, but don’t touch it. I’m gonna need at least three of them,” he adds. Isaac nods and sets to popping apart two more bullets, adding their contents to the small pile on the cookie sheet.
“Just hurry the fuck up,” Derek rasps out, groaning, and John turns his head to glance at him. The black veins across his chest have spread further, and there’s sweat beading across his forehead now; he looks wrecked.
The bullets look like hollow-points, but instead of actually being hollow, they’re apparently stuffed with something greenish-grey, like powdered, dried plants. It looks like something that might come off a spice rack, and John takes a moment to wonder why the hell someone would put ground up dead plants in a bullet, or why you’d need them to treat a bullet wound.
Not that anything else is making sense tonight, John thinks, only slightly hysterically, as Stiles crosses back over to the counter, lighter in hand.
“Okay,” Stiles grimaces. “This part’s gonna suck. Isaac, I need you to hold him down as much as you can, because this is really going to hurt.”
Isaac frowns, looking worried, but he crouches down and slips behind Hale, wrapping one arm high across his chest, under his arms, and the other low against his stomach, pulling Hale back against him.
“Oh my god, please let this work,” Stiles mutters, then flicks the lighter. He sets the flame to the pile of ground-up whatever on the cookie sheet. It goes up in sparks instantly, then dies down a moment later, purple-blue smoke curling from the pile of ash left behind. Stiles tips the tray quickly, dumping the ash into his palm. He takes a deep breath, then turns and leans forward over Hale and shakes the ash directly into his wounds.
Hale’s reaction is immediate: his body bows, back arching, straining against Isaac’s hold on him. John jumps, involuntarily flinging himself backwards until he can clutch at the doorframe behind him. Stiles just leans closer, his fingers pressing harshly at the wounds, grinding the ash further into them while blue smoke curls out from underneath. Hale yells, hoarse and painful-sounding, like it’s being dragged out of him, and his entire body seems to spasm, muscles flexing and joints locking in pain.
But John can see the trickle of ooze slowing, the black lines around the wounds somehow retreating, fading away even as the wounds themselves seem to be shrinking, closing up all on their own. Hale whimpers slightly and then sighs, slumping back against Isaac in a heap. Stiles pulls his hands away, wiping them absently on his jeans as he sits back on his heels.
There’s silence as Isaac releases his hold on Hale, who stays slumped back against him, eyes closed and chest heaving. Stiles takes a deep breath, falling back against the cabinet door behind him, tilting his head back against it and closing his eyes. John opens his mouth to say something, anything, but he has no idea what to say so he closes it again and stands there, staring down at his son.
It’s Stiles who finally breaks the silence.
“You know,” he says, without opening his eyes. “When I told you to never, ever, make me have to do anything like that again, I was being totally serious.”
John blinks, mind tripping over that word again. Again, like this was something Stiles had done before. John thinks about the movements of Stiles’ hands, the way he’d known what to do without Hale saying anything. Again. John closes his eyes for a moment, shudders, and opens them again, staring between Hale and his son.
Hale twitches, mouth twisting up into something that might almost be a like a smile. “I thought that was in reference to cutting my arm off,” he says, voice slurred from exertion and pain.
Behind him, Isaac’s eyebrows shoot up towards his hairline. “What,” he says flatly, clearly not expecting an answer, and John’s honestly just glad he isn’t the only one who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. He’s not sure he wants to know, anyway.
Stiles opens his eyes, raising his head so he can glare at Hale. “It was in reference to that entire episode,” he corrects, raising an eyebrow. “And thank you so much for bringing that up.”
Hale makes a muffled sound that John thinks might’ve been a laugh. “Don’t worry, “ he says. “It won’t happen again.”
Stiles’ laugh is more of a bark, short and harsh like it’s being forced out of him. He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, right,” he says sarcastically. “You’re never, ever going to get shot again. Ever.”
He laughs again, and this time there’s a faint note of hysteria in it, a little too high and a little too broken-sounding. His hands are shaking where they’re clasped across his drawn-up knees. He’s breathing too quickly. And it’s been years, sure, but John still knows what his son looks like when he’s on the verge of a panic attack. Seeing it again now, after everything he’s just seen and still isn’t any closer to understanding, he’s struck by the feeling that the last few months are suddenly making a whole lot more sense.
At the very least, the weird shift in Stiles’ behavior seems a lot clearer now. Because John remembers the panic attacks, the way they only came when Stiles had spent too long trying to hold everything off, trying to push everything away so he wouldn’t have to face it right then and there.
And John knows that things have been crazy, between the animal attacks and the murders and whatever weirdness Stiles and his friends have gotten themselves involved in. And whatever’s happening, it’s clear that Stiles hasn’t been able to find the time to deal with it, that he’s been forced to push it all to the side until now. Until it’s built up so high that he can’t control it anymore.
John thinks about the winter formal, Lydia Martin lying in the hospital and his son standing in front of him and clearly lying about what happened to her, remembers knowing it was a lie and being unable to call Stiles on it. He remembers wondering, every day after that, what else Stiles was lying about. He remembers the crime scenes and the weird excuses and the way Stiles hasn’t looked him in the eye in months. He remembers all of it and he wonders just how long Stiles has been holding off the panic.
“Stiles,” he says gently, moving forward until he can sit down against the cabinet next to him, because Stiles’ entire body is shaking now, his breathing gone high and gasping. John leans close, wrapping his arm around Stiles’ shoulders; his other hand rests on top of Stiles’. Stiles sounds like he’s still trying to laugh, but there are tears in his eyes and his chest is heaving with the effort of breathing.
“It’s okay,” John mutters, turning his head to press a kiss against the side of Stiles’ head. “You’re okay, son, you’re just fine.”
Stiles nods jerkily, but his breathing doesn’t change and his fingers tighten around each other, his knuckles white.
There’s motion from in front of him, and Stiles gasps suddenly. John looks up and sees that Isaac has moved, is kneeling in front of Stiles with a hand stretched out, resting against Stiles’ wrist. John can see Isaac’s veins, running black and inky under his skin like Hale’s wounds had been earlier. But Isaac doesn’t seem to be in any pain, despite the tears forming at the corners of his eyes.
“Breathe,” he tells Stiles quietly, “just breathe.”
And Stiles does, closes his eyes again and takes one huge, deep breath. He lets it out slowly, shuddering, and takes another, and another. His hands loosen their death-grip on his knees and John can feel Stiles’ pulse slowing where his arm is pressed against Stiles’ neck.
Across from him, Hale has matched his breathing to Stiles’, taking slow, deep breaths, his eyes open again and fixed on the rise and fall of Stiles’ chest.
They’re quiet while Stiles carefully slows his breathing to something more approaching normal, as his hands stop their trembling and he unclenches his fingers, stretching out cramped joints. John wants to ask, wants to know exactly what the hell is going on, what he just saw. But Stiles is looking pale and exhausted, like he could panic again at any moment, so John bites his tongue and stays where he is with his arms wrapped around his son. He doesn’t really know how to ask, anyway.
Stiles makes it easy for him in the end.
“I hate you so much for this,” he says hoarsely. John has a brief moment of sharp, stabbing panic that Stiles is talking to him, until he realises that Stiles is looking across at Hale. Hale raises his eyebrows and Stiles glares weakly.
“No, seriously,” he continues. “Do you know how insanely hard I’ve worked to keep my dad out of all of this shit?”
And that hurts a bit, John thinks. He remembers the way things were after the funeral, when it was just the two of them trying to figure out how to live around the empty space in their lives. He remembers sitting across the table from Stiles at two in the morning, after the first night he’d woken to find Stiles huddled in his bed, gasping and shaking.
He’d taken him downstairs and made him hot chocolate to calm him down and they’d sat across the table from each other in silence, until finally John had said, “You know, son, that you can always talk to me. Doesn’t matter about what. You can always tell me anything.”
And Stiles had nodded, had said, “I promise, Dad. I will.”
And for a while (for years) he had. And then the weird animal attacks had started, and Stiles went quiet. John suddenly realised that night, looking at the files spread across the table while Stiles cleverly weaseled information out of him in between pouring him more whiskey, that it was the most time they’d spent together in weeks.
And he’s known for months now that Stiles was lying, that he’s been hiding things every way he can. But he hasn’t known why, or what he’s been lying about, and he’s been afraid to risk Stiles’ rejection by asking, afraid that he would shut down and shut John out entirely. And now things are starting to look even more serious than he’d known. And considering that what he’d known had already included mauled classmates, violent attacks, some pretty serious property damage, and more than a few suspicious murders, realising it was worse was really saying something.
“I never wanted him to be involved,” Stiles says, pulling John back to the present. Stiles is still glaring at Hale, but there’s something about his expression that looks like it’s directed more towards the situation than towards Hale himself.
Hale looks at Stiles for a moment, then ducks his head to inspect his own hands. “Yeah,” he mutters. “I know. Sorry.”
Stiles is staring at Hale, incredulous. “You’re sorry.” It comes out flat, and John braces himself, because that tone of voice coming from his son never bodes well for whoever’s on the other end.
It’s the same voice he’d used when he was eleven and the head nurse at the hospital had tried to tell Stiles that there was nothing at all wrong with his mother, nothing at all to worry about, sweetie, she’ll be just fine. Stiles had gone flat and angry then, too, had demanded to know everything so he could go home and look it all up himself because he didn’t trust the nurse to tell him the truth.
“You know that I’ve been bending over backward and running myself ragged trying to keep him out of all of this, and then when you get shot you decide, ‘Hey, let’s go see if the sheriff is home! I bet he can help!’”
Hale shakes his head and looks away. “There wasn’t anywhere else to go,” he says quietly.
Stiles glares at him for a moment longer, then sighs heavily, closing his eyes for a moment. “Just for that,” he tells Hale, pointing a finger at him, “you get to be the one to explain everything.”
“Lucky me,” Hale grouses, but he pushes himself up off the floor so he can stand leaning back against the refrigerator. He’s still looking pale, but he doesn’t look anywhere near as bad as he had before.
“We should move this somewhere else,” Hale says, looking at John. “This is going to take a while, so you’re probably going to want to get comfortable. And maybe get yourself a drink while you’re at it. You’re going to need it.” He doesn’t sound like he’s joking.
John nods, getting to his feet and reaching a hand down for Stiles. “I’m so sorry about this,” Stiles whispers, standing and wrapping his arms around John in a tight hug. John closes his eyes, holding his son close for a moment before he gently lets him go.
“It’s okay,” he whispers back. “I’d rather know now than watch you get further and further away and not know why.”
Stiles pulls back, staring with tear-bright eyes, but doesn’t say anything, just drops his gaze and shakes his head. “Let’s just do this,” he says, and leads the way into the living room.
John sits on the couch with Stiles beside him. Hale takes the armchair next to it. Isaac opts to sit on the floor, folding himself up with his back against the wall under the window across from them.
“So,” John says, feeling awkward and overwhelmed. “I’m gonna go with the easy question and start with: what the hell just happened?”
Next to him, Stiles snorts. “Cliff Notes version?” he says, pointing to Hale. “He’s a werewolf. Got shot with a wolfsbane bullet, I had to help heal him or he’d die, but he’s fine now.”
John blinks, opening his mouth to...laugh, say something, who knows. But Stiles is frowning again and Hale looks impassive as ever, if a touch guilty; Isaac just looks sheepish and a little amused.
“Right.” John says, finally. “Derek Hale is a werewolf.”
“And I thought it was funny when Scott said it the first time,” Stiles mutters. John groans.
“What’s Scott—” he cuts himself off, waving a hand absently. “You know what? No. I’m gonna get that drink,” he says, pushing off the couch and making his way towards the cabinet beside the fridge. He pours a couple fingers of whiskey in a glass, pointing back behind him with his other hand. “And then you’re going to tell me everything.”
He returns to the couch and settles back in next to Stiles, ignoring his son’s disapproving look as he takes a nice, long sip of Jack.
“Where do you want me to start?” Hale asks.
John swallows hard, thinking. “Start at the beginning,” he says. “Just start at the beginning and tell me everything.”
Hale eyes him for a long moment, then nods. “Okay,” he says softly. “Then I guess I should start with my family.”