Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Mieczysław Stilinski was born on a cold October night in 1994, when the wind rattled the windowpanes of Beacon Hills General and the trees outside bowed like they were whispering gossip. He came into the world howling, red-faced and furious — born with too much energy and a set of lungs that could rival a fire alarm. A spirited baby from the very beginning.

The nurse crinkled her nose, squinting as she tried — and failed — to read the name on the birth certificate.

"Mee... meecha-sloff?"

Claudia Stilinski, tired and glowing with the kind of love only new mothers seem to radiate, gave a faint but firm smile.

"Mieczysław," she said clearly through the fog of exhaustion. "Mee-eh-chee-swahv."

"God bless you," the nurse muttered, making a mental note to call the child literally anything else.

The baby boy was named after Claudia’s father — Mieczysław Gajos. Old-fashioned and solid, the name seemed forged from the steel of language itself. Rooted in words meaning “sword” and “glory,” it told a story before the bearer had ever lifted a blade. It meant “one who earns glory through the sword” — a name to grow into, etched into legend by the sharp edge of valor and the weight of destiny.

Claudia said it like a lullaby — soft and fluent. And when she cradled her son to her chest for the first time, she whispered it into the tawny hair at the crown of his head like a blessing.

But outside that quiet hospital room, the name didn't land quite as gently.

By the time he was three, no one at daycare even attempted to pronounce it. Teachers raised their eyebrows. Doctors squinted. Children stumbled over it like a tongue-twister.
Even Noah Stilinski — who adored his son but lacked Claudia's ear for foreign vowels — tried only a handful of times to pronounce it.

"Meech... Meech-uh... Sloth?"
"Mee-cheese-slaw?"
"I give up."

Claudia would laugh, sometimes so hard she had to sit down and hold her side. But she never mocked her husband. Her laughter was sunlight — bright and warm, never cruel.

Stiles was easier — short and digestible. Borrowed from the family name. American enough to slip through the cracks unnoticed, but strange enough to raise a few eyebrows.

He had tried once to explain the name situation to a school secretary — only to give up halfway through and scrawl Stiles into the blank.

“He answers to it,” he said with a shrug. “Good enough for me.”

“But it’s not his legal name,” she pointed out.

“Trust me,” Noah muttered. “It’s going to be easier this way. For everyone’s sake.”

But Claudia — Claudia never let it go.
She didn't always call him Mieczysław. But she used it in the quiet moments. At bedtime. When he was sick and curled up beside her with a fever and a blanket. When she stroked his hair after nightmares and whispered it like a protective spell.

The boy had trouble himself. His tongue tangled around the soft consonants and lilting vowels, trying to wrestle the Slavic syllables into shape.

She taught him to say it piece by piece.

"Mee... chee... swav," he'd sound it out, puffing out his cheeks and narrowing his eyes in concentration.

"Good," she'd say gently. "Again."

He was four the first time he tried to write it.
He scrawled M-E-E-C-H-Y-S-W-A-F in crooked letters across a sheet of yellowed paper and stuck it to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a pancake.

"Close enough, Mischief," she said with a fond grin.

He called himself that first — just once — trying and failing to say the name right. She was the one who kept calling him that after: Mischief. And it stuck, like all the best names do. It started as a joke, a nickname murmured as she tousled his hair and tucked him into bed at night, but it grew into something tender. Something true. He was mischief — sparkling in his eyes, stitched into the way he could never sit still, always poking at the edges of the world just to see what would happen.

But to everyone else — friends, teachers, doctors, the dry cleaner, and especially his dad — he was just Stiles.

One night, tucked under a patchwork blanket in his parents' bed during a thunderstorm, he asked her:

"Do names have power?"

Her fingers idly played with the ends of his hair. Rain tapped against the glass like soft applause.

"Of course they do," she said. "Why do you think we keep your real one secret from everyone else?"

"Because it's hard to say?"

"No," she laughed, turning toward him. “Because it’s yours. The world doesn’t get to take everything, sweetheart. You get to keep part of yourself safe—like a flame in a jar.”

"Like magic?"

"Exactly."

Stiles sat up straighter.

"Does that mean I'm magical?"

"Oh, sweetheart," she whispered, drawing the blanket up to his chin and kissing his forehead, "you're the most magical boy I've ever met."

He smiled softly, a proud, sleepy curl of lips, and blinked slowly.

"And one day, when you need it most," she said, "maybe it'll remind you who you really are."

"Mischief?"

She smiled. "More than that. But that too."

It was raining again.

Not the gentle kind — the kind that made stories feel soft and the world feel tucked in. No, this was angry rain. Harsh, stinging sheets driven sideways by a wind that made the house groan like something alive. Each drop struck the windows like a slap. Outside, trees bent low, swaying like dancers caught mid-collapse. A flash of white light split the sky — then thunder followed, cracking the night open like bone.

Mieczysław — Stiles — was six years old.

He lay curled on the living room rug, legs tangled in a blanket. The television flickered behind him in quiet blues and silvers, its sound low. In his lap sat a notebook, half-filled with looping swirls and jagged corners. Not pictures, not really. Lately, he'd been drawing mazes. Puzzles.

From the kitchen, his mother was humming. A low, meandering lullaby. She always hummed when she needed to keep her hands steady. She'd once told him the tune came from her mother — a melody old like a memory. It made the air feel safe, homely.

Then the humming stopped.

It began with the kettle. A slow whine, rising. The sound of boiling water building like a siren. A high, keening pitch that slipped beneath the walls of the house and into the bones. Claudia stood at the stove, unmoving. Her hands shook. One held a teacup that trembled like it weighed a thousand pounds. Her eyes stared into the tiled backsplash like it had shown her something she couldn't look away from.

The kettle screamed. The teacup slipped and ceramic shattered across the floor.

Stiles flinched at the sound, "Mom?"

Her arms jerked suddenly, spasming like tangled puppet strings. Her grip slipped from the counter. Her fingers clawed the air but caught nothing. She turned — no, fell — toward him. Her whole body crumpled. Her mouth opened wide, but no sound came out. Her eyes rolled back, showing too much white. Then she hit the floor.

"Mom!"

He ran, blanket forgotten, his knees smacking the tile. The world had shrunk to the terrible sounds her body made — the stuttering breath, the twitch of her hands, the dull thud of her head hitting the ground.

He dropped beside her, shaking. "Mom?! MOM?!"

No answer. Just the horrible rhythm of her body jerking against the floor, as if she were caught mid-electrocution.

He didn't understand. He was six. Seven in a few weeks. Still small enough to believe everything bad had a reason. Still small enough to believe that if he can't help her it'll be his fault.

He pressed his hands to her chest, panicked. "Get up—please get up—wake up, please—"

His fists pounded, soft and useless. His tears came hot and fast. He didn't hear the thunder anymore. Or the rain. Or the kettle, still screaming.

Only her. Only this.

Her eyes flickered again. For a moment — just a second — he thought she saw him. There was something there. Recognition. Panic. Then nothing. Unseeing.

And he broke down. Just a quiet, clean snap inside him. Like glass under pressure finally giving way. He didn't feel the cold. Didn't notice the way his body folded in on itself, trembling.

The lightning struck again — closer this time. The windows flashed white. The kettle let out one last shriek and then clicked off. And the boy lay beside his mother, his breathing hitching as he cried himself raw, terrified in the midst of chaos.

That's when it heard him.

Outside, lightning forked across the sky — and somewhere behind the house, far beyond the backyard fence where the trees curled like broken bones, an ancient being stirred awake.

The Nemeton, the sacred beacon of supernatural power in Beacon Hills — once cut down by foolish, clueless men — was no longer the monument it had once been. It was fractured, stripped of its former strength. Vulnerable. Not to time, but to the world it existed in. On nights like this, it had no protection. The severed trunk, barely a stump now, sat exposed to the elements. A bolt of lightning struck. The wood screamed, splintered and weakened.

And in the dark beneath the bark, a fox opened its eyes.
The Nogitsune awoke — not from sleep, but from stillness, from decades of imprisonment beneath the tree, locked in stasis.
It did not rise from a grave. It did not crawl from the earth. It was more elemental than that. It had no true shape — only instinct. Purpose. Trickery. Hunger.

The sensation came as a sudden spike of tension in the air, the raw, electric charge of fear. It tasted it. Tracked it. Like a shark tracing blood through the deep.

It found the house. Inside, a woman writhed on the kitchen floor, caught in the grip of a seizure, her mind spiraling, unraveling at the edges. It did not touch her. It fed — not on her life, but on the chaos around her, on her faltering hold on reality. On the storm of grief rising from the child beside her, the child who shook her, who sobbed and screamed for her.

A child’s grief is not light. It is not simple. It is vast, shapeless thing — depthless and wild, untouched by logic, untempered by reason. It does not know how to regulate pain, only how to feel it in every atom.

The Nogitsune curled its fingers around the child in that moment. Felt the grief. The helplessness. The fear. The opening.

It seeped in like rot into soft fruit.

Stiles sobbed so hard he hiccupped, his small hands trembling as he pressed his forehead to his mother’s chest, begging her heart to beat for both of them, begging her not to die. And then — a stillness between screams. A soft pressure behind his eyes. Not pain. Something… settling. A second presence slid beneath his skin, feather-light and quiet, threading into the cracks of his soul. It did not force its way in. It invited itself gently.

Where there was terror, it offered calm.
Where there was pain, it whispered purpose.
Where there was helplessness, it gave something steady and sharp — control.

It curled there in his chest.

Ancient.
Playful.
Curious.
Cruel.
Hungry.

Let me help us.

The words were not spoken aloud. They rang inside him, echoing against the inside of his head. Stiles blinked, tears hot on his cheeks. And somewhere, deep inside, he realized — he was no longer alone.

When Noah came home, Claudia was already breathing again. The seizure had passed. Her eyes fluttered open in the ambulance, confused, blinking like someone waking from a terrible dream. In the emergency room, Stiles sat in the corner, wrapped in a thermal blanket too big for his frame. Red-rimmed eyes. Blank expression. He didn't cry anymore. He didn't speak. When a nurse brushed a metal tray and sent a glass shattering to the floor, he didn't even flinch.

Later, Claudia would try to explain it. How, when she looked into her son's eyes, something sharp lodged in her chest. A tremor. A sense of wrong.

"M-Mischief?" she whispered, her voice dry, cracked at the edges.

He turned to her. Called her mom. But there was a whisper beneath his voice, like someone breathing through him. His eyes caught the light — not amber, honey-warm, but silver, flickering at the edges like moonlight on oil. His face — his sweet little face — looked strange for a heartbeat. Not monstrous. Not cruel. Just... unfamiliar. Tilted wrong. His smile too soft, too slow. Like something wearing a child's expression gently, like trying it on.

And then — it passed.

She blinked, and he was just Stiles again. Small, scared and drenched in tears. The illusion, if it had been one, had vanished. He wrapped his arms around her, sobbing. She held him like she always had. But when her fingers brushed the back of his neck — she flinched. His skin was cold. Not clammy with fear or sweat, but cold like water left sitting in shadow. Cold like the dead.

She would later blame her reaction on the dementia. The illness unraveling her mind, thread by thread. But the moment never left her. Because when her son pulled back and looked up at her — she wasn't sure who was looking back.

( Even in her final lucid moments, before madness claimed her entirely, Claudia dreamed of foxes with hollow eyes. Of laughter — her son’s, but stretched too thin, too high. Of shadows trotting at his heels that belonged to nothing human. )

Later that night, Stiles sat alone in the living room, perched on the edge of the couch like a doll forgotten mid-play. The house was quiet. Only the clock ticked, and the wind rattled the windows. The television was off. He stared at the blank screen. His reflection hovered there — faint, but visible. Pale face. Wide, tired eyes.

He tilted his head. The reflection tilted too — but not quite in sync.

His breath caught. A cold shiver went through him. He rose quietly — always quietly after bedtime — and walked to the hallway mirror. It had always been there: tall, old, flecked with age. His mom had said it had “character.”

He stood before it and stared. His face was his own. But his eyes… they were not. Darkness pooled in them, like ink bleeding from behind his pupils. Something behind them was watching him watching it. He leaned closer. So did the reflection. A flicker — silver rings coiling at the edge of the pupils.

The thing in the mirror smiled. He did not.

"Who are you?" he whispered, so softly even the shadows had to lean in.

That's when the voice came.

"No, no," the voice replied, from everywhere and nowhere. It came from the shadow that pooled unnaturally by the closet door, from the space behind his bookshelf, from inside the whorl of his own ear.
"Not who are you, Stiles. Ask, who are we."

"I—I don't understand."

"You will."
"We're here because you called. You hurt. And hurting opens doors."
"We stepped through."

He felt a strange cold bloom in his chest, a second presence stirring.

"You're scared." The voice soothed. "That's alright. We're here now. You don't have to be alone anymore."
"Just us. It'll always be just us."
"We can play a game. Do you know any riddles?"

He nodded, hesitantly. "A few."

The voice softened further. "Good. Let's try one."

A face with no eyes, it murmured, hands with no fingers. I move but never walk. What am I?

Stiles blinked. "A clock?"

Laughter — not mean exactly, but low and satisfied — drifted around him. "Clever boy. Another?"

I speak without a mouth. I hear without ears. I have no body, but I come alive with wind.

Stiles thought harder. "An echo?"

"Oh, you're a sharp one," the voice said. "So sharp. One more."

A pause.

Everyone has it... but nobody can lose it.

Stiles frowned, confused. "A name?"

"No." the voice hissed, somehow closer now. "Try again."

He chewed the inside of his cheek. "I... I don't know."

"You do," the voice insisted, just a little firmer now.
"You're smart. You want to be smart for us, don't you?"

"I'm trying..."

"You're not trying hard enough, Stiles."

The hallway stretched longer, darker than it should have. He glanced toward the stairs. Thought of calling his dad. But something inside whispered don't.

The closet door at the edge of the room creaked open.

Shadows thickened, spilling outward, swallowing the corners and pressing the walls inward until the space seemed to draw a slow, suffocating breath. The room shrank around him, inescapable, like a trap easing shut. The air sharpened, cold seeping across skin and bone alike. Stiles could see his own breath curling in the dim light, pale and fragile, trembling before his face in soft clouds. The cold kissed his lungs, slid down his throat, settled deep in his chest, but oddly the chill didn’t bother him.

From the darkness came something else. It stepped out of the closet’s shadow, smooth and silent.

It was tall — its limbs were too long, too thin, folding in ways they never should. Its head hung low, craning forward like it weighed more than gravity could bear, yet it crossed the room without disturbing a single mote of dust. The shadows clung to it, curling around its body like it belonged to them — or maybe they belonged to it.

Its eyes were hollow pits of liquid black, glistening like oil beneath a strange silver gleam. Its mouth was a smile without lips — only silver fangs, long and wicked, arcing outward in a cruel, elegant crescent. They caught the weak light of the room, glinting like knives. The grin stretched on its face, waiting, and promising something terrible.

“Everyone has it,” the voice said, coming from the thing though its mouth didn’t move. “But nobody can lose it.”

Stiles whimpered, tears streaking his face. “P-please…”

The thing crouched. Limbs cracked as it moved. It inched closer.

“You’re not trying, Stiles. Don’t you want me to stay? Don’t you want to never be scared again?”

It lunged.

Stiles screamed and fell to the floor with a thud, his head barely missing the lowest step. He scrambled backward, but a cold hand — no, not a hand, claws that felt like bone and smoke — snatched at his ankle.

"WHAT IS IT?" the voice roared.

The staircase light flicked on. Footsteps thundered down the stairs.

“Stiles?! What’s happening?!”

He turned his head sharply. His father stood on the stairs, hair messy from sleep, eyes wide with panic.

But the room was empty. Just Stiles, sobbing, and the long, warped shape of his shadow stretching across the floor, twisted by the light.

By morning, he told himself it had been just a bad dream.

The doctors said it was frontotemporal degeneration — a rare, progressive, fatal disease. There was no cure. It would take Claudia's memory first, they told her gently. Then her behavior. Then everything else. And they were right. Within weeks, her speech began to fray. Words tangled on her tongue. Sentences thinned and withered halfway through. Names slipped through her fingers like dust. Gestures lost meaning. She would forget what she was doing even as she did it. Her emotions became jagged things — too sharp to hold without bleeding.

But beneath the confusion, beneath the halting speech and sleepless nights, Claudia knew something else was wrong.
Not with her.
With him.

Stiles was still sweet, still kind. If anything, too patient. He sat by her bedside when she woke screaming from sleep paralysis. He held her hand when her mind refused to untangle dream from memory. He smiled when she lashed out in panic—never angry, never afraid. And that was the problem.

It was the way he stayed utterly still when she shouted, or when lights flickered, or when something broke across the room—like fear had been taken out of him. Like something else had crept in and filled the space it left behind.

She was being watched, she knew it. She could feel it in the base of her spine, cold breath against her skin. The corners of the room seemed darker now. Wider. As if something waited there—just outside of sight.

One night, when the world was quiet and her mind felt mercifully clear, Claudia slipped into her son’s room. Her eyes were softer than they’d been in weeks—focused, present. She smiled the way she used to, with that tired but boundless kind of love that made Stiles feel like he was still the center of her universe. She tucked him in with gentle hands, brushing his hair back from his forehead. The overhead light had been dimmed to amber, shadows softened by her voice. She climbed into bed beside him, wrapping her arms around his small, warm body as if shielding him from everything waiting beyond the walls. As if she were still his mother, and not the fractured version he was learning to navigate.

She began humming—then singing softly in Polish. A lullaby. He didn’t know the words, but he loved them anyway. Once, he’d told her it sounded like magic. And now, even though the melody wavered with exhaustion, it still held that power.

Stiles blinked sleepily. Once. Twice.

And suddenly—
the warmth was gone.

The bed was cold.
The air, thin.
The room felt darker than it should have been.

He sat up, heart pounding, the covers tangled around his legs.

“Have you figured out the riddle yet?”
The voice—calm, curious, far too close—slipped into the room like frost.

Stiles whimpered and curled in on himself, dragging the blanket over his head. “Please… go away.”

The voice didn’t rise.
“If you answer correctly, we might help your mother.”

The blanket muffled his breathing.
“…What’s wrong with her?” he whispered.

“She is dying,” the voice said without hesitation. “Her body is sick. The sickness will win. But we can help. We can make sure she feels no pain. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Stiles’s bottom lip trembled. His voice cracked. “But I don’t want her to go.”

The shadows on the walls stretched, bent—then began to crawl.

“Everyone has it, but no one can lose it,” the voice murmured. Closer now. Too close.

It spoke with an odd, lulling rhythm—like a bedtime story told too slowly, meant to lure you into sleep, not scare you awake.

But the footsteps that followed were sharp, the floorboards creaked under its weight. The bedframe groaned as long, crooked limbs gripped it tight.

Stiles shook violently beneath the blanket.
“Please, I don’t—”

Something shifted. The mattress dipped.
It was on the bed. With him.

Instinct made him look—just a sliver, just enough to see how near the thing was.

“Everyone has it,” it rasped. “But no one can lose it.
What. Is. It?”

Its presence loomed over his small body, cold radiating from it like winter wind, casting a long, dark—

“…a shadow?” Stiles’s voice was barely more than breath.

Everything stopped. The weight lifted and the voice changed.

"Very well," it said.

But it wasn’t the voice anymore. It was his own.

When Stiles dared to raise his eyes, he saw—himself.

Sitting at the foot of the bed. Same face. Same tired eyes. Same scrunched blue pajama set. Only… this version was still, like a shadow given shape. Dry-eyed. Watching him with his head tilted just slightly—like an animal studying something curiously.

And then it grinned, pleased. Because Stiles wasn’t crying anymore.

He was still afraid—but less afraid.
He was confused.

And most importantly, he was listening.

The next day Claudia felt worse then ever in her last few weeks. She was sleeping all day, barely moving from her bed even when awake. One of those moments of wakefulness, she woke to the soft creak of her bedroom door. Her chest tightened and her hands clutched the blanket.

"Mischief?" Her voice cracked. "Sweetheart?"

He stepped inside, silent as a thought. Too quiet. There was no footsteps following him as he came up to her bed with a tray rested in his hands.

"I brought you soup," he said gently. "You didn't eat dinner."

His voice was soft and loving. He walked over and sat beside her on the bed, placing the tray in her lap. The steam rose faintly from the bowl. Chicken broth with herbs.
She stared at it. Then at him. Something twisted in her chest. Guilt. Grief. Revulsion.
Like she wasn't staring at her son anymore. But he looked like him. He acted like him. But something inside her screamed he wasn't.

After that day, the feeling never went away. She could stare at him for hours, and every instinct in her kept screaming the same truth—this wasn’t her boy.

Stiles didn’t flinch anymore. When something startled him, he didn’t jerk or blink. Instead, his head tilted—slow, deliberate—and his eyes locked on the source of the sound with an unsettling stillness. Not afraid. Not cautious. Just… curious.
His laughter had changed, too. It was sharp now, sudden—more bark than joy—and it always came at the wrong times: when someone stumbled, when someone cried, when someone said something cruel. He wasn’t exactly being cruel himself. It was more that he found humor where no one else would think to look. A trickster’s laugh.
He blinked too rarely now. Never broke eye contact unless he decided to. His gaze lingered a beat too long, a shade too deep. It wasn’t hostile. It wasn’t warm either.
He had taken to tapping his fingers in slow, swaying patterns—repetitive, rhythmic. Like the phantom flick of a tail that wasn’t there. Like tension bleeding out through muscle memory.

One therapist called it self-soothing. But Claudia knew better.

And that smile. God, that smile. Too soft and too sharp all at once, like a predator trying to be gentle.
He looked at her the way a child might look at a favorite pet—something beloved, but not equal. Something to feed. To keep. To possess.

"You don't sleep well anymore," he murmured.

He reached up and brushed her hair from her forehead. His hand was freezing cold. Claudia flinched—barely—but he noticed. His fingers stilled mid-motion as he tilted his head, studying her reaction. Then he leaned forward and kissed her cheek. His lips were like ice.

"Don't worry," he whispered.  "I'll take care of you."

It took her a while to notice. Her medication had begun to disappear—not all at once, but in quiet, careful thefts. A few memory pills gone. Anti-seizure tablets that didn’t last the full prescription. A bottle of lithium, nearly full one day, mysteriously half-empty the next.

At first, Claudia blamed herself. Her mind was slipping—wasn’t that what they kept saying? Sometimes she couldn’t remember where she was. Names hovered just out of reach. She’d open the fridge and forget what she was looking for. The nurses were kind. They spoke softly when they said it: progression of illness, cognitive confusion, seizure-related memory erosion. Just part of the decline.

But then came the puzzles.

Mieczysław—her sweet, brilliant Stiles—had taken to riddles again. Not like before. Not the bright-eyed, breathless kind of puzzles he'd always adored. These were different. Bleaker. Morbid even.

You only notice me when it's too late.
I've been growing while you've been forgetting.
What am I?

She begged him to stop.

He'd just smiled. "Don't worry, Mom. It's just a game."

The doctor adjusted her medication. The nurse dimmed the lights. They told Stiles to keep her routine steady. And he was so good to her. He brought her tea without her asking. Brushed her hair gently in the evenings. Held her hand during the worst of the tremors. He was her perfect son again. Her sweet, attentive boy.

Except sometimes... he wasn't. Sometimes he watched her too closely. Studied her as she broke down like he was enjoying it. As if her pain fascinated him. Fed him.

"She's confused," they said. "People near the end start seeing things. It's normal. Just be gentle. Reassure her."

Stiles always nodded. Always smiled that soft, understanding smile.
But Claudia wasn't confused. Not about this.

"I don't think he's my son," she whispered once to the night nurse.

The nurse smiled, pitying. "Of course he is. He's been an angel through all of this."

Claudia's voice cracked. "No... there's something inside him."

She didn't drink the water they gave her. Not when it came with that straw—the twisty blue one Stiles had always picked out for her.
She watched him from across the room. He sat curled on the armchair in the corner of the bedroom, fiddling with a Rubik's cube. And then he looked at her. For a moment, just a flicker—his eyes caught the light and reflected it back white. Not human. Animal. Like a fox in headlights.

He smiled. Not cruel or cold. Soft and loving.Terrifying.

A week later, Claudia called her nurse in a panic.

“I think he’s drugging me. Taking my pills.”

The nurse’s face tensed—but she smoothed it away almost instantly.
“You’ve had a few… confusing moments, Claudia. That’s not unusual.”

“I’m not confused!” Her voice cracked under the strain. “He smiles all wrong. Not like a child. Like—like he’s having fun. Having fun seeing me like this.”

The nurse jotted something in her notes. “He’s under a lot of pressure. He’s just a boy trying to put on a happy face. And he’s doing so much for you.”

Claudia’s hands trembled in her lap.
“Exactly. He’s too calm. A child shouldn’t be that calm. Not about this.”

That night, she locked her bedroom door. She heard him knock. Heard the rattle of the handle. The lights flickered—once, twice.
She pressed herself against the wall, holding her breath. Listening. Then she heard him. Talking to himself.
Not the high, drifting tone of a child at play—low, careful, intentional. Conversational.

He sat cross-legged in front of the hallway mirror, knees tucked to his chest, pajamas rumpled.

“Is she still afraid of me? No. We made her better. She’s not afraid.”

The house creaked as if surprised. Stiles frowned at his own words.

We?

The mirror smiled wider than his face.

“I didn’t mean— No, we’re not— I’m…”

A pause. Eyes narrowing.

“I’m—We are…”

The voice in his head purred, pleased.

After that night, he stopped speaking in singulars when he was alone. A few days later, he spoke in plurals almost exclusively.

We’re hungry, the boy would say. His father always assumed he meant himself and Claudia. But Claudia flinched every time she heard it.

“We don’t like this one,” he whispered to her one night about the new nurse.

Her decline accelerated after that. He toyed with her now, she was sure. Like a cat playing with its food.
She stopped eating. The tremors worsened. Speech came in broken fragments, like her words were falling apart mid-thought.
What disturbed the staff most was how she behaved around him. She flinched when he entered the room. Screamed when he touched her hand. Once, she broke down entirely—sobbing uncontrollably—when she woke to find him sitting quietly at her bedside. They asked her why. She pressed her palms to her ears, shook her head, and wept.

“That’s not my son,” she whispered to the nurse. “It wears my son’s face. But it’s not him anymore.”

Stiles overheard. Curled tighter on the couch. Hurt flickered across his face, but he still smiled at her.

They never harmed her—not outright, anyway. But her fear—the fear of them—was a wine they sipped slowly. Savored. Letting it age alongside her decline.

It did care, in its own way. But it wasn’t love—not like the boy’s.
It was something more primal. Like a predator, possessive of the prey it had claimed.

One night, in a lucid spell, she called him to her room. Her voice trembled, but she steadied it—the way she used to when he had nightmares.

"Stiles, baby. Come here."

He came, he always did when she called. He stood beside her bed, small hands folded neatly on her bedside. Blue pajamas, slightly too short at the wrists now. His hair was messy from sleep. His eyes were wide and sweet. And ancient.

She reached out, brushed his cheek with trembling fingers. "Mischief... baby, I love you. I love you so much."

He blinked. Then smiled. It was a gentle smile—tender, even. He leaned down slowly, kissed her on the forehead, and whispered into her ear with all the softness in the world.

"We love you too, Mom."

She screamed. But no one came.

The next morning, when the nurse checked in, Claudia was silent again. Withdrawn. Her hands curled like claws around the blanket. Her eyes stared forward—unblinking, vacant, hollowed by something no one else could see.

Claudia had taken to pacing the house late at night, curtains always drawn, lights flickering on and off like her mind couldn't decide whether it wanted to be seen or unseen. The silence of the house, once a comfort, had become a cacophony—every creak in the floorboards, every rustle of wind at the windows sounded like breathing.

His breathing.

By the time Stiles turned nine, Claudia had stopped calling him Mischief. Now, she only called him It.

That morning, Noah had already left for the station. Stiles sat at the table with his cereal, legs swinging idly under the chair. He stirred the milk with his spoon, watching it turn a dull gray from crushed chocolate cereal dust.

Claudia stood in the kitchen, unmoving. A cup of tea in her hand, long gone cold. Her eyes were fixed on him.

“Stiles,” she said, her voice brittle as dry leaves.

He didn’t look up. “Yes, Mom?”

“Come here.”

He obeyed, cheerful in that careful way he always was when she seemed like her old self. She crouched to meet him eye to eye and took his hands. Her fingers trembled, but her thumbs stroked over his knuckles with that motherly softness. He smiled back at her, cautious but warm, like someone testing the temperature of water before stepping in.

“You’re not my boy,” she whispered.

His smile faltered. “Yes I am.”

“No.” The word broke in her throat. “No. You’ve been… wearing him. Like a skin.”

“I don’t know what you mean…”

“You think I don’t see it?” Her hands twitched. Her grip began to tighten. “You changed. You watch me. You smile wrong.”

“I just want you to feel better…”

It sounded sweet—gentle, even—and for a moment she almost believed him. But then her fingers squeezed harder, hard enough to grind bone against bone. His smile was gone now, replaced with a pinched, uneasy expression.

“Mom… that hurts.” He tried to pull free.

She didn’t let go. Maybe he was her boy right now. But not always. Not late at night, when she felt the most afraid. The most vulnerable. When she woke up with his eyes already on her.

“Mom, please—let go.” He tugged harder, his voice fraying at the edges.

Her breathing quickened. She searched his face as though hunting for seams in the skin, for something that didn’t belong.

“Mom—!” His wrists twisted under her grip, but she held fast.

“You were in my room last night,” she said suddenly, her voice climbing. “I saw you. Standing there. Smiling.”

“No, I—”

“You don’t sleep anymore! You don’t even blink!”

She shoved him back and staggered to the counter. Her hand closed around the handle of a kitchen knife—not with purpose, but with with sheer, naked terror.

“I won’t let you take me!” she screamed. “I won’t let you eat me alive from the inside!”

He backed into the wall. “Mom—stop! Please—”

“GET OUT OF HIM!”

She lunged.

He screamed.

The knife never struck, but she hit him hard, the blade grazing his arm as they went down. She pinned him with a strength she didn’t know she had, sobbing and shouting the same words over and over:

“Not my boy. Not my boy. NOT MY BOY—”

“Mom, it’s me! It’s Stiles!” he cried, tears streaking his cheeks. But as she stared into his face, something shifted. A narrowing of the eyes. A bloom of cold where fear should have been.

It was him. And also not.
It wasn’t him who caught her wrists so easily, so calmly.
It wasn’t him who, with unnatural steadiness, sat her upright and held her there despite her thrashing.
And yet—it had to be him. He was only nine, but he kept her pinned. Long enough for the storm in her to break. Long enough for her sobs to dissolve into trembling. Long enough for silence to return.

When Noah came home—summoned by a frantic neighbor who’d heard the screaming—he found his son in the kitchen, holding his wife down with shaking hands. The knife lay on the floor, blood smeared across the tile like spilled ink. Stiles was crying. Real tears. And yet… his gaze was flat. Not entirely there.

The doctors said Claudia had suffered a psychotic break—paranoia, hallucinations, delusions.

“She believes her son is some kind of demon,” they murmured, not unkindly. “Classic displacement. She’s not a danger to others—just confused. She’ll get the help she needs.”

Noah didn’t argue. He told himself this was the right call. That this was what a good husband—a good father—was supposed to do. But his hand trembled as he signed the forms. The pen felt heavier than it should have, each loop of his signature dragging like betrayal across the page.

In the corridor outside her hospital room, he sat beside Stiles. The boy was swallowed in his father’s coat, knees drawn up, looking impossibly small.

Through the open doorway, Claudia sat rigid in bed, her skin pale as paper. Her hands were folded in her lap with an unnatural stillness, as if she were holding something invisible and refusing to let go. Her gaze was fixed—not on the window, as Noah first thought—but on Stiles. Her lips moved, forming each word slowly, deliberately: That’s not my son.

Even from the hall, the words seemed to slide over his skin like cold air. But he told himself she wasn’t looking at Stiles—she couldn’t be. She was seeing some figment of her sickness projected onto the boy who had spent the most time with her.

Noah smoothed a hand over his son’s hair, brushing it gently back from his forehead.
“She didn’t mean it,” he whispered. “She’s sick. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

Stiles looked up at him with wide, glassy eyes.
“I know, Dad,” he said softly.

Later, when Noah checked for injuries—expecting a long cut on the boy’s arm—he found nothing. Not even the faintest scar. The skin was whole, as if it had healed in less than an hour.

And in the reflection on the dark hospital window, the boy and his image moved in perfect unison—
for the first time in a very long while.

At first, they were two.

Stiles—the child, the host.
And the Nogitsune—the dark spirit, the shadow.

It was the way you sometimes feel another presence in the room, even when you’re alone. Sometimes, when he sat perfectly still, he could feel it stretch behind his eyes—long and deliberate—brushing against the soft places in his mind like a spider testing its web.

She’s forgetting your name again, it murmured.

You did this. You keep messing with her head.

He argued, back then.

Just leave her alone. She’s sick.

Let me in.

Do you want her to die in pain?

Go away.

It’s our fault. We’ll make her better.

Let. Me. In.

And Stiles did. Every time.
Because part of him believed it was his fault. And part of him wanted to believe they could help her—by taking the pain away.
He tried to be a good boy. A normal boy. He tucked in his shirts neatly. Brushed his teeth without being asked. Smiled for the nurses when they visited on the bad days—the days Claudia screamed at shadows or clawed at the mirror, convinced the reflection staring back belonged to someone else.

The doctors gave it names: progression. Degeneration. Burden of care.
But none of them could name the thing that had slithered into the house when her mind had just begun to fracture.

Claudia wasn’t just dying. She was afraid.
Afraid of the dark. Afraid of mirrors. Afraid of him.
She was afraid in the way her breath caught when he entered a room too quietly. In the way her eyes lingered on his face a beat too long. Like she was waiting for him to shift into something she recognized from a nightmare.

I’m still me.

He repeated it like a spell. Like an anchor line. As if saying it enough times could keep the spirit from devouring him entirely.

I’m still me.

I’m still me.

He loved her.
They loved her.

Made her tea every morning, even after she stopped drinking it. Sat with her in silence. Buttoned her cardigans when her fingers forgot how to grip. Held her hand when she wept without knowing why. But sometimes, when she looked at him… She knew something had rooted itself inside him that shouldn’t be there. And he knew that she knew. It had entered through the crack in the world—when the Nemeton split open and something dark and wrong slipped through. The Nogitsune had already made its den behind his ribs.

A fox did not rage or howl. Not like a wolf would.

It fed on her terror, slow and patient, as her mind unraveled.
On Stiles’s quiet, unspeakable grief as he watched his mother fade.
On the heavy, hopeless way Noah looked away from them both and buried himself in work.

There was so much pain in the house it smelled like incense—thick and cloying, as if mourning had seeped into the walls, soaked into the furniture, and lingered in the air.

A feast.

The Nogitsune should have moved on by now.
Found another host—someone older, fully formed.

It missed the days of real chaos, of its glory. It craved war, disaster, the kind of conflict that split families apart and left hearts in ruin.

But it stayed. It would at least stay until the mother was buried, until the family moved on. Then it could move on, too.
Weakened by the long years it had been sealed away, it stayed hidden in the boy, scavenging from this one broken family.

At first, they lived side by side.

Stiles would cry—shoulders shaking, face buried in his knees—and the spirit would whisper to him.

It wasn’t always cruel.
Sometimes it was curious. Almost fond.

Did you know that grief has a flavor?
You wear it so well, little mischief, it murmured, voice low and warm as old smoke.

Stiles rarely answered. But he heard it.
Like an echo of his own voice, but older, heavier, worn thin by centuries.

Not quite him.
Not quite not.

She mourned you long before she died.
You were already gone from her, piece by piece.
I only kept you company.

“Stop it,” Stiles whispered.

When Claudia finally collapsed—when the last thread in her mind frayed beyond repair—Stiles screamed and begged. But some part of him, some terrible and secret part, had already let go. Had whispered that she was already long gone.

The Nogitsune coiled into that despair like smoke curling into a cracked jar.

You were her boy.
You were her breaking point.
You can’t help her now.

And this time… Stiles didn’t argue.

Because the thing is, a spirit should never stay too long in a mind still growing. A child’s mind is soft—clay still wet. And the Nogitsune began to sink in.

When a spirit takes a child, it doesn’t just use the body. It becomes part of the person.
Stiles kept growing. And it adapted. As did Stiles.
His mind didn’t reject the spirit. It molded around it. Adjusted. Accommodated.

His thoughts began making room for a second voice.
His reasoning twisted to hold contradictions.
His dreams layered into riddles, symbols, and memories from before he was even born.

At night, he lay awake, eyes wide, listening.

The Nogitsune didn’t speak much anymore. It didn’t need to. The line between them had blurred.
Its thoughts hummed beneath his skin, second nature.
Its instincts folded into his own.
It pulsed through him like a second heartbeat.

That was why they tuned so well to each other.

Not because they were opposites.

The fox had nested in a boy who was already a trickster at heart.
And the boy had accepted the spirit that shared his mischief.

They were the same.
So they had stopped being separate.

He never questioned the odd laughter that sometimes slipped from his lips,
or the sly curl of his smile,
or the calm that settled over him when chaos bloomed around him,
or the way he could lie without ever blinking.

He called himself witty.
Others called him a troublemaker.

Sometimes he laughed a little too hard when someone got hurt.
Just a little.

And yet he still helped people.
Still loved.
Still tried.

Only now… goodness had taken on a new shape.

Sometimes he caught a silver flicker in the mirror—
him, watching himself, from somewhere just behind his eyes.

Sometimes, just before sleep, he could still feel it—
the fox, curled along his spine.

But it wasn’t separate anymore.

It had become him.
Or he had become it.

He no longer asked, Was that me or him?
There was no clean split to find.

When Claudia finally passed, the grief and the pain was so deep, so aching—the fox tasted color.

Stiles didn’t cry. Didn’t scream. He sat beside her bed and held her cooling hand,
black veins threading up his arms as he drew the pain out of her body until he took her last breath with it.

Inside him, the fox purred.

She wanted to go.
She was so tired.
She was afraid of me.
I made her tea every morning.
She never drank it.
I know.

So when he asked himself who he was now,
there was only one voice left to answer.

He was the boy who loved his mother as she unraveled.
He was the spirit that fed on her terror as she was dying.
He was the kindness and the hunger.
The trickster fox wearing a grieving son’s face.
The cruelty held in a child’s hand.

There was no we anymore.

Only I.

When people asked how he was doing, Stiles smiled and said,
“I’m doing better.”
And he meant it—because he could no longer pinpoint when they had stopped being two.

Was it the day Claudia died?
The day he stopped crying?
The night he stopped dreaming of the shadow monster?
The morning his body healed faster than it should—
as if it had been meant to be invincible all along?

There was no clean break in the bone.
Only the quiet certainty that the fox had stopped curling around him
and had started growing with him.

His mind became a maze where every echo was his own.
He didn’t feel haunted.
He felt right.

He was clever. Thoughtful.
A little too sharp. A little too tricksy.

Some called him gifted.
Some found him… unsettling.

But no one saw what Claudia had seen.
Not anymore.

There was no boy and spirit.
Only what became of them.

On a windless winter afternoon, a few months after Claudia was buried and silence had settled over the Stilinski house like dust, Stiles stood in the garage and watched a bird.

It had trapped itself inside.
Wings beat in frantic bursts, scattering feathers like snowflakes.
Again and again, it struck the window—ten long minutes of impact and recoil.

Stiles stood still.
Not smiling.
Not crying.

Just watching.
Savoring the panic.
The sharp, dull pain of each collision.
The helplessness of being lost in a place with no way out.

At last, he unlatched the window.
The bird darted into the cold air and vanished.

Merciful, he thought.
It would have died alone in here.

He’d given it another chance.

Noah Stilinski grieved like a man trying not to drown. Slowly. Quietly. All beneath the surface.
He didn’t scream. Didn’t collapse in hallways or sob into his hands like men in the movies. He went to work. Filed reports. Signed forms. Paid the bills. He forgot to eat sometimes. Forgot to sleep. His uniform started hanging off him a little looser. The house grew quieter.

And then—Noah started drinking at night. Not much, at first. Just a glass of whisky. Then two. Eventually, the bottle stopped returning to the cabinet. It lived on the coffee table, half-empty more often than not. The clink of ice against glass became the soundtrack to their evenings—soft, rhythmic. Stiles could hear it from his room upstairs. His ears had grown hypersensitive lately, twitching at the faintest sounds. He counted the clinks like a metronome for grief.

His father never got sloppy. Never stumbled, never slurred. That would have meant admitting something was wrong. No—he drank like a man trying to dull the edge of a scream he refused to let out. The whiskey took the shine off the grief. Blurred the sharpest edges. Made it quieter.

And Stiles—whatever Stiles was now—watched.
He felt the grief more than he saw it. It had a smell and a taste: rich, sweet, and bitter all at once. Soft and dense, like bread pudding soaked in burnt sugar syrup. Noah carried it everywhere—thick and endless, trailing behind him like fog. It clung to his clothes, seeped into the walls. The whole house smelled faintly of smoked vanilla and salt-kissed caramel that wasn’t really there. Sometimes, Stiles would breathe it in as his father passed, eyes closing briefly, tracing the invisible trail like a scent hound.

Noah left it in doorways. In untouched coffee. In the way the chair across from him stayed empty. He was desaturating. As if life had once been painted in color and someone was slowly washing it out to grayscale.

And in contrast—Stiles was thriving.
Not like a grieving boy should.

His thoughts were sharper now. His movements smoother, too-fluid, like something newly oiled. He didn't sleep as much, if at all, didn't need to. Something inside him was always awake. His skin felt tight with energy, with rightness, as if something in the world had finally clicked into place. But the fit was wrong.

He knew it wasn’t right. Knew he shouldn’t feel so alive.
The old Stiles would have cried into his pillow. Would have curled up beside his dad like a lifeline. But now, he could stand in the doorway, watch Noah slumped on the couch with the TV buzzing static, and feel something else.

Pity.
Hunger.
And something dangerously close to curiosity.

What will break him?
How does a man mourn without letting it devour him?

The fox in him found the questions fascinating.

The boy—the one who remembered birthday pancakes, shotgun rides in the patrol car, and falling asleep to the sound of his father’s voice—ached.

That ache kept him tethered.

So every morning, Stiles made tea. Two mugs. One he set on the table beside the cold toast and unopened mail, without a word. The other he drank slowly, fingers curled around the ceramic to keep from fidgeting. To keep from reaching for something he shouldn't.

He didn’t try to talk Noah through the grief. He wasn’t sure he could anymore, now that he became like this. So he simply existed beside him.

But Noah’s pain drew him in like flame draws a moth. His sadness was quiet—but vast. Stiles could feel it pressing against his skin like gravity.
And—God help him—he hungered for it.
Pain was sharp and cold, numbing but sweetly comforting, like citrus and chili sorbet dusted with sugar that cracked between his teeth.
This new, wild self—this fox in his bones—fed on pain. And his father was full of it.

Every night, Stiles paced his room like something caged. Restless. Eyes catching light like mirrors. His too-sharp teeth ached. His fingers twitched. The pit inside him grew wide, and black, and starving. He grew cold and couldn't keep himself warm. It began to hurt.

He tried not to look at Noah too long. Not to sit too close. But every time his father sighed—every time he stared into his glass like it might hold answers—Stiles's insides howled.

He lasted a week. Maybe.

Then, one night, he gave in. Barefoot and silent, he crept into the living room. Noah was where he always was—on the couch, bathed in blue TV light, one hand around a half-empty glass. He didn’t look up. Stiles padded across the carpet, smooth and soundless. Sat beside him. Close. Closer. Without warning, he curled into his father’s side, tucking his legs in, pressing too-long limbs into a space that had once fit him perfectly. He was too big now. Too old.

But Noah didn't say a word. He froze for a moment, glass hovering midair. Then—slowly, carefully—he set it down. One hand lifted to Stiles's hair, the other wrapped around his shoulders. Stiles burrowed deeper, forehead pressed to his father’s chest, listening to his heartbeat, letting it ground him as not to harm his father. The grief radiated from Noah like heat. And God, it called to him. His whole body ached to take it. To sink his teeth into it and drink until there was nothing left. The hunger opened inside him like a mouth. And he fed.

Faint black veins spread under his skin, hidden beneath his hoodie. Warmth bloomed in his core. The sharp edges dulled. The ache softened. He drank the pain like water from a cracked well.

Noah let out a broken breath. For a heartbeat, his eyes went wide. The tears came quiet. He didn’t know why. Didn’t know what his son had taken. Only that something inside him had loosened, and he could breathe—just a little easier.

Stiles curled tighter as his pulse steadied and the gnawing hunger dulled to an ache. He almost whispered an apology. Almost started crying himself. Almost. But he stayed silent. Because Noah needed this too, didn’t he? To feel a little less? Stiles was still his son. He could do this for him. He could take it away.

And yet—beneath that thought—something darker paced inside him, restless. His fingers twitched against his father’s shirt, an animal urge pressing at the edges of his mind. The part of him that wasn’t human anymore wanted to dig deeper, drink more, see how far Noah’s pain could stretch before it tore.
Stiles forced himself to breathe slow. Count heartbeats. Keep his grip loose. He didn’t want to hurt him—he didn’t. The idea made his stomach knot. Noah’s grief ran through him like warmth after frostbite, chasing away the cold in his bones. It felt good. Too good.

So he stayed still, alert. Didn’t move. Didn’t trust himself to. He told himself he was only taking enough to make it lighter, to help. That he could stop whenever he wanted.

Noah cried silently, his tears slipping into his son’s hair. Stiles didn’t speak. Didn’t promise things would get better—because maybe they wouldn’t. Didn’t say he was okay—because he wasn’t. But his arms tightened, just slightly, around his father. Drinking down his father’s pain and sorrow until it left a faint, metallic sweetness on his tongue. Hoping—for both their sakes—that maybe, just maybe, that was enough.

The house was dark, humming. The only light came from the TV screen, its blue flicker painting shadows across the walls, catching on the curve of a cheekbone, glinting along strands of tawny hair. Lighter when the sun hit it, but darker in this strange light. Noah’s hand rested in that hair, tangled loosely. He knew it before he looked. Knew it in the way the spine curved against him, the tilt of the head under his arm, the faint scent of shampoo. Knew it in the wrongness.

Because something was wrong.

Something in his mind tried to surface. Tried to remind him this wasn’t normal—his son didn’t do this anymore. Not since he was seven and too afraid to say why.

He is curled into his side like when he was small—bonier now, too tall at ten years old, knees folding in awkward angles like a paper crane. Too cold to the touch. Always too cold these past few years.

Noah didn’t move. Not because he was paralyzed, but because something in him had come undone. He should have spoken. Should have asked.
There was an ache in his chest—but softer now. Like something was bleeding out of it in slow, steady streams. The house itself felt different. Hollowed out, maybe. Like something heavy was lifted, but too quickly. Like a lung suddenly empty.

The grief. It's—It's quieter. It hasn't left. He didn't feel better. Not exactly. But—lighter. Lighter the way you feel after throwing up.

Noah should have felt relief. Instead he felt the edges of something colder—like a door had been opened in the night. Like a price had been paid while he slept through the transaction.

Stiles didn’t move. Just rested there, small again. Or pretending to be. His hand was curled in the front of Noah’s shirt—an anchor. Or a leash.

Noah glanced down. Stiles’s eyes were closed, but his brows pinched together in a faint frown.

Noah couldn’t remember when the tears had started. He didn’t wipe them away. Didn’t breathe too hard. Afraid to disturb whatever this was.

This was his boy.
Still the kid who fell asleep in patrol cars. Who made jokes at crime scenes to keep the fear at bay. Who used to climb into Noah’s bed after nightmares, lying there stiff and embarrassed, muttering, Just for a minute?

Still the boy who carried too much. Noah saw that now—saw that Stiles had witnessed something, done something, that had changed him. And had never said a word.

Regret settled heavy in his chest. He regretted not being there when Claudia stopped being enough. Not being there with Stiles when she passed away. And now barely being there for Stiles who also lost someone important. He’d left his son alone too long during the hardest seasons of his life. And maybe that’s what had changed him—just enough to survive reality a little differently.

Noah pressed his cheek to the crown of Stiles’s head and stared at the white-noise static until his vision burned and blurred. Because Stiles needed this. Needed him. Or maybe—God help him—Noah needed this too. To hold something still familiar and his. To remember he wasn’t alone in the house. In the world. He let his eyes close again. Didn’t sleep. Just sat there, heart thudding slow and hollow, one hand curved protectively around something he didn’t fully recognize. But loved anyway.

When he finally exhaled—long, tired, wrung out—it fogged the air between them. His chest felt like a field after fire: blackened, but clearing.

And if something else in the room was listening—silent, cold, silver-eyed—he would deal with it in the morning.

Noah locked the whiskey away on a Tuesday. Not because he’d stopped hurting. But because the ache no longer screamed at him from every corner of the house. It still hummed in his chest. Still waited in the quiet moments—shaving before work, pinning on his badge, seeing Claudia’s handwriting on old shopping lists—but it didn’t drown him anymore.

He could breathe again.
Not deeply. Not without weight. But breathe, all the same.

Stiles still made tea every morning. Noah had started drinking it again. He said thank you sometimes—not always out loud, but in the way he rested a hand on Stiles’s shoulder as he passed. In the extra snacks slipped into the lunchbox. In the way he lingered at the table longer than necessary, just so they could share the same space.

There were still bad nights. Sometimes Noah woke in the dark, certain he’d heard Claudia’s voice. Sometimes Stiles vanished into his room and didn’t reappear for a day and a night. But they kept going.

They chose to keep going—for each other’s sake.
And slowly, so slowly, the house stopped feeling like a mausoleum. Not warm, not yet, but less hollow.

Noah threw himself into work again. Cleaned the garage. Fixed the dripping kitchen tap. Rehung the bedroom door that always squeaked. He called Melissa McCall back, finally. Let her hug him and didn’t break down crying.

And Stiles… Stiles tried.

Turns out, for a fox spirit, school was a buffet.

Children were all sharp spikes and screaming hearts—emotions spiking from zero to a hundred in milliseconds. First fears, first fights, first heartbreaks. The teachers weren’t much better—overworked, underpaid, barely holding themselves together. Some days, Stiles swore he could smell the exact moment a teacher’s restraint snapped, like a pencil breaking inside their skull. Some cried in the supply closet when no one was looking.

All of it—all of it—was nourishment.

A smorgasbord of fear, of pain, of small tragedies.

And Stiles feasted.

People started to notice. Wherever chaos erupted, he was never far behind. When a prank went too far—when someone ended up crying, bleeding, humiliated—Stiles was never directly involved. But he was always nearby, lurking, watching. Like some forest cryptid peeking from the treeline—never quite in frame but impossible to ignore.

He got detention. He got suspended once. He spent enough hours in the counselor’s office to memorize the posters on the wall and the sharp scent of dry-erase markers. Everyone said he was acting out because of his mother. That was what Noah told them, too. Everyone knew how close he had been to Claudia. Watching her wither, watching her forget—surely that had broken something in him.

And maybe it had. Maybe it was true, in some long, drawn-out way. But Stiles wasn’t sure anymore. He didn’t think the hunger inside him—the need—was really about Claudia. Not directly. Maybe, when she had stopped being there for him to care for, he had needed to find something else to feed off of.

Because the hunger didn’t go away. Not ever.

Quiet, normal life—it wasn’t enough. Not for a trickster spirit. Not for something that thrived on chaos and strife. Something that soothed itself on negativity, that burned through stillness like wildfire through dry grass.

Once, he made a girl cry just by looking at her too long. He hadn’t meant to, not really. She’d just laughed—a hollow, brittle sound—and he had wanted to know: what kind of sadness turns a smile that shape? What made her eyes dart left before every lie?
He was just watching. But whatever she saw—whatever slipped past the mask in that moment—made her bolt from the room in sobs.

Noah was called in three times that month.

“Your son is… disruptive.”
“Easily distracted.”
“A bit of a—uh—problem.”
“Strange,” one teacher murmured, then caught herself and backpedaled.

Noah nodded. Apologized. Promised to talk to him. And he always did. About behavior. About control. About how Stiles was always a step away from serious trouble. About how his actions might go on his permanent record. About his future.

That was what saved him most days—Stiles thought.

Because the hunger wasn’t fading. It was growing. Scraping behind his ribs. Curling its claws around his spine. Whispering, promising sweet satisfaction if he just let go.

He wanted things he shouldn’t.
He’d sit there, shivering, starving for something no cafeteria could serve, fighting it with chamomile tea and music so loud it rattled his skull. Clinging to the steady beat of his father’s heart—the sound of a man who stayed, who loved him even when Stiles wasn’t sure there was anything left to love.

Sometimes he slipped.
And when he did… people suffered.

Like the older boy who tried to take his lunch in the courtyard. Stiles didn’t scream. Didn’t tattle. He followed him home, found the bike chained by the gate, loosened the handlebars, broke the brakes, scratched the gear shift so it caught. The next morning, the boy collided with a car at full speed. Concussion, a deep scalp laceration, a fractured femur—his leg broken in multiple places.

Like the teacher who delighted in humiliating students. Stiles watched her for a week, noted her thermos decorated with painted sunflowers—Van Gogh. He spiked her tea with just enough rodenticide to make her stomach revolt. Nausea hit first, sharp and relentless. Vomiting followed, sometimes streaked with blood. When she finally reached the hospital, doctors suspected severe food poisoning. She didn’t return for a week.

Like the girl who mocked him in front of her friends, laughing too loudly, calling him the weirdo with dirt under his nails. She found her bag dripping with a corrosive chemical during science lab. Burned her hands so badly she screamed all the way to the nurse’s office. Her hands stung for hours, leaving red, blistered patches, and she was sent home.

Sometimes it was smaller. Sometimes he stirred things just to see what broke.

He whispered rumors into the ears of best friends and watched them explode into screaming matches by the lockers.
Fed a bully the wrong name until he picked a fight with the wrong kid and ended up with a black eye.
Mapped the social food chain like a scientist dissecting prey—then tugged at the threads, just to hear them snap.

He stole keys. Slipped them from desks, pockets, the janitor’s ring. Got into classrooms after hours, flipped through teachers’ drawers, rifled through lockers.

His favorite place was the guidance counselor’s office. All those files—a library of broken things. Vulnerabilities cataloged. Pain alphabetized. He read them like bedtime stories.

Nobody ever caught him.

Eventually, a few teachers pulled him aside.

“Why do you always seem to know everything?”

He’d smile. Tilt his head.
“I pay attention.”

“And how do you always know just the right thing to say?”

“I’m just good with words.”

“And why are you always there when something goes wrong?”

He blinked—wide-eyed, guileless—and answered honestly enough that they left feeling off.
As if they’d asked the wrong question.
As if maybe they were the ones imagining things.

Because Stiles Stilinski—too smart for his own good, too quick with his tongue, too sharp with his eyes—wasn’t doing anything.
No one ever suspected the boy who had just lost his mother and still kept straight A’s.

The Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department always hummed with quiet chaos—phones ringing, radios crackling, footsteps echoing down long hallways. The front desk officer didn’t notice him slip past. His steps were impossibly light, the hem of his hoodie flaring behind him like a tattered cape.

“Deputy Haigh!” Stiles called, slipping through the station like a fox in a henhouse. “Love the new haircut. Going for ‘retired boyband backup dancer,’ or was that just a happy accident?”

Haigh nearly jumped out of his skin. “Stiles! Oh my God—”

But Stiles was already gone, grin sharp and flashing, moving like he was always one heartbeat from sprinting, a stolen pen twirling idly between his fingers. He let himself into his father’s office without knocking, vaulted into the chair across from the desk, spun once. Twice. Three times. Then kicked his feet onto the paperwork.

“Dad,” he said solemnly, as if delivering a state secret, “you need a plant in here. Something hard to kill. Like a succulent.”

“Feet. Down.”

He obeyed, slowly, theatrically. Sheriff Stilinski rubbed his temples, finished scribbling on a form, then finally looked up.

“Thought you had detention.”

“I did,” Stiles said, chair spinning lazily. “Mrs. Cardona let me out early. Said I wasn’t technically interrupting anymore.”

“She called me,” Noah said evenly.

The smile stayed on Stiles’s face, but something flickered in his eyes—a shadow moving just beneath the surface.

“She say something flattering?” he asked lightly. “She does like my handwriting. Calls it… disturbingly elegant.”

“She said you tore apart a classmate in front of the class. That the boy couldn’t speak afterward.”

“He said something stupid, Dad.” The smile remained, but the warmth had vanished from his voice.

Noah leaned back. “So you humiliated him.”

“I corrected him. With flair.” His teeth flashed; his skin was a little too pale under the fluorescent lights. “He won’t say it again.”

“You made a kid cry, Stiles.”

Silence settled between them, thick and viscous, like cold syrup. The fidgeting stopped. Stiles’s mouth flattened into a careful line. The fox inside him snarled once, then coiled low, waiting.

“I’m not a bully,” Stiles said—too sharp, too quick. “I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”

His fingers tapped against the arm of the chair. Rhythmic. Soothing.

“Son,” Noah said gently, “you’re smart. Smarter than people give you credit for. But you can’t treat life like it’s a game. One day, you’re going to go too far.”

“Why?” The word was quiet. “Because you’ll be disappointed?”

Noah leaned back, exhaustion shadowing his eyes, his shoulders never fully relaxing.

“Because you’re better than that.”

Stiles didn’t answer. His gaze drifted to the cold half-mug of coffee on the desk. Because when he looked at his father, he saw the shadows under his eyes, the grief that still hung on him like an extra coat, the strain of holding everything together—including Stiles.

And that’s what killed it.
That’s what quieted the sharp-toothed thing in his ribs.

Stiles finally broke eye contact, letting his gaze drop to the desk between them. His fingers never stopped tapping. A beat passed. He clenched his jaw, swallowed the retort, and looked up again. His expression softened—just enough to pass for sincerity.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Maybe it was true. Maybe. Noah had long since stopped trusting his gut when it came to Stiles.

Because beneath the apology, beneath the sheepish smile, there was something cold and calculating. Something that had learned too quickly, that knew exactly how to sound remorseful without ever being it.

Noah exhaled slowly and rubbed the back of his neck.

“I know this isn’t easy for you,” he said finally. “You’re… going through something. But that doesn’t give you the right to hurt people.”

“I wasn’t trying to,” Stiles said quietly. “I just…”

They sat in silence. Neither spoke because they both knew it wasn’t the truth.

For once, Stiles didn’t fidget. Didn’t crack a joke to fill the space. He just sat, small and pale, with too many thoughts stacked behind his eyes like cards shuffled by something trying to understand kindness.

Noah dropped his gaze. Looked tired again. Older.

Stiles leaned back in the chair, quiet for a moment. Then, softly:

“You should eat something. Your blood sugar’s low.”

“How do you know that?” Noah frowned.

Stiles tapped under his own eye. “You get a line here. Same spot every time.”

Noah blinked. Didn't respond. He stared at his son, but his eyes softened.

Stiles stood, moving toward the door like a whisper. He paused at the threshold.

“I’m trying, Dad,” he said. “Really.”

He meant it. Noah knew he did. And that was the scariest part.

Because he was trying—trying not to become whatever his nature was shaping him into. This thing that whispered the world was meant to be rearranged, manipulated,
torn apart and remade better—with claws, if necessary. For all the chaos coiled inside him, for all the cold logic, and razor-sharp intelligence, it was this—this emotional tether—that kept the monster leashed.

Not for the world.
For his father.

He controlled himself because the man across the desk was the one person he could not bear to break. Disappointing him, making his life harder—that was the only thing that could shame him for what he had become.

He couldn’t say when Noah became his anchor. Maybe he always had. Maybe that was why the fox spirit hadn’t consumed him completely. Beneath the sharp teeth, the flickering eyes, the tricks and cruelty, Stiles loved his father.

Because love—even twisted by instinct—was the line he would never cross.